In his “Backchannel” email last night, Josh Marshall made a point I’ve been thinking about the past few weeks.
Trump is hungry to walk through this door of lawless autocracy. But it is the conservative legal movement, embodied in the Federalist Society, organized by Leonard Leo and others, who opened the door. They manufactured the fraudulent idea that presidents cannot be constrained by the law. They imported it from abroad, from the degenerate ideologues of autocracy. They did this. They created the current moment in which a renegade President can simply start chainsawing through the legal fabric and do anything he wants….
I think it’s important to realize that when Donald J. Trump finally leaves the scene, there will still be thousands of highly educated, very smart, and very determined conservative ideologues left. Including those who wrote the memos, briefed Trump, carried out the orders, and put those orders into effect, wrote the legal briefs, and stood up and argued on behalf of Trump and his regime’s actions in court after court after court. For years — no, decades — they have been researching and writing position papers, conducting seminars, investigating and approving conservative wish lists of judges and federal appointees, and running state governments in the red.
What are we going to do about this right-wing apparatus that will survive after Trump?
I think ostracizing MAGA will be part of the answer, but I don’t think it will be enough.
And while it’s nice to see David Brooks’ recent realization that Trump and MAGA are an existential threat to the survival of democracy in USA, I have to wonder how long will it take for Brooks and other never-Trumpers to realize that someone like Trump and something like MAGA were the inevitable result of conservative thinking and actions.
They spent the past half-century “feeding red meat to the base.” They knew that “red meat” was laced through and through with hatred and intolerance for liberals and “the other.” They knew that the most zealous of their precious conservative movement believed that Democrats were satanic baby-killers. Did they never realize that the injection of all this conservative poison into the body politic was going to someday allow a monster to emerge?
We need to think long and hard about how to fully repair the damage Trump leaves behind.
