When Donald Trump was nominated to run for president by the Republican Party, some of us believed the GOP had lost its mind. That analysis was confirmed for us by the ignorant, incompetent lout that Donald Trump has proven himself to be as chief executive.
But it took the Republican Party’s equally inexplicable backing of Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate, to confirm that the party has lost its soul as well.
Yesterday, the Republican National Committee, which had done the right thing by pulling their support when allegations about Moore’s perversion became public, did a complete 180-degree about-face, jumping back into the race. And GOP senators who had called on Moore to exit the contest have now come around and are backing him.
The acceptance of Mr. Moore — who has been credibly accused of pawing, groping, and touching teenage girls, at least one of which was not of legal age — by Trump, the RNC, and the GOP leadership shows that Republicans have abandoned their core principles, abandoned common decency, and abandoned their souls.
“I think he’s going to do very well. We don’t want to have a liberal Democrat in Alabama, believe me,” Trump said Tuesday during a lunch with Republican senators. “We want strong borders, we want stopping crime, we want to have the things that we represent and we certainly don’t want to have a liberal Democrat that’s controlled by Nancy Pelosi and controlled by Chuck Schumer, we don’t want to have that for Alabama.”
The colorless, faceless Democratic sacrificial lamb in the race, Doug Jones, would be far and away the most conservative member of the Democratic Party serving in Congress if he wins on December 12. But with typical bombast and lies, Trump is trying to make it appear that Jones is the second coming of Ted Kennedy. No doubt Jones will vote with the Democrats on many issues. But how does that stack up when compared to a Republican pervert voting on “family values” issues?
An RNC official confirmed late Monday that the committee would once again be supporting Moore after severing its fundraising ties to his campaign last month, though it was not immediately clear what that support would entail. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm the reversal, which was first reported by Breitbart News.
Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, is scheduled to attend a rally with Moore Tuesday evening.
Buoyed by the taste of his own success in Congress as the Republican tax bill inches closer to passage, Trump telephoned Moore on Monday to offer encouragement as well as support and also argued in a pair of tweets that Moore’s vote was badly needed to push the president’s policies forward.
Weeks ago, when accusations of sexual misconduct with teenagers first surfaced, Trump’s spokesman had said the president believed Moore would “do the right thing and step aside” if the allegations were true.
Top Republicans had vowed to expel him from the Senate if he wins. Publicly and privately, GOP leaders described the allegations against Moore as credible and insisted there were no circumstances under which he should serve in the Senate.
Whatever the GOP tries to do after Moore is elected, it will be too little, too late. The Democrats are in a win-win situation — and they know it. If Jones wins, it’s more evidence for them that their hysterical anti-Trump campaign works. If Moore wins, he and Trump become the face of the Republican Party going into the November 2018 elections.
There are enough rabid Republicans in Alabama who think Moore’s accusers are all Democratic partisans — or work for the Democrats, or are part of a gigantic conspiracy to bring Moore down — that the candidate has a good chance of eking out a victory. That some people are impervious to the facts because they are reported by the hated media is not entirely the party’s fault. Decades of lying about Republicans have birthed an anti-rationalist movement in the GOP that sees the media as the enemy and now rejects even the most self-evident facts as lies.
But most of the GOP leadership should know better. That many of them have given in and will probably accept the pervert Moore in the Senate will mark the end of Republican principles, leaving only the quest for raw power in their place.
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