One of the truly astounding features of the last half-dozen years of American politics is how willingly so many Republican politicians have debased themselves in service to the man who now owns the GOP lock, stock and criminal liability.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a fascinating — and ultimately deeply disturbing — piece this week about this phenomenon by focusing on Sen. Rob Portman, a generally well respected, often serious and very conservative politician from Ohio who retired at the close of 2022.
Goldberg interviewed Portman in front of a live audience not quite two years ago on the same day a Trump White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. You may recall — or, if you’re inclined, you may have dismissed — Hutchison’s chilling testimony.
As a young aide to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Hutchinson, displaying remarkable courage and calm, told the House committee of former President Donald Trump watching impassively as the mob, attacking the Capitol, chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” She testified that Trump thought his vice president deserved that fate because Pence refused to violate the Constitution in order to keep Trump in office even though he had lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Did Portman, hearing such first-hand testimony, regret that he had voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, Goldberg wanted to know? That trial was, of course, a turning point in American history where the Republican Party might have, with impeccable and urgent reason, banned an insurrectionist from ever holding office again.
Portman never really answered Goldberg’s question but instead became indignant that a journalist had the audacity to ask such a question.
“It would be unfair to blame Portman disproportionately for the devastating reality that Donald Trump, who is currently free on bail but could be a convicted felon by November, is once again a candidate for president,” Goldberg wrote. “The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, denounced Trump for his actions on January 6, and yet still voted to acquit him. Trump’s continued political viability is as much McConnell’s fault as anyone’s.”
But here’s the thing: Portman knew he was debasing himself in front of the reality of Trump’s lies and incitement of violence, yet he debased himself willingly. Portman, who worked in the George H.W. Bush White House, knows about the value of character in politics, but he chose to ignore Trump’s lack of character.
At one level, this degree to suspension of belief is a great case study in human psychology. How does a person, experienced and smart, capable of critical thinking and understanding basic right and wrong, decide to ignore what looms right in front of him?
Portman, like Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo and several others, withdrew his endorsement of Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public in 2016 — Trump boasted of grabbing women by the genitals, a certain “high” point in American political history — but Portman (and Crapo) eventually came back around and willingly supported a sexual abuser for president.
Nothing, it seems, absolutely nothing is beyond the pale when it comes to Republican officeholders debasing themselves in order to stay, even temporarily, on the right side of Trump.
Nothing. Not the praise of dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, not the unprecedented indictments, not the former president’s outrageous attacks on judges, prosecutors and their families, not the increasingly blatant incitement of violence against his opponents, not the promise to pardon those convicted for assaulting police officers on January 6, not the civil conviction for sexual assault, not the family takeover of the Republican National Committee in order to pay his legal bills — nothing, absolutely nothing constitutes a red line for the Debasement Caucus.
So what is to be said about timid men like Crapo, Portman and so many others? Many, like career politician Crapo, are clinging to power so they dare not follow normal political instincts and abandon their authoritarian leader. Normal would be, of course, to distance oneself from a many-time-indicted, violence-spouting insurrectionist.
Other Republicans hide behind the fiction that somehow President Joe Biden presents a greater danger to the country than a man attacking judges and threatening to set free criminals who assault cops, a greater danger than a man who makes excuses for Putin and threatens to destroy a finally recovering U.S. economy by imposing sweeping tariffs that really will hit every American pocketbook.
The hyperpartisan nonsense that a steady, experienced political veteran is a greater danger to Americans than a twice-impeached grifter who will soon be the first former president to ever face a criminal trial is routinely spouted by Republicans like Idaho Senator James Risch and South Dakota Senator John Thune. But this line of argument is so blatantly flimsy as to further debase those who peddle it.
Republicans are obviously entitled to their policy differences with Biden. But to consider him a greater threat than Trump is to inhabit a la-la land of partisan fantasy.
Others who stand with Trump in the face of a mountain of evidence as to his venality are surely just afraid — afraid — of having the MAGA mob unleashed on them or their families. It’s a logical fear. But fear that doing the right thing will be uncomfortable or career-ending is simple cowardice. But when you have no red line, or the line continually moves, cowardice and the acquiesces that comes with it becomes a way of life.
Meanwhile, some Wall Street CEOs who thought Trump was done after January 6 and somehow found the courage then to distance themselves are back in the fold and writing big checks to pay his lawyers and fuel his campaign. There is no red line when it comes to the wealthiest among us putting their fortunes ahead of the country’s democracy.
All this is reminiscent of the death stages of Weimar Germany when, as recounted in Eric Vuillard’s brilliant book, The Order of the Day, 24 of Germany’s top corporate chieftains assembled in Berlin in February 1933 to bless and finance the election of a man they all disdained, but believed would be useful to them, their futures and fortunes.
The man who won that election was a sociopath, a virulent racist and the instigator of a failed coup. But he promised a return to order and stability and to conduct a war against democratic institutions. He would Make Germany Great Again, and then would destroy it.
“We never fall twice into the same abyss,” Vuillard wrote of these enablers of another time, “but we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread.”
As The Atlantic’s Goldberg notes, just 10 Republican senators could have reclaimed their party and ended their own nightmare by convicting Trump for his actions on January 6. That they did not will be their legacy — and ours. Theirs indeed are careers of ridicule and dread.