“I didn’t come here,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina complained last week, “to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy.” Tillis was referring to Republicans who were abandoning a deal on border security because they thought reaching a solution with President Joe Biden would hurt Trump’s electoral chances in the fall. It is immoral, Tillis added, to look “the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”
As Bruce Willis’s fictional cop John McClane would say: Welcome to the party, pal. In theory, Republicans care deeply about the situation on the southern United States border. In reality, most of them seem to care only about whatever Trump wants at any given moment, and what Trump wants is to take refuge in the Oval Office from his multiple legal problems. Tillis’s outburst, although welcome, was a rare moment of candor from a senior Republican senator about the degree to which the party’s once and future nominee has gutted the GOP of any remaining principles.
For years, Trump has attacked and obliterated anything like virtue in the Republican Party, a process that regularly features Republicans pulling their political souls from their bodies and handing them to Trump in jars for display on his mantle at Mar-a-Lago. (Ted Cruz going from the potential conscience of the 2016 GOP convention to a Trump-praising, phone-banking flunky is only one such example.)
Lol, okay bruh. The last decent republican was Eisenhower.
Eisenhower, in fact, chose to run as a Republican because he felt that the party needed to find its ‘maturity’ and embrace progress.
Clearly, he failed at changing the prevailing winds in the party.
I strongly thought in the 90’s that Colin Powell would be the first black president. I didn’t fathom the decent into madness that the Republican Party would succumb to.
I thought Sarah Palin in 2008 was the full descent into madness and that this was rock bottom and a moment of reckoning for the GOP. Little did I know we were actually sitting at the top of the slide back then.
I remember reading that his wife was adamantly opposed to him running for Vice President. She knew what would get stirred up.
McCain wasn’t the worst.
He was a staunchly pro-aristocrat war-happy troll who brought sarah palin to national prominence. He wanted to increase wealth inequality with tax cuts for the rich and slashing medicare, which would literally kill poor people. He opposed torture having been tortured himself - another conservative who can’t imagine or empathize with anything that hasn’t happened to them personally.
And yet, you’re completely correct. He wasn’t the worst republican. He wasn’t even the worst repulican on his presidential ticket.
He was a vastly different candidate in 2000. Everyone just remembers 2008 after the party had essentially broken him. If he’d gotten the nom over Bush I think things would’ve been much better. Still a Republican, but he wasn’t afraid to do what he thought was best for the country over the party. By 2008 they’d sunk their claws in and forced him to be their candidate.
Straight line from that asshat to trump via palin. He tried. But he gave in to the party rather than following his heart. He admits to that in his memoir.