After this disastrous week, it's clearer than ever: Yes, Donald Trump is a "real" Republican
FRIDAY, MAR 24, 2017 04:59 AM EDT
After this disastrous week, it’s clearer than ever: Yes, Donald Trump is a “real” Republican
Don't believe that Republicans in Congress secretly hate Trump! It's time to take their bootlicking at face value
AMANDA MARCOTTE
In the first three months of Donald Trump’s presidency, a narrative has taken hold in the political punditry that owes more to wishful thinking than to empirical observation. Congressional Republicans, the narrative goes, are smart and savvy enough to realize Trump is an unhinged, incurious crank. They are only using him, the thinking goes, to pass their right-wing agenda. They don’t really think of him as the legitimate head of their party.
“The relationship between President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress is rooted less in a simpatico bond than in a particularly ugly kind of transactional politics,” Brian Beutler of the New Republic wrote on Thursday, in a typical example. “Republicans tolerate his racism, ignore his corruption, laugh off his erratic behavior, and in exchange he leaves the core of the party’s domestic agenda unmolested.”
But this week in politics should raise a troubling alternative possibility: Trump is not an outlier in his party, but is simply an inevitable outgrowth of years of Republicans wallowing in bigotry, replacing proper policy analysis with half-baked ideological posturing and promulgating hyper-partisan conspiracy theories. Trump’s paranoia and proud ignorance have worked for him because those qualities have come to define the 21st-century Republican Party.
The first example is no doubt Rep. Devin Nunes’ bizarre behavior this week, which was especially troubling in light of his position as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. As Salon’s Heather Digby Parton explained:
In a nutshell, Nunes claimed that this unnamed source showed him some intelligence intercept from the transition period before Trump took office that indicated members of the Trump team were under surveillance. Inexplicably, the congressman thought it was appropriate to immediately inform the the subject of the investigation and tell the world that he did it. Under questioning in the two (!) press conferences that Nunes held on the matter, it became clear that he was talking about routine legal surveillance of foreign actors that caught some conversations with Trump transition officials.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/03/24/after-this-disastrous-week-its-clearer-than-ever-yes-donald-trump-is-a-real-republican/
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