Trump and MAGA will fail. I expect the economy to get worse, and I think their ability to persuade Americans to blame everyone else is wearing out. Someone who agrees with that assessment can nevertheless decide to keep helping them until withdrawing becomes the safer choice.
In its survey conducted from September 28 through October 4, Pew found that 30 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, while 68 percent disapproved. For a politician hoping to survive Trump, those numbers may look like a reason to prepare an exit. But preparing to leave can mean continuing to vote with him while waiting for the political cost of leaving to fall.
I think a lot of people are going to regret having stood in photographs with Trump in the Oval Office. Especially anyone choosing to do it now. You may already be thinking about how you will explain the picture later, but Trump gets to use it today.
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If you are a Republican in Congress who understands what this administration is doing and continues to protect it, I would like you to explain whose interests your patience serves. You can tell me about the primary challenge you fear. I will understand you perfectly well, and I will still want to know why someone else should endure the consequences of your decision to avoid it.
You were elected to exercise judgment. The possibility that exercising it might cost you your seat was part of the arrangement, and I do not accept that preserving your career takes precedence over protecting the people subjected to the power you help sustain.
Perhaps you believe you can accomplish more by staying close to the president. Then your defense needs to include something you have actually prevented, because the access itself is of no interest to the person whose rights are being violated. If you cannot explain what your influence has accomplished, I am left looking at your continued cooperation.
A chief executive can make much the same argument about protecting a company. But if keeping the business in favor requires helping officials harm people, then protecting the business has become a decision about what you are willing to do to those people. Calling it a responsibility to shareholders does not relieve you of responsibility for the choice.
“I was protecting shareholder value” tells me why you wanted the arrangement to continue. It gives me no reason to forgive what you did to preserve it.
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Refusing can cost you something. I have written about what it cost me, and I am tired of having the existence of that cost explained as though it resolves the argument.
The person who cannot afford to lose a paycheck is in a different position from the person who can afford to lose a fortune and remain wealthy. A senator’s fear of losing office deserves less sympathy than a family’s fear of the government. I will judge the choices available to each, and I will not help the powerful borrow the helplessness of people who have far less room to act.
If you have substantial power and are withholding it until you can act without personal risk, you have decided that the people currently being harmed should bear the risk for you. They get to live through the interval in which you are preserving your options. Your eventual statement of opposition will not give them that time back.
I would welcome your decision to stop cooperating. Every refusal that makes further abuse more difficult has value, including one made by someone who should have refused much earlier. But I will judge it by what you stop doing and what you help stop, rather than by how eloquently you describe your disappointment.
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The Associated Press reports that ICE agents have fired their guns during more than a dozen vehicle stops since last year, killing at least four people and wounding others. Each shooting requires an examination of its circumstances. Officials responsible for oversight should be demanding those answers now, while their findings could prevent another death.
A person in an office of public trust who is waiting for everyone else to break first is helping maintain the support he says makes breaking impossible. His colleagues can point to his continued cooperation as a reason to maintain theirs. They can all privately believe the administration is finished while publicly helping it remain in power.
Breaking with it gives those colleagues something to join. It also forces them to decide whether they will defend conduct that someone in their own circle has refused to defend. The person waiting until opposition is safe is waiting for someone else to do that work for him.
You may believe that holding out for another month will let you leave on better terms. But you are making that calculation from a position in which another month is something you can afford. Someone subjected to the power you are helping preserve has no way to negotiate how much of that month they can endure.
Even if everything I expect about this administration’s failure comes to pass, an earlier refusal could still have spared someone. The day you finally decide to act matters to a person whose life might have been different had you decided yesterday.
Trump’s eventual defeat will not make the time you gave him harmless. The blood is dripping from the hands of those who could stop him and won’t. I think people should reconsider that. But I’m not holding my breath. They all seem like pretty shitty people, all things considered.
Go Deeper into the Circus
No, We Cannot Agree to Disagree
I do not want to lower the temperature. I think the people responsible ought to feel increasing public pressure until they stop hurting people and answer for what they have done.
Inside the Deranged Mind of the Right-Winger
Eric Schmitt had reached the part of his interrogation where he warned Jack Smith about committing perjury. He had not yet established which basketball game Smith had attended, but apparently that could wait.
The magnitude of denial and/or willful greed and disregard for life required for continuing support for this nakedly malevolent regime is astonishing. The historical inflection point that will define us in ways we can't even fully know yet.
That hundreds, nay thousands, of treasonous actions have been openly committed by the Trumps and their extensive venal circle while the mainstream media looked on from their phoney impartial bleachers
That your Institutions from SCOTUS down have been hollowed out in the service of corruption
That your GOP has been a historically active treacherous Party to all this
That parasitical capitalist business practices have your economy teetering on the edge of a financial abyss
That sheer laziness and disillusion has enabled too many electors to walk away from their patriotic responsibility to Vote
Indicates that your precious DEMOCRACY has been longtime ruined and your Empire, as paralysed as your military machine, is on the skids.
Poor fellow your country!