This week's impeachment hearings underscored yet again just how debased the Republican Party has become. Trump's Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland implicated pretty much everyone at the top of Trump's administration in this widening scandal, which in a normal world would have by now led principled Republicans to tell Trump to resign or be impeached and removed from office. Republicans instead did what they always do with Trump's scandals and outrages. Nothing. John Harwood took the pulse of Republican insiders, and among many takes that once would have been shocking but now are routine, this summed it up:
They're all in with the worst president since the Civil War. They don't care about the rule of law, they don't care about defending the Constitution and national security, but they are keeping their eyes on the polls. That's all that matters to them. There is nothing Trump could do that would lead them to force him from office, unless the polling gets bad enough to threaten their own political careers. And every step of the way, they play along with the lies, obfuscations, and abuses of power that characterize Trump’s entire life.
When this scandal first became public, Republicans said it was all hearsay from an anonymous source. When the first of what turned out to be multiple firsthand witnesses began to step forward, they said there was no quid pro quo, and unless there was a quid pro quo Trump did nothing wrong. This was a lie, because even at face value, with nothing offered in exchange, seeking help from a foreign government to attack a domestic political rival is in itself an egregious abuse of power. But there was a quid pro quo. Multiple witnesses have so testified. So, Republicans then pretended that because Trump told Sondland that there wasn't a quid pro quo, there couldn't have been. Except that Sondland himself says there was.
And the timing of Trump's hollow words to Sondland speaks for itself.
So, with this excuse failing, Republicans then fell back on flinging spaghetti—or something else— against the wall to see if anything else would stick. They keep carping about the secret whistleblower, which is like wanting to know who pulled the fire alarm after an arson attack, when multiple witnesses saw the arsonist. They scour extremist fringe websites to dredge up conspiracy theories that leave witnesses baffled almost to the point of laughter. They try to find fault with the process, because that's what one does when one can't argue the facts. They argue that the aid was delayed only 55 days, and eventually was released, ignoring the fact that the legal process for such a delay was ignored, that no national security or international diplomacy experts wanted the aid delayed, that there was no reason for the delay, and that the money was released only after the whistleblower's report was made public, and it was released when people outside the Trump loop determined he had no legal grounds to block it.
Republicans even tried the face value absurd argument that Trump has been trying to fight corruption in Ukraine. Because the guy who never has a bad word to say about Vladimir Putin, who sucked up to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after greenlighting his slaughter of the Kurds, and who sends troops to protect a regime that savagely murdered an American resident journalist cares about foreign corruption.
Of course Trump didn't care about an actual investigation, he only wanted one to be publicly announced. Because it wasn't about facts, it was about public perception. It was about smearing a domestic political rival, knowing that the American media again would obsess over a false attack on one of his opponents, the way they did with the false attacks against Hillary Clinton in 2016. And even with all this exposed, some are nevertheless trying.
But none of this is working. Like Trump's Russia scandal, that Attorney General William Barr apparently successfully covered up and made go away, Trump's Ukraine scandal is hiding in plain sight. But the public revelations happened too quickly and too publicly, and the Democrats now control the House of Representatives, so this investigation wasn't so easily obstructed and redacted from public consciousness. So, when all else fails, the Republicans' ultimate backstop is to declare that Trump can do whatever he wants to do, anyway. That yeah, maybe there was a quid pro quo to attempt to strong arm a foreign government into attacking Trump's domestic political rival, but he can do anything he wants. In other words, this isn't a nation of laws based on a functioning Constitution. To Republicans, Trump has absolute authority to do anything he wants. That's the real backdrop to their entire sinister charade. But it’s even more dangerous than that.
Not only are Republicans joining Trump in his war on the Constitution, they’re also at best enabling and at worst participating in his attacks on American values. He overrides the military brass to pardon war criminals. He and his followers don’t blink at endangering the personal security of a decorated military officer who dared tell the truth about Trump’s abuses of power. And Republicans also are enabling and participating in Trump’s undermining national security. All along, Trump has proven a deeply stupid man who routinely gets his ass kicked on the world stage, and the evidence keeps rolling in. In just the last several days, North Korea again was mocking him. South Korea refused Trump’s blackmail, and instead is turning to China for security assistance. And thanks to Trump’s greenlighting of Turkey’s war on the Kurds, the terrorist group ISIS is rebuilding.
All of this is deeply and historically damaging to the United States. All of this benefits no one more than Russian despot Vladimir Putin. As with all things Trump, all roads lead to Putin. And Republicans won’t do anything to stop any of it.