Awwww, poor congressional Republicans. They supported and continue to support a popular-vote-losing president who was helped into office by Russian election interference and whose habits of obstructing justice and alienating allies and undercutting the legal defense of his own orders have turned out to be a distraction from the Republican agenda. Why, for instance:
As James B. Comey was testifying that President Trump was a liar, Senator John Hoeven held two meetings about health care, and pondered ideas about infrastructure.
“We’re working,” said Mr. Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota, though he conceded that the president’s travails “make it tougher.”
Oh, noes. Is Trump making it tougher for you to take health coverage away from tens of millions of people and cut taxes for the wealthiest people? How very inconsiderate of him!
As they have traveled through the various stages of grief over the unpredictability of their president and the realization that Mr. Trump is unlikely to change, congressional Republicans appear to have landed at acceptance, basically hoping that the president does not get in their way.
They feel grief? The people who have supported Trump every step of the way on the bet that he will give them the big-ticket policy items they want, like—and I know I’m repeating myself here but it can’t be stressed enough—taking health coverage away from tens of millions of people and cutting taxes for millionaires and billionaires? And also gutting Wall Street reforms, by the way. They feel grief? We’re going to need an entire orchestra worth of teeny tiny violins.
With Mr. Trump still broadly popular among rank-and-file conservatives, Republican lawmakers are uneasy about aggressively criticizing the president and potentially angering their voters. So even while deeply critical of Mr. Trump in private, readily questioning his fitness for office, many of them leap to his defense before the cameras.
“Their calculation is that there’s no percentage in being public,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist and Trump critic. “Now I know what Vichy France must have felt like. Everybody is a patriot after 6 o’clock in the privacy of their own living room.”
That Vichy France thing is a killer line, but let’s be clear: Republicans are not staying silent on Trump only because they don’t want to anger their base. They’re also staying silent on Trump because they still need him to sign off on the policies they’ve been itching to pass for the past eight years. Congressional Republicans are not Trump’s victims. When they make excuses for him, it’s not Stockholm syndrome. They are eager collaborators, trying to push him toward their vicious policy agenda.