Conservative WSJ editor begs 'duplicitous' Republicans to stop pretending they support Trump

The editor at large of the Wall Street Journal today called out “the malaise in the very soul of the Republican Party” that causes its members to feign support for Donald Trump while harboring a “fervent desire” for him to be gone.

Gerald Baker wrote that “it’s not exactly shocking to discover” that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had told fellow Republicans privately that he would ask Trump to resign, and then didn’t. That was revealed in a new book by New York Times writers Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.

Baker, a British writer who served as the Journal’s editor-in-chief from 2013 to 2018, lashed out at Republicans for their “mendacity” in feigning loyalty to Trump.

“It says something about the malaise in the very soul of the Republican Party that so many of its prominent members say one thing behind Mr. Trump’s back and another to his face,” Baker wrote. “Democrats speak a lot about the ‘big lie’ that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But the continuing bigger and more consequential lie is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the relationship between the Republican Party and Mr. Trump himself.”

Then Baker called out the party with a directness seldom seen in conservative media regarding their view of Trump.

“It may or may not come as a shock to you, dear reader, to learn that the fervent desire of much of the Republican Party’s top brass, its major donors, business leaders who urgently crave a Republican restoration, and many of the party’s most prominent supporters in the media and elsewhere, is for Mr. Trump to break the habits of a lifetime and go quietly away. It is a desire expressed as fervently in private as it is assiduously and dexterously avoided in public. But the big lie of this duplicitous relationship requires them to utter multiple, smaller, cascading fictions.”

But it may or may not come as a shock to you, dear reader of Raw Story, that the conservative editor hasn’t come over to the dark side of liberalism. Scorning the “mess” he says that Democrats have created, Baker apparently clings to a fictional vision of what the Republican Party is today.

What can fix this for a Republican Party that Baker terms “too important a political institution to continue to be a vehicle for this grand deception?” Apparently, this:

“There are too many capable Republicans who uphold high conservative ideals while embracing the populist values that are energizing the party’s base, understand the need to abide by the U.S. Constitution (and so on), Baker claimed.

In his view, they won’t allow the party “to be willingly shackled once again to the vanities of a cynical opportunist.”

That’s sounds high-minded enough. But Baker didn’t name a single name among these culpable Republicans. And seeing as how he did not, it must be assumed that he didn’t want to embarrass them by citing them as independent of Trump, or calling them out for their previous silence.

Wasn’t that precisely the “mendacity” for which he was accusing them?

With no apparent sense of irony.