{"id":9887,"date":"2018-04-12T16:31:34","date_gmt":"2018-04-12T21:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=9887"},"modified":"2018-04-12T16:31:34","modified_gmt":"2018-04-12T21:31:34","slug":"donald-trump-republicans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/9887","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump Republicans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stolen from Digby…Ron Brownstein assesses Paul Ryan’s pathetic legacy:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

No one in the GOP was better equipped, by position and disposition alike, to resist Trump\u2019s racially infused, insular nationalism, or to define a more inclusive competing vision for the party. Instead, Ryan chose to tolerate both Trump\u2019s personal excesses and his racially polarizing words and deeds as the price worth paying to advance Ryan\u2019s own top priorities: cutting spending; regulations; and above all, taxes. The result was that Ryan, more than any other prominent Republican, personified the devil\u2019s bargain the GOP has signed with Trump. And his departure crystallizes the difficult choices Republicans face as Trump redefines the party in his belligerent image.<\/p>\n

From the\u00a0exhaustive reporting<\/a>\u00a0of Politico\u2019s Tim Alberta, who was first to telegraph that Ryan was likely to retire, we know that the speaker, expecting a Trump defeat, planned to deliver a speech on Election Night in 2016. He intended to denounce Trump\u2019s racially polarizing agenda as a political dead end and a betrayal of conservatism\u2019s ideals. Instead, when Trump won, Ryan folded the speech back into his jacket pocket\u2014where it has receded deeper ever since.<\/p>\n

Throughout his career, Ryan has presented himself as a disciple of Kemp, the ebullient former pro-football player and Reagan-era Republican congressman who sought to expand the party\u2019s appeal to non-white communities. Ryan idolized Kemp and even worked for him: The future speaker was a young staffer at Kemp\u2019s think tank, Empower America, in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

But after Trump took office, Ryan blinked at confronting the president\u2019s appeals to white racial resentments. Pressed for reaction to comments like Trump\u2019s reported description of African nations as \u201cshithole\u201d countries, Ryan\u00a0managed to mumble<\/a>\u00a0the bare minimum of plausible criticism: \u201cThe first thing that came to my mind was very unfortunate, unhelpful.\u201d For most people genuinely distressed by Trump\u2019s remarks, \u201cunfortunate\u201d and \u201cunhelpful\u201d were probably not the first words that came to mind; \u201cracist\u201d and \u201cxenophobic\u201d were.<\/p>\n

Even more consequential was Ryan\u2019s refusal to challenge Trump on behalf of the young undocumented immigrants included in former President Barack Obama\u2019s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Though the speaker repeatedly promised the \u201cDreamers\u201d that Congress would protect them, he has allowed the legislation that would have preserved their legal status to wither, after Trump and House Republican hardliners insisted on linking it to poison-pill provisions that would slash legal immigration.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked with him back in his days of working for Jack Kemp at Empower America,\u201d Frank Sharry, the executive director of the pro-immigrant advocacy group America\u2019s Voice, told me Wednesday. \u201cHe was one of the most committed pro-immigrant, pro-immigration libertarians I\u2019ve encountered in my three decades in D.C. Then, after ascending to one of the most powerful positions in the nation, he talked a good game and did nothing\u2014except front for Trump\u2019s nativism.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Trump\u2019s excesses, Ryan followed a similar pattern of denial. Those who imagined he would defend the law-enforcement institutions that Trump has subjected to unprecedented attacks were invariably disappointed. At a critical moment\u00a0in the standoff<\/a>\u00a0between the Justice Department and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes\u2014over access to highly classified surveillance warrants\u2014Ryan intervened to support Nunes. He was, by extension, supporting Trump, whom Nunes was hoping to assist by raising doubts about the initial justification for the investigation into Russian election interference. On Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s investigation itself, Ryan has mouthed the right sentiments about allowing the inquiry to proceed without intervention. But he\u2019s resolutely refused to consider legislation to ensure that it could.<\/p>\n

Month after month, Ryan signaled that as long as Trump provided a vehicle for advancing the speaker\u2019s own goals of retrenching government\u2014especially by cutting taxes\u2014he would be willing to defend (or at least minimize) almost any presidential outrage. Ryan was hardly alone in broadcasting that message\u2014every other major Republican congressional leader did, too. But it was especially powerful coming from a speaker who had fashioned himself as both a champion of inclusion and a policy wonk motivated more by ideas than partisan maneuvering.<\/p>\n

The result of all this inaction has been the transformation of the GOP majorities into the see-no-evil Congress, with rank-and-file Republicans and their leaders repeating the same mantra: Move along folks, there\u2019s nothing to see here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Digby adds…<\/p>\n

\n

Ryan may be one of the best illustrations of just how supine the GOP has become in the face of a demagogic white nationalist the voters they’ve primed to respond to racist appeals love.\u00a0 Some of them, like Ryan, may have been a tad uncomfortable with it. But not enough to try to save the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stolen from Digby…Ron Brownstein assesses Paul Ryan’s pathetic legacy: No one in the GOP was better equipped, by position and disposition alike, to resist Trump\u2019s racially infused, insular nationalism, or to define a more inclusive competing vision for the party. Instead, Ryan chose to tolerate both Trump\u2019s personal excesses and his racially polarizing words and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[118,21,90],"class_list":["post-9887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-politics","tag-republican-america","tag-the-abyss","tag-the-human-gutter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}