- Republican Senators Grassley and Graham are trying to get charges filed against British intelligence agent Christopher Steele (seriously that's his name) over his dossier that investigated how deeply Russia had/has ties to trump before and during the 2016 campaign. The Senators are claiming Steele may have lied to the FBI, but what it looks like from the sidelines is that the Senators are trying to discredit an intel source that for the most part been proven accurate.
- Over in the House, Ryan and Nunes are harassing the FBI into releasing documents related to that Steele dossier, what observers are noting are attempts to force the FBI into shutting down their Russia-trump investigation.
- And the GOP leadership seems to be shooting down any reports that they've been briefed on trump's unfit mental status, or on any discussions about the 25th Amendment being used to shut down trump as more public signs of dementia crop up.
Why are Republicans - who have to be aware that trump is toxic in the polls, and that they're facing angry voter turnout in the general midterms this November - tying their fate to someone who's proven over the last year to be a disruptive force capable of ruining their own chances?
Part of it has to be the recent Wolff book Fire and Fury that chronicles how everyone circling around trump are not-so-privately complaining about how he's a childish moron. There's a level of embarrassment for the party to have their own administration's handlers dissing their own boss like that.
If we refer to Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian:
What did you think would be the Republican reaction to the latest revelations about Donald Trump? Did you expect the party’s luminaries to drop their collective head into their hands, or to crumple into a heap in despair at the state of the man they anointed as president of the United States?
They’d certainly have had good reason. In the book Fire and Fury, which on Thursday received the greatest possible endorsement – namely a “cease and desist” order from Trump’s personal lawyers – the journalist Michael Wolff paints a picture of a man whose own closest aides, friends and even family believe is congenitally unfit to be president...
...Instead, the official campaign account for Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, tweeted a GIF of McConnell grinning mightily. And that smirk captured the mood of many of his colleagues. What do they have to smile about? They’re pleased because they believe Fire and Fury marks the downfall of Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to Trump and source of some of the book’s most scathing lines...
In this regard, the Republican leadership views Bannon's downfall weakens his ability to challenge the incumbents during Primaries as once feared.
There's also the overall Republican delusion that they can control trump, or curb his nastier impulses:
But the more enduring delusion is that Trump is poised to moderate. Republicans predicted he would change once the primaries of 2016 were under way. Then they said he would change once he’d won the party nomination. Or when the presidential election campaign proper began. Or when he’d won the election. Or once he’d taken the oath of office. They were wrong every time. He won’t change. Trump is Trump...
Republicans have enabled trump ever since he jumped into the race in 2015: They tried humoring him, then were forced to placate him when it turned out the Far Right voter base were in his pocket. Even with the revelations that trump's handlers are fooling themselves, they're STILL deluding themselves in order to push yet again for the extremist parts of their agenda not yet passed.
The GOP will eagerly turn a blind eye to the reality that trump remains dangerously ill-informed, recklessly self-serving, and showing every sign of aging dementia in the psychology handbooks. They will pretend that "all is well" and will campaign as such, even as trump commits more atrocities driven by his anger and his folly.
This isn't so much the Farmer ignoring all the signs that the Viper is a viper. This is a political party ignoring all the signs that their banner-carrier is a drooling moron desperate to prove himself a god. They are letting trump bite them over and over, the poison shredding every muscle and bone of their party's corrupted body, and they're happily singing about how every sting is a kiss of the divine.
The Republicans are taking the coward's path of expediency and of least resistance. Rather than confront reality and fix the problem, they're letting the problem dominate every corner of their fantasy world.
We are so very royally fucked.
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