Retiring Republican Rep. Charlie Dent is frustrated that his party—the one now synonymous with an ignorant, blustering, fascist xenophobe—is running into hard times.
“I think there’s a lot of weariness and a lot of exhaustion; frankly, this will be a challenging year and I’ve said this many times that the litmus test for being Republican these days is not about any given set of ideals and principles, it’s about loyalty to a man and that’s challenging,” he said to CNN’s Manu Raju.
“If you’re a member of Congress, particularly in a swing or marginal district, and you go out there and put distance between yourself and the President, guess what? The loyalists to the President will say you’re betraying him,” he continued. “If you put distance from the President, those in the resistance movement will say you’re still a sycophant and it’s never enough. You’re really in a no-win position.”
How to even respond to this? All right, so the main problem here is that the party has stapled itself to an incompetent, grifting buffoon whose closest family and advisers are under investigation for partnering with a foreign power to throw a U.S. election ... and by golly, that turns out to be hard. And it’s hard because some Republicans, namely the white nationalists and authoritarian-inclined, want you to support the clearly incompetent and grifting buffoon anyway, no matter what he does, and others don't, and it's just so hard to decide what to do.
Yeah, well. You can't say he doesn't have his finger on the pulse of the party.