Republicans are finally paying the price for throwing away their party to Trump: Conservative columnist

On Tuesday, writing for The Daily Beast, conservative columnist Matt Lewis argued that the coronavirus pandemic has finally forced the GOP to pay the full and complete price for the abandonment of principles and the wholesale subsumption of their identity into President Donald Trump.

"Don’t look now, but the chickens are coming home to roost. Everything that Never Trumpers warned Republicans about Donald Trump is coming true," wrote Lewis. "COVID-19 is the kind of national emergency many of us raised when we warned Republicans not to elevate a man so clearly unprepared and ill-suited to the job."

"As National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar writes, 'Of the 10 most-competitive Senate races, Democratic candidates outraised their Republican rivals in eight of them — often by massive margins,'" wrote Lewis. "Republicans should have seen this sort of thing coming. Even if all the warnings (not to mention movies) about pandemics were ignored, what are the odds that a president can survive four years without facing some sort of massive crisis? I’m far from clairvoyant, but my final column of 2019 warned about precisely this kind of black swan event."

"Republicans were making a risky political calculation when they overlooked Trump’s obvious character flaws, supported his presidency, and failed to remove him for clearly impeachable behavior," wrote Lewis. "Instead, Republicans gambled and won — but it was a Pyrrhic victory. More and more, Trump looks like a one-term president whose bad reputation may live much longer than his tenure in office, reinforcing negative stereotypes about Republicans, undermining positive ones, and casting a pall on a generation of Republicans who enabled him."

"The moral is you should always build your house on rock, because, eventually, the rain comes, and the streams rise, and the winds blow, and when that happens ... no amount of public relations spin will save you," concluded Lewis. "And what people like me have been worried about all these years is this: Trump's tower was always built on the sand."

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