“Irredeemable”: Never Trumper Tom Nichols Eviscerates the Republican Party

Author, lecturer and historian Tom Nichols has a classic national Security Republican resume – a Graduate of Colombia with a PhD in Government from Georgetown University, he taught at the Naval War College and has written well received books on matters of National Security and Defense.

I personally disagree with Tom on a lot, I including his Indian food and Led Zeppelin, and his virulent opposition to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. But there is one matter upon which Tom and I agree:

The GOP today is hideous and irredeemable.

Writing in The Atlantic Tom sketches the outlines of the brutal hammer attack of Paul Pelosi and his former parties reaction to that incident:

“January 6 was not an outlier. Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.

One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable.

And he deals with any false equivalence the GOP might cite in their defense:

“Of course, Republicans have put on a master class in whataboutism over the past few days. What about the people who laughed at Rand Paul’s neighbor giving the Kentucky senator a beatdown? What about Kathy Griffin’s ugly photograph of her holding up a mask representing Trump’s severed head? And, most of all, what about James Hodgkinson, who shot at a group of GOP political officials and nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise? These are all said with triumph, as if the transformation of the GOP into a violent mob is rendered moot by these examples…

… I disapproved of laughing off the attack on Rand Paul and the Griffin photo shoot. (I am allergic to even the implication of violence against any president.) But I also don’t think these are neatly comparable cases; Paul, a middle-aged man, was attacked by a neighbor angry over a pile of brush in Paul’s yard, and Griffin paid a significant career price for her tasteless stunt.

Hodgkinson and DePape, by contrast, do seem alike, a similarity exploited by Republicans. Both were troubled and unstable men who spent a lot of time on the internet and settled on political figures as their intended target. That’s fair as far as it goes.

There are other false equivalencies at play here Tom, including that in the case of Rand Paul, individuals who wrongly made jokes about the beating of Paul were just that, individuals. There was no party wide discounting of the facts, and no Democrat suggested that his attacker was sent by Q. And, in the case of Hodgkinson, no one suggested that he’d received his marksmanship training if a Trump supporting militia and was just pretending to be a Democrat.

But you make a fair argument here. Please do go on.

“Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy. If all attempts at reason and all offers of friendship fail, the rest of us should shun those whose dark hearts encourage them to revel in such poison. Unfortunately, millions of our fellow citizens seem poised to vote many such people into power. The darkness is spreading.”

Yes, it is Tom.

Thanks for a well reasoned and written column.