A lot of people in the media and even some conservatives are beginning wonder where the hell the leaders of the Republican party are as Donald Trump totally destroys our country, its reputation, and its place in the world as we once knew it.
After MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asserted that history would be "brutal" in its assessment of Republican lawmakers’ “cowardice,” GOP political strategist Steve Schmidt responded:
But Schmidt didn’t stop at Mitch McConnell. He went on to indict almost all Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Very nearly every elected member of the Republican Congress has chosen Trump and party over our country. It is shameful. They have embraced illiberalism, assaults on the rule of law, attacks on objective truth and staggering corruption. They betray their oaths with complicity
Amen. And when New Yorker foreign policy writer Susan Glasser facetiously wondered if she had missed hearing Republican leaders say “no they do not in fact want Russia to rejoin the G7" after the GOP led the way in kicking Russia out, The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein aptly explained Republicans’ deafening silence.
Brownstein, among others, also gave supposedly sensible GOP moderates like Sen. Susan Collins shade for her toothless tweet that “We must preserve this friendship” with Canada.
He wasn’t the only journalist sick of hearing meaningless bromides from GOP moderates like Sen. Collins as Trump tears down our institutions, severs ties with our allies, buddies up to despots, and launches the world into exactly the type of chaos that could yield World War III.
Let’s face it, Paul Ryan surely wants to be on the right side of history, as long as it doesn't require any effort and someone would just tell him which side will prevail in the history books. Among top Republican leaders, Ryan sadly represents the GOP's moral best right now—someone who would at least like to be viewed favorably as long as soul searching, self-sacrifice, and actual work aren’t involved. In other words, he’s a useless lemming who hopes he will be held in high regard for not knowing any better.
On the other side of that GOP 'Profile in Depravity' coin is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who could give a crap whether he's viewed favorably by history. McConnell's only ambition is to bend every law and institutional rule to his own advantage until it breaks his opponents—Democrats, in this case. Whether the republic can be pieced back together again isn't his concern, so much as the special thrill he gets out of screwing his enemies.
That’s where Ryan and McConnell are, in case anyone’s wondering.