Everyone who works for President Trump: Quit now. Save your souls. Save your honor, such as it is. Save your reputation, such as it remains. Russia attacked our democracy. Trump has demonstrated repeatedly, and did so again with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, that he doesn’t care and won’t defend his country.
If you work for this man and you call yourself a patriot, it is time for you to go.
This may sound excessive, even irresponsible. Indeed, for months I have agonized over the question of public service in the age of Trump.
Of course, as a general matter, it is better to have more grown-ups around Trump, mitigating his worst impulses, providing wisdom born of experience to counter his ignorance and petulance.
But that assessment assumes facts not in evidence: that Trump is educable or containable. Actually, it contravenes the available evidence. There is none that Trump has done anything but what Trump wants to do. Monday’s news conference made that clear.
Extreme times call for extreme measures, and these are the extreme-est of times.
The problem of course is that the people Trump has surrounded himself with, and the GOP that enabled his perfidy for the last 18+ months, are just as soulless and as hateful as Trump is, and they're more than happy to remain in the service of Trump's stated political policies because they believe, rightly so in nearly all cases, that they are going to be absolutely fine and they won't lose a wink of sleep over it either.
If they do get fired or quit, they'll just go to some think tank or DC lobbyist firm or law firm or sinecure and they'll happily keep on serving the GOP's all-American brand of bigotry and white nationalism. Even guys like Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort are going to be fine in the end. (Well, okay, maybe not Manafort, Mueller has a surprise for him apparently.)
The larger problem is that the 60 million plus people who voted for Trump are okay with his racism, and they'll remain okay with it. If the Russians helped Trump stop "that stupid Clinton bitch" then they can't be all that bad, can they? They'll excuse that just like they excuse everything else he's done, and his support among Republicans will remain close to 90% like it always will.
I appreciate Marcus's sentiment, but as I've said for years now, Trump is the symptom of a broken, cancerous, hateful GOP and the tens of millions of angry bigots that it serves. His rise was inevitable. Nobody's going to resign over this. We're going to have to take power from them and drive the regime out.
That conflict is also inevitable, and it's time we steeled ourselves and prepare to face it rather than engaging in wishful thinking dreaming of the day the people who voluntarily decided to work for Trump in the first place suddenly developing a conscience where the gaping void in their souls are currently.
Power is never surrendered voluntarily.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment