The Republicans have been living in a world of “wishful thinking” when it comes to Trump, and while they’ve been dreaming Donald Trump has been allowed to ravage the nation, a conservative columnist wrote Monday.
From Trump’s emergence on the political stage, through his presidency, the election denial, the riot at the U.S. Capitol and now his indictment, the former president has been given the benefit of the doubt by the party, he said.
“When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage to lead his improbable insurgency of the dispossessed, most top Republicans assumed he was a joke and could never win,” wrote Gerard Baker for the Wall Street Journal.
He went on: “When the iron duly entered their hides — if not their souls — they hurriedly made their peace with their new leader. When, against the odds (and, one suspects, the wishes of more than a few of them), he won the presidency, the wishing only intensified. Some believed, or hoped, that somehow the office would become him, that the mystical mingling of the man and the presidency would elevate the former rather than debase the latter. How did that work out?
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“Some allowed the wish to father the thought that by working with and for him, they could restrain his flammable impulses. The long list of short-lived ex-Trump cabinet officers is eloquent testimony to the fancifulness of that idea.”
He said the 2020 election should have been the final straw.
“But when he violated his oath of office after the 2020 election by attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, Republicans faced their worst choice yet between fact- and faith-based decision making: Bite the bullet and banish him from office, or keep wishing, harder than ever.”
“It wasn’t really a contest. With a few exceptions, they declined to vote to impeach or convict him in January and February 2021, many clinging to the misplaced belief that he was finished anyway.”
Baker wrote that wishing has replaced hard decision-making for the Republican Party, and that it avoids members having to meet the wrath of MAGA head-on.
“Mr. Trump’s latest indictment last week, on charges relating to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, signals that the long era of wishful thinking in the Republican Party leadership’s relationship with Mr. Trump must come to an end.
Not that everyone has recognized it. I suspect that even now a significant number of senior party figures, even as they express public outrage at the judicial tyranny on show in the charge sheet and dubious legal theories of special counsel Jack Smith, are secretly, desperately hoping that somehow this case will spare them from having to keep on side with the former president.
“They’re telling themselves that some new revelations at trial or even the possibility of a prison sentence will persuade enough Republican primary voters to withdraw their support and that this chalice will pass their lips. Their wishes might finally come true, but I doubt it.”
