We now continue our ongoing series exploring just how low Trump's Republican enablers can sink in their attempts to protect him from our nation's rule of law. Exhibit the whateverth: Newt Effing Gingrich.
Now, let's all first take the necessary moment to just take this masterpiece of bizarre post-modernism in. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, not long ago a Republican presidential candidate himself, appears to be arguing that the whole notion of prosecuting allies of Donald Trump, sitting president, for crimes they are suspected of committing is tainted or invalid because the crimes are suspected of taking place in a location in which Donald Trump is not popular.
Mind you, for all we know the Donald Trump campaign and/or White House may have committed crimes in West Virginia as well. If that is the case, Newt Gingrich can look forward to getting his wish.
This is dumb even for Newt Gingrich, mind you, but is systematic of just how easily Trump's Republican allies can brush aside the entire notion of rule of law, whether it be the investigation of potential crimes or, in this case, the long-standard mechanisms of prosecutors, if it so much as brushes sideways against the momentary needs of the party. Newt is not the primary proponent of this theory; that honor falls to Fox News, which has rapidly transformed itself from a network ever-shrieking about theoretical corruption in government to a state-allied defender of those corruptions.
To hammer a key point home yet again: You can draw a line from Newt Gingrich and his own in-power attempts to twist the rule of law into a bludgeon to be used on his ideological enemies and the similarly cynical Republicanism of this new Trump-led era. The party moved from the hard partisanship of Gingrich et al into increasingly vociferous denials that the opposition party had any legitimacy at all. Democrats were no longer merely "weak" or sponsors of a "nanny state", but a malevolent force allied with worldwide cosmopolitans, to use the Stephen Miller framing.
The Republican masters of that era would soon move on to spearhead the gerrymanders of a new era blocking the opposition party from rule regardless of who got the majority of the votes, or retroactive law-passing to strip authority from state offices or state cities that fell into opposition hands; the obsessive conviction that surely the Clinton family had done something wrong, or perhaps five wrong things, or perhaps fifty wrong things, rapidly transferred itself to conspiracy theories about John Kerry's military service or a multitude of frothings about whether the nation's first non-white president was a "secret" Muslim, or a "secret" foreigner, or had ordered a United States military raid to subdue ... Texas.
Republicans are currently engaged in yet another pity party over how Donald Trump "happened" to them, and how distant his brand of conspiratorial and willful ignorance is from what they envision to be their own convictions. It is all bunk. If Trump had not come along his replacement would have been in the same mold. He would be contemptuous of the bounds constraining his power, and of laws protecting others from his beliefs. He would rail against immigrants. He would cite conspiracies gathered from the National Rifle Association or filtered from hate groups; he would condemn scientific findings that conflicted from the needs of favored businesses as a plot by international elites.
And if his underlings committed a crime, the entire party and movement would rally to his aid. It does not matter if it was Trump or if it was not; Trump is not in command of what party ideologues from Paul Ryan to Newt Gingrich may declare. Whatever arguments come from the mouth or thumbs of Newt Gingrich, Newt Gingrich did that to himself.