The GOP Has A Communicable Disease (Trump Fever)

(This caricature of the Republican Party in trouble is by DonkeyHotey.)

There is a school of thought that the biggest problem right now is the Trump administration, and once Trump is gone things can return to normal. That underestimates the problem. The Republican Party is now diseased (with Trump Fever), and that disease has spread far beyond the White House. It has infected the GOP Congress and the GOP base. The real question is whether the Republican Party can survive this disease -- or is it fatal.

The following is part of an excellent op-ed by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post:

The Republican Party has a communicable disease. It has been intimate for so long with President Trump that it acts pretty much as he does. He lies and then Republicans lie about his lies — they don’t matter, just noise, the wall is more important, etc. These evasions are intended to suggest that moral squalor can be cleansed by a jump in the Dow Jones or a handshake with Kim Jong Un. The months of Trump have taken a toll. The GOP has been stripped of its dignity and honor by a president who has neither. . . .

The title of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” stemmed from a question the producer-director Blake Edwards’s son had asked him. A similar question has to be asked of Republican officeholders by their own children: What did you do to stop Trump?

What, Daddy or Mommy, did you do to insist on presidential honesty? Did you just look away and cowardly maintain that Trump’s behavior — his intellectual, political and spiritual corruption — was beside the point? And when, Daddy or Mommy, did you condemn his lies or not shake the hand of a man who dissed John McCain’s heroism? Did you demand that the president account for his bizarre relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin or his insidious attempt to cow the press? Did you confront him for suggesting that the indictment of two Republican congressmen should have been delayed until after the midterm elections? Tell me, Mom and Dad, did you ever sing Bob Dylanwhen you were a kid: “How many times can a man turn his head/Pretending he just doesn’t see?” Look, our freedoms are blowin’ in the wind.

The most shocking thing about Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” is that the appalling no longer shocks. There’s not a member of Congress who does not know the truth of Woodward’s depiction of Trump as out of control and, in a way, out of his mind — downright dangerous. The revelations were of degree, but not of kind. The feeble act of faux heroism on the part of then-adviser Gary Cohn — he swiped documents off Trump’s desk — deserves a mock medal. Where was Cohn’s denunciation of Trump when he left the White House? Where were his harrowing details, anecdotes — anything? Silence. . . .

By now, we have all become inured to Trump and his antics. We know he’s a liar — some 4,713 false or misleading claims since his inauguration, according to The Post’s Fact Checker database. The consequence is that lying has become normalized, like killing in a time of war. Trump has infected much of the Republican Party. The lie has become its First Principle — and there is no second. The GOP is diseased, in the tertiary stage of moral cowardice. It may never recover.