We have yet another mewling apologia from Peter Wehner about the sorry state of the Republican Party in today’s New York Times. Wehner is one of the former Party intelligentsia whose ability to lie with long words earned him a career promoting Bush’s Wars and Cheney’s Mendacity before they earned him exile. Now, along with David Brooks, Max Boot, Ross Douthat, George Will, and other once-respected keyboard warriors for the Right who look now like feebs and dweebs, Wehner is stuck now in a discredited think-tank trying to re-brand himself by re-branding the whole GOP that has scattered his teeth and left him behind.
Wehner’s been on this nostalgia tour now for a while, and The Times is never stingy with space for pussified Conservatives whose objections to Trump make them seem like renegades (collectively, all these eunichs don’t have the balls of Jennifer Rubin). Wehner actually floats the scenario of the GOP removing Trump from office on merit. He even has a cute name for it: Trexit. Get it? Like Brexit. Trump Exit.
As usual with Gray Lady opinions, the Comments section is smarter than the column. The points that Wehner will not see are made for him repeatedly by readers: Trump has a 90% approval rating among Republicans, and they aren’t just the Red Hats at the rallies. One reader responds:
I know people, friends who are businessmen, college educated people; housewives, young and old WW II vets church going people young mothers etc. and they love this man. When pressed to defend their position they are vague. They love what the economy is doing they love his bluster. What I can't grasp is that these same church going people laugh and look past his dalliances with porn stars, corruption and the myriad investigations circling this man. And they will vote for him again should he last that long. They will never change their minds about him. That 90% approval rating doesn't surprise me in the least. It frightens me.
There's no such thing as a "Republican" if one insists on specifics, just as there hasn't ever been any such thing as a "Conservative" beyond platitudes and vagaries. Their most fundamental tenet is their Achilles' Heel: power determines reality. So: what is a Republican? Whatever the leader says it is. For the moment that leader is Trump.
One must add how ugly it has become to see Peter Wehner here and anywhere else that gives him a soapbox serving these cocktails of feeble defiance, leadership-in-exile, and prescriptive futility. He has a sellable byline in the first place because he was tenured at the poison academy that caused this downfall. The culmination of all his arguments now sits in the Oval Office, deciding by his gut, faith-based in himself, denying the very idea of empirical reality, and driving his own party under the whip of power-as-fact.
Orwell gave us Peter Wehner in Animal Farm: Squealer. "He was a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point he had a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail which was somehow very persuasive. The others said of Squealer that he could turn black into white." Now Wehner wants to explain to us that this can all be remedied if the GOP only returns to the erudite palatable lying, blindness, and rationalizations that are the stock in trade of Conservative intellectuals such as, say, Peter Wehner. Too late.
Republicans have the same tools they had before: bluster, lies, hypocrisy, selfishness, hype, and cruelty. That’s why they won’t get us out of this. Trump is exactly what they are, and Peter Wehner helped make them so.