Who bells the cat?
How self-loathing must Republicans be to get in line behind a candidate who is an eighty-three million dollar court-affirmed rapist, who threatened to destroy the Constitution, who recruited, empowered and promised to pardon a mob that violently attacked the Capitol, who has four active criminal indictments against him comprising 91 criminal counts and has proven to be, time and time again, election poison for Republicans? No need to answer, it’s a rhetorical question. “Very” doesn’t quite cut it as an answer. There exists no adverb sufficiently strong to answer that question.
That is the state of today’s MAGA Republicans, the cult of unabashed sycophancy in the service of treachery. These days Republicans commit treason for power, but it didn’t begin with Friday’s refusal to pass border legislation because “it might be seen as a win for Biden.”
We find some of its most insidious roots back in 1968, when the Nixon campaign made a deal with Chaing Kai Shek to torpedo the Paris Peace Talks. This was done so that Nixon’s Democratic opponent and member of the Johnson administration, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, wouldn’t score a major win before the election. If LBJ (and by extension, Humphrey) had ended the Vietnam war prior to the ‘68 election, there would have been no president Nixon. There would have been no Watergate. Imagine that.
Republicans made sure that Jimmy Carter didn’t get a win prior to the 1980 election by ensuring that Iran, through back channel negotiations, didn’t release the American hostages until after Carter was gone from office. Iran kept those hostages months longer than they might have done thanks to Team Reagan. Imagine an America without a phoney hero like Reagan. Imagine no trickle-down “Reaganomics.”
Today the stakes are even higher. The survival of the human race and billions of other species on planet earth are bargaining chips in the game of Republican perfidy. Republicans today are subverting the safety and future of everyone on earth for short term gains of money and power. It’s insane but, well, there it is. Republicans continue to protect the interests of the fossil fuel industry despite the deadly consequences.
The problem is one of tactics versus strategy. Republicans are more than willing to commit short term tactical sins for marginal gains. But by doing so they take the Republican Party in a strategically deadly direction most of its members very much do not want to go. Most Republicans are privately aware of this but are unwilling — individually or in small groups — to overtly oppose Trump and the MAGA machine. In their tiny and frightened little minds the MAGA constituency is simply too powerful.
That’s why, for the most part, only out-of-power or indicted or retiring Republicans are willing to speak out publicly against Donald Trump. Few have the courage to speak the truth and run the risk of incurring Trump’s wrath and the displeasure of his small but decisive fan club of MAGA loonies. Talk to Liz Cheney about that.
But there can be no doubt that most Republicans loathe the corner they find themselves in and, cravenly I think, wish Trump were gone through any means possible — except, of course, at the risk of their own jobs. We know that dozens of Republicans have confessed as much privately, but only off the record.
So the question remains, what individual or group of Republicans will finally step forth and proclaim the Emperor’s obvious nakedness? Who, in short, has the cojones to bell the cat? The original Republican Abraham Lincoln put it best: “Few can be induced to labour exclusively for posterity. Posterity has done nothing for us.”
It’s a bizarre situation. The only way Republicans think they can hang onto power is to cheat. So they gerrymander, they try to limit the number of citizens who can vote, they proclaim as “rigged” every election they lose. They have become so dangerous and unpopular that they have come to believe that the only way they can hope to survive is to destroy democracy itself. That will remain the deadly reality we are faced with for as long as the Republican Party, today’s true Enemy of the People, is allowed to exist. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.