I never tried the experiment of putting a frog in water and slowly boiling it when I was a kid. I wasn't a budding psychopath.
The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.
While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual,[1][2] according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out.[3][4] Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms. Wikipedia
It turns out that Wikipedia has already written half my story for me:
Even some conservatives like Max Boot and Naval War College Professor Tom Nichols are realizing that the Republicans who thought that Trump would be a useful idiot are having second thoughts.
With its long-standing opposition to immigration (both illegal immigration and current levels of legal immigration), National Review has found common ground with the far right. Like many conservative media outlets, it has flirted with the “great replacement” theory espoused by the El Paso gunman. A National Review article in January warned: “The native-born are having fewer children, leading to a fear that new entrants into American society will replace the existing culture rather than assimilate into it.” This is, sadly, a return to the roots of a magazine that defended Jim Crow in the 1950s (and even the early 1960s) and South Africa’s apartheid regime until its dissolution in 1994. Nowadays the magazine often defends Trump from (well-founded) charges of racism.
I take no pleasure in writing these words. I am heartbroken to see that it is not just the Republican Party that has become Trumpified but much of the American right — including a magazine I once revered.
The conservative National Review, a longtime cornerstone of the conservative movement’s intellectual wing, quickly fell in with President Donald Trump after his election, and most recently has published a series of pieces clashing with Never Trump conservative Max Boot over the American right’s white supremacy problem — calling him and his supporters “self-loathing whites … paralyzed by intersectional deference.”
As another Never Trump conservative, Naval War College Professor Tom Nichols, put it, this is a microcosm of the “Trump-compliant right’s” realization that there is no way to divorce their supposed principles from Trumpism — and the future of their place in conservative thought looks bleak.
There’s even a far right Republican ex-Congressman calling for an aggressive Trump primary challenge — from the right
(Former GOP member of Congress Joe ) Walsh writes, Trump “has increased the deficit more than $100 billion year over year” and “sides with (Russian President) Vladimir Putin over our own intelligence community.” Moreover, Walsh says, Trump “refuses to take foreign threats seriously as we enter the 2020 election. That’s reckless.”
“We now have a president who retweets conspiracy theories implicating his political opponents in Jeffrey Epstein’s death,” Walsh observes. “We now have a president who does his level best to avoid condemning white supremacy and white nationalism.”
Walsh even calls out Trump’s “ugly, racist attack on four minority congresswomen” — a reference to the president’s recent diatribes against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Rep. Ilhan Omar, all of whom he told to go back to the countries they originally came from even though three of the four were born and raised in the U.S. and the Somali-born Omar has been a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2000.
If Republican leaders from Mitch McConnell on down had heeded the warnings coming for the duty to warn therapists about how unstable malignant narcissists like Donald Trump are they would have been putting their craven heads together to figure out a way to oust Trump and replace him with Mike Pence.
Pence would have been a horror show in his own right but at least he would be comparatively sane.
But then if the GOP establishment had any sense they would have thrown Trump overboard after the Access Hollywood tapes.