Collaborator: 1. Someone who works for another person or group; 2. Someone who works with the enemy, an occupying force or dictatorial regime.
It’s an open secret that most Republican members of Congress believe Trump is an unhinged menace to the nation and the Constitution. His autocratic impulses get moreso with each new day. It’s a simple fact. From the very beginning of his presidency, indeed with his inaugural address Donald Trump sold his country down the river. There should never have been any surprises in what Trump would do. But there were plenty, right from the start.
He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear. -Anne Applebaum, Atlantic Magazine
Trying to re-write history a day later he expounded that attendance at his inauguration was record breaking, even in the face photographic evidence quite to the contrary. Later tried to get the National Park Service to doctor up photos showing crowds which weren’t there.
38 months later Trump has shown himself to be the traitorous, psychotically self-obsessed person he is over and over again, jettisoning people who disagree with him and for good measure belittling former office holders like a schoolyard bully those left voluntarily and for whatever reasons chose not to say why they left.
When you know and see evil and have the power to overcome it but make an active choice to live with it, indeed nurture it, you are a collaborator, no less than the French, Belgian, Czech men and women who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II against their own countrymen.
The three most visible collaborators in the Republican regime are Lindsey Graham, a powerful senator from South Carolina, 16 years in office, and Willliam Barr, the current Attorney General on his second tour as the AG., and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader. These three individuals are the grease around whom Trump has perverted every notion of democratic government in this country. They are the unholy trinity of enablers. They are committing treason against the Constitution:
They are collaborators.
Graham once tagged Trump a “jackass,” a “nutjob,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He added, "Here's what you're buying," Graham continued. "He's a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot. He doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for... He's the ISIL man of the year."
What happened that Graham now shines Trump’s shoes?