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Now that the worst-kept secret in Washington is out of the bag—that nearly all Senate Republicans view Donald Trump as a threat to the country—the question becomes, what are Republicans going to do about it?
Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, let some doozies fly in his frank 25-minute interview with the New York Times Sunday, but perhaps the most provocative among them was his open assertion that he was simply saying aloud the words that "most senior Republicans use only in private."
Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview. [...]
All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.
“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”
The problem is, he's not “in the middle of the road.” There's nothing middle of the road about calling neo-Nazis and white supremacists "very fine people." There's nothing middle of the road about telling your secretary of state to quit "wasting his time" trying to find a diplomatic alternative to a nuclear holocaust with North Korea. There's nothing middle of the road about threatening to torpedo a deal that's preventing Iran from producing nuclear weapons when your secretary of defense says staying in the deal is in the country's national security interests.
This is absolutely crazy—people are working around the clock to "contain" this guy and this is the best they can do? We’re basically barreling toward a nuclear war with North Korea, courtesy of the nut job in the Oval Office. Can you imagine what a menace Trump would be without the entourage of officials who devote all of their energy to keeping him from going off the deep end? It's a truly frightening thought.
This is exactly the type of situation that calls out for the 25th Amendment, but Mike Pence is too busy flying across country to do Trump's dirty work to actually look out for the interests of the country. Because when you can't succeed in passing legislation, pouring salt in the wounds of America's culture wars is apparently all that's left to you.