The whining is hard to take. It’s not so much that the president has forgotten that he needs conservatives as well as populists in order to govern as it’s that conservatives made a deal with the devil and the payment is coming due.
This is the most accurate section of the piece:
Coalition politics always requires sail-trimming by all coalition partners. Many Republicans who flocked to former President George W. Bush’s call to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” in the wake of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal have swallowed hard and accepted Trump for the promise of conservative Supreme Court justices and the defeat of Democrats.
Now they wonder when Trump will trim his own sails for them.
The bargain has always been that he’d cut taxes and surround himself with traditional Republican foreign policy experts. The departure of Gen. Jim Mattis from the administration is not just a vacancy in the Cabinet. Coupled with United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s exit, this has Republicans, even those who have steadfastly stuck with the president, worried that there is a vacancy in the coalition bargain.
He provided two Supreme Court justices, a tax cut, and kept his promise to fill out his foreign policy team with adults, and now we have vacancies at Defense and the U.N., a conspiracy theorist at the State Department, a rental hack and fraudster at the Department of Justice, a Fox & Friends host at the U.N., and John Frickin’ Bolton as the National Security Adviser.
This is supposed to be okay, though, because at least the Bitch didn’t win.
Beating Hillary justified every other thing Trump has done or is plausibly accused of having done. And this is primarily because conservatives believed their own bullshit. When she served in the Senate, she got along fine with her colleagues who rightfully saw her as a serious person who came prepared, didn’t throw unnecessary bombs, and kept her promises. That was quite a contrast with the caricature of her that had been built up over the preceding decades.
The election of 2016 was not a choice between a Democrat and a Republican but a choice between sanity and safety or rage and recklessness. Any ideological choice was settled in the primaries of the respective parties.
Trump is conscienceless conman and a transparent fool, and this was overlooked by conservatives. With the midterms over, they have already paid the first installment on the price this will cost them. They will keep paying until they help us remove him from office.
