gracchusdixit

After all the pretense, after all the pompous hemming and hawing, after all the high-sounding protestations about “conservative principles,” Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and nominally the most important Republican public official in the land, finally caved, swallowing his oh-so-demure and oft-proclaimed reservations and endorsing Donald J. Trump as the Presidential nominee of his party.  The so-called “Never Trump” movement, insofar as such a movement ever truly existed, has now been consigned to the Neverland where all such political fantasies eventually go to die.  Along with Peter Pan and Wendy, with the crocodile and Captain Hook, this particular fantasy can now be bid a melancholy adieu.

Paul Ryan’s surrender not only signals the end of the “Never Trump” movement, it extinguishes the last flickering illusion that the Republican political establishment stands for anything except its own self-interest.  For all Ryan’s reputation as the altar boy of “movement conservatism,” his decision to swallow hard and put his purported principles aside shouldn’t surprise us.  His capitulation was merely the latest in a series of humiliating and hypocritical reversals.

The first to bend his knee was Ben Carson, whose haste to embrace Trump was in equal measures ironic and embarrassing.  The good doctor had based his ill-fated campaign on “Christian values,” yet it took him no more than a nanosecond to endorse a man who is a thrice-married, serial womanizer, blatantly dishonest, and greedy—a violator of almost everything the Biblical Testaments, both New and Old, condemn.  It is fair to say that neither Moses nor Christ would approve of Donald Trump.  It is also fair to say that, if Ben Carson truly believed in the Judaeo-Christian principles he espouses with such gusto, neither would he.

Not far behind Ben Carson came that gargantuan blusterer, Chris Christie, who on innumerable occasions had declared Donald Trump to be “completely unqualified” to be President.  Put aside for a moment that Christie himself possesses few of those qualifications—his tenure as governor of New Jersey has been such a disaster that an overwhelming majority of the voters in his home state now despise him.  That said, at least good old Chris took a bit more time than Carson before deciding to cave and genuflect—about 72 hours, as best I can tell.  A few hours one way or the other is now what “principle” amounts to in the Republican Party.

Then came Marco Rubio, whose about-face about Donald Trump makes Chris Christie’s seem positively statesmanlike.  It was Rubio, after all, who declared Trump to be what he undoubtedly is: a con man.  It was Rubio who mocked his “small hands.”  It was Rubio who declared him to be a “danger” to the republic.  Nonetheless, it is now Rubio who says that he wants to be “helpful” to the “cause” of getting Donald Trump elected President.

The litany of Republican capitulation and hypocrisy could be extended indefinitely:  Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, even the venerable, albeit irascible, Bob Dole—one by one, all have bowed down and lined up to support their party’s presumptive nominee.  Paul Ryan was merely the latest and the last of the hypocrites to eat humble pie and give in.

With Ryan’s capitulation, the leaders of the Republican establishment have revealed themselves to be what they have in reality been for decades: not conservatives in any true or meaningful sense, but craven careerists.  To hang onto power, prestige, and public office, they will do anything—even to the point of embracing a crude and dangerous bully, a pathological liar, and a criminal.  The fact that Trump doesn’t care a hoot about their “principles” doesn’t appear to deter them.  The damage his election would do the country doesn’t seem to bother them.

Now that their “principles” have been exposed as a sham, now that they themselves have been exposed as liars, the only excuse such people can offer up for rallying around the candidate they once condemned is that Trump would be “better than Hillary.”

Really?  Is that the best they can do?  Do they truly expect the country to swallow the absurd and repugnant notion that a self-absorbed demagogue, a loud-mouthed sexist, a foul-mouthed race-baiter is on any level—personal, political, or moral—“better” than a woman who has spend her life in public service as the former First Lady of the United States, a two-term Senator from New York, and the Secretary of State?

It is perfectly reasonable to disagree with any number of Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals.  It is entirely logical to question some of her political decisions.  It is  even understandable, if not particularly rational, to dislike her on personal grounds.  However, to justify supporting Donald J. Trump because he is “better than Hillary” is an act of criminal insanity.  No matter what you may think of Hillary Clinton, there is simply no comparison between the two.  She may be a “flawed candidate,” as the pundits so often put it, but he is a psychopath.

Whatever else the November election may bring, one thing is clear: it will bring the end of the Republican Party as the voice of coherent conservative principles.  As a political entity, the party may, and probably will, stumble on.  But it can never again claim to be a party of credible ideas that can be tolerated in a democracy.  Whatever credible ideas the Republican Party once advanced have been replaced by a blinkered ideology or—far worse—by pure, corrosive hate.

When the presumptive nominee of this party says that he intends to “make America great again,” what he really means is that he wants Americans to hate again.  Long before Republicans capitulated to Donald Trump the man, they surrendered their party, and their “principles,” to his message.