The GOP is the problem: 

With his dark gospel, the president has enthralled the Republican base, rendering other party leaders too afraid to stand up to him. But to stand with Mr. Trump requires a constant betrayal of one’s own integrity and values. This goes beyond the usual policy flip-flops — what happened to fiscal hawks anyway? — and political hypocrisy, though there have been plenty of both. Witness the scramble to fill a Supreme Court seat just weeks before Election Day by many of the same Senate Republicans who denied President Barack Obama his high court pick in 2016, claiming it would be wrong to fill a vacancy eight months out from that election.

Emphasis mine, because … The thing is, LITERALLY EVERYBODY TRIED TO TELL YOU THIS, 20 YEARS AGO. That we were heading exactly here. That this party was being propped up by feral critters prowling and growling underneath the banquet tables and eventually they’d slip their chains and start mauling the buffet.

The GOP wasn’t so much “enthralled” by Trump as the money guys looked at their spreadsheets and said eh, how bad could it possibly be? They gambled that if they let this happen the damage wouldn’t be obvious.

It worked out great for them last time, after all: 

It’s not only liberals who have noticed that Bush’s most committed followers are caught up in the fact-filtering force field of a personality cult. In January, Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury during the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal’s far-right editorial page, published a damning column in the progressive Z Magazine about fascist tendencies in the conservative movement. “In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush,” he wrote. “Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy.”

Sound familiar? Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket, do you GET IT NOW? Now that enough people are dead? Do you get what all us damn dirty hippies were trying to tell you? This was a long time coming and I take no pleasure in being able to say a hell of a lot of us saw it coming by a couple country miles. It’s why we didn’t want these people — nor anyone, really, but if you give arm one moron you arm ’em all — to have warrantless surveillance capabilities.

But that guy danced with Ellen and paints funny pictures of dogs now, so it’s all good.

Back to the performative innocence of the Times:

For all their talk about revering the Constitution, Republicans have stood by, slack-jawed, in the face of the president’s assault on checks and balances.

Um, they’ve actively assisted him, just as they assisted his GOPredecessor, who for those of you who didn’t have to live through this bullshit as adults was basically WHAT IF NIXON BUT SPIN IT OUT TO THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT OF LAWS IDEA. The grand old men of the once-glorious Republican Party actively fought for Bush and Cheney’s right to detain people without charges, without warrants, without recourse. They actively fought for RETEROACTIVE IMMUNITY for telecom companies, come on. Plus that whole “weapons of mass destruction” thing, which is still killing people to this day.

The only difference between what they did and what Trump is doing is that they bothered to make excuses for it.

Trump’s attitudes towards women and minorities are crude and crass, but his attitudes towards governing are right in line with three decades of Republicans telling us they would run government like a business, in which the CEO just yells something and everyone has to hop to. How many senators and governors of this party have promised to just magically say the right words and everyone will behave? Here in Illinois we’ve had two of these guys and they’ve both noped out of the job the minute it became clear they’d have to work with people instead of screaming at them to obey.

And GOP intransigence during the Obama years only worsened the problem, because when you shut down all legislation you leave open the only door there is, and the president’s gonna use it, come on. Nobody, I don’t care how saintly, gives up power they don’t have to give up, so don’t throw B. Barry Bamz’s executive orders in my face. He kept trying while these tea people’s constituents were burning him in effigy.

Mr. Trump’s corrosive influence on his party would fill a book. It has, in fact, filled several, as well as a slew of articles, social media posts and op-eds, written by conservatives both heartbroken and incensed over what has become of their party.

But many of these disillusioned Republicans also acknowledge that their team has been descending into white grievance, revanchism and know-nothing populism for decades.

DOES IT ONLY COUNT WHEN REPUBLICANS SAY IT? Because I remember quite a few people mentioning this as far back as 2001. I remember a whole lot of Democrats and HILLARY YOUR MOM CLINTON saying this during the 2016 campaign while our national punditry worried she was too smart and capable for the job.

Here’s Michelle Goldberg again, writing in 2003: 

The conference was packed with events devoted to denouncing the perfidious left. There were panels titled “Modern Feminism: The Bilking of the Taxpayer,” “Real Stories of Real Liberal Bias on Real College Campuses,” “NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and other Professional Victims” and “Myths, Lies & Terror: The Growing Threat Of Radical Environmentalism.” Dan Flynn, author of “Why the Left Hates America,” was on hand to sign his book. Ann Coulter, there to push her own book, was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation, after which she ripped into the “treason lobby” — the Democratic Party — whose platform “consists in breaking every one of the 10 commandments.”

But back then, we were starting a war that would be over in a couple of weeks, and everything was going great, and only pansy idiot fifth-columnists were worried about the racism and lawlessness embedded in that war’s cheerleaders. Only hysterical pussies were listening to the genocidal turns talk radio was taking and saying hey, this is going to inspire violence. Only conspiracy theorists thought our elections weren’t safe.

Maybe next time it won’t take 225,000 dead Americans for the Times to notice who’s been right about this all along.

HAHAHAHA even I’m not that naive.

A.