When the Polls Turn, So Do the Principles
After two years of defending presidential misconduct and abandoning congressional oversight, Republicans are discovering the virtues of independence. The timing tells us everything.
For nearly two years, congressional Republicans have tolerated presidential misconduct, corruption, and policies harmful to the American people, purposefully disregarding their constitutional responsibilities inherent in the separation of powers. Only now, with voters growing restive and reelection at risk, is their solidarity beginning to crack. What looks like a rediscovery of principle appears to be nothing more than political self-preservation.
With few exceptions of a cautious and scant handful, the US House members and Senators who have been proud to call themselves Republicans have displayed a mix of enthusiasm for the policies of President Donald Trump, including readiness to dine with him, appear in public and at rallies with him, and offer spirited defenses of his presidency and policies. The Republican caucuses in the House and the Senate, up until a few weeks ago, had nary a word of criticism for the president, even as he has slipped over the past months deeper and deeper into a state dissociated from reality and from most of the rest of us.
Strikingly, they did so even when the president’s actions were indisputably inimical to the national economy and cost of living, as well as the precious state of our international relations, or to the well-being of the American people, that any president by law and tradition is sworn to protect, expand, and enhance.
They stood silent as their president began the demolition, brick by brick, of our democracy.
Turning a blind eye to the enormous harm Trump was doing, Republicans recused themselves from oversight, tacitly consenting to what was increasingly becoming an authoritarian state characterized by Trump’s blatant perfidy and bald mendacity. There was not a hint of concern to be found anywhere in the GOP as Trump acted compulsively and with impunity, trashing the Constitution and literally pushing aside our hallowed rule of law with his disregard for heroic lower court rulings. They did not lift a legislative finger to oppose the corruption, the snatching of food and medical aid from the needy of the United States and the world at large, the Robin Hood-in-reverse taxation of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
A Change in the Political Air
It seemed as if there were little to nothing Trump could do that might shake the devotion of that Republican tribal camaraderie. Until, perhaps inevitably, the American electorate finally began to publicly demonstrate growing, vocal unhappiness with the state of an economy they could barely afford to live in and a yawning chasm between the oligarchy and the rest of us.
Then, and only then, did the loyal armor of those Republicans begin to wobble.
But running the risk of losing reelection, the office’s generous salary of $175K and its many vanity perks, facing the alternative of having to play in a new world where they might actually have to go to work in an office somewhere for a full 11 and 1/2 months out of the year was too daunting. Heaven forbid earning the scorn, the opprobrium of one’s fellow tribesmen for thinking or acting independently; now that was not to be chanced.
The herd-like mentality of the GOP caucus, recalling its virtues only when reelection was threatened, has put the “values” of those men and women in stark relief.
I have struggled for some time to place the abominable conduct of the president somewhere on the scale between what the modern-day Sherlock Holmes described as a “high functioning sociopath” and that state of utter ‘other-worldness’ in which the president lives, an existence filled with lies, hokum and the kind of twaddle that accompanies a fictional state. Trump’s malignant narcissism is reasonably well documented, including grandiosity, self-absorption and a lack of empathy. Ladle up a healthy serving of the intoxication of authority found in Trump’s apparent Hubris Syndrome, and the plot thickens. The frosting on the cake seems to be the rapidly developing delusional grandiosity. Taken together, they paint a picture of what a layman’s reading of ChatGPT might describe as cognitive or psychiatric deterioration. The grim visibility of Trump’s increasingly bizarre and erratic behavior before the newly aware and shrinking crowds is there for all to see.
The focus here, however, is on the contrast between months of congressional acquiescence and the sudden appearance of electoral anxiety. Those empty suits on the Republican side in both houses of Congress, having spent two years aiding and abetting their “Great Leader,” have shown us plainly where their interests lie and that probity is in scarce measure.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 450 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.
