GOP enabling a Demagogue
"These are sick people.
You know the thing I don't understand? You would think—you would think they'd want to make our country great again, and I honestly believe they don't. I honestly believe it."
Sick people. Who don’t want the best for our country. Not critics. Enemies.
Joe McCarthy said things like this, but he wasn’t president. George Wallace did as well, but while he won election as governor of Alabama, of course he didn’t reach the White House. The closest a previous president came to taking a similar tone in public was not even that close. The president was—surprise!—Richard Nixon, who made a famously bitter crack in a press conference after the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973. First he complained about the imbalance of press coverage of the event. Then he said to the reporters, with an icy smile: “Don’t get the impression that you can arouse my anger. One can only be angry with those he respects.”
Paul Ryan doesn’t speak this way. Nor Mitch McConnell. Nor the great majority of Republican senators and representatives. They know this is dangerous. They know this is wrong. Increasing numbers of them wring their hands in concern.
But with every day that passes without their doing something about it, the stain and responsibility for Trump’s ungoverned tone stick more lastingly to the Republican establishment that keeps looking the other way as he debases his office and divides his country.
Not even 20 years ago, Republicans in Congress were sure that Bill Clinton’s lie about extra-marital sex justified impeachment proceedings against him. Trump has given them 100 times greater grounds for action.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-republican-party-is-enabling-an-increasingly-dangerous-demagogue/537723/
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