I mean, it really does.
What I’ve noticed over the past couple of years is a
movement – seemingly growing stronger every day – of loud, clear voices who are outraged
by the antics of Donald John Trump and the Republican sycophants who support, endorse,
enable and empower him in his systematic destruction of everything good about
America.
These are voices who coherently call on the American
people to rise up against the authoritarian Trump regime and refuse to accept his
version of America as the “new normal” – or any kind of normal, for that
matter. What’s surprising about these anti-Trump voices is who they belong to.
Here’s a partial list off the top of my head:
* Nicolle Wallace, former press secretary to Florida Governor
Jeb Bush, White House Communications Director for George W. Bush and senior
advisor for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.
* Steve Schmidt, former strategist who worked on the political
campaigns of President George W. Bush, California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Senator McCain.
* Joe Scarborough, a lawyer and politician who served in the House
of Representatives from 1995 to 2001 from Florida’s 1st congressional district.
* David Jolly, attorney, lobbyist and former representative from
Florida's 13th congressional district.
* Elise Jordan, who has worked as a columnist for Time magazine and The Daily Beast and was former communications director for the National
Security Council and a speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
* Bill Kristol, neoconservative political analyst and founder
of the political magazine The Weekly
Standard.
* Jennifer Reuben, op-ed writer and “Right Turn” blogger for The Washington Post.
* Bret Stephens, opinion writer for The New York Times and former foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
* And Michael Steele, one-time Lieutenant Governor of Maryland
and former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
What do all of these people have in common? They all are –
or were until recently – Republicans.
Now I’m not suggesting that there aren’t Democrats (or
Independents) in print and broadcast news who aren’t equally appalled and
disgusted by Trump’s two-year reign of terror against the moral and ethical values of America, because there are. But when I listen to them
these days, I’m getting a confusingly consistent, repetitive message that
combines “go low/go high” with a mixture of “Trump bad/Democrats good,” “here
comes the blue wave” and “we have to be better than this.”
The aforementioned Republicans, on the other hand, because
they are or once were Republicans, have developed a network of solid contacts within
the party who are much better at peeking behind the curtain to tell us what the
Wizard of Ooze is really up to. Nicolle Wallace, for example, and the guests she invites to her show have the best sources
and ask the right questions to get the information that I want to hear.
These one-time GOP operatives know what the Republican Party is supposed to be, so they excel at seeing through the
fog of Trump and reading beyond the tweets, the rants, the rallies and the rage of the current administration for the inside story on where we’re going, where
we’ve been and what we need to do to keep from staggering any further down the Orange
Brick Road.
It makes me ponder two things:
(1) Why there isn’t anybody among the 240 Republicans in the
House of Representatives or the 52 Republicans in the Senate who can see what’s
happening with the same clear vision of these Republican analysts and
commentators…and has the stones to do something about it? The answer to that, I
believe, is they are all afraid of the tweeter-in-chief and consider getting
re-elected to be more important than actually trying to govern the country.
(2) If we woke up tomorrow morning and Donald Trump was no
longer the president, would we still think Wallace, Schmidt, Kristol,
Scarborough and the others were the good guys we have come to respect for putting country ahead of party, or would
they retreat back into Republicanism and become the same people who promoted the
likes of Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sarah Palin and much of the Bush family as
potential leaders of the free world?
For that one, I don’t have the answer. At least, I don't have it yet.
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