Jennifer Rubin was a columnist for The Washington Post who departed when publisher Jeff Bezos bent his knee to Trump. Rubin, a journalist and lawyer, knows that Trump is a dangerous demagogue. She says in this piece that Republicans complain privately about Trump but refuse to stand up to him. They will pay for their cowardice in November, as they have in every special election since Trump returned.
Silence is complicity.
Rubin founded The Contrarian, an immensely popular blog, where this article appeared.
She wrote:
Republicans made a calculated bet that by indulging Donald Trump’s ill-conceived and cruel schemes (e.g., unleashing ICE on cities, tariffs, wars with Venezuela and Iran, slashing healthcare to pay for tax cuts for the rich), the country would somehow stumble through. They figured congressional Republicans would share in any successes but somehow avoid any blame when things (inevitably) went haywire. Politics rarely works out that way.
(Credit: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson)
Through Trump’s Iran War, shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, futile effort to pass a Jim Crow-style voter suppression act (the so-called SAVE Act), and inflation-aggravating tariff scheme, Republicans are discovering they are tied at the hip with Trump. Refusing to deviate from his dictates, they will bear the brunt of his serial failures.
Whether the Iran War ends this month or months from now, Republicans cannot escape responsibility for the massive expenditure of taxpayer dollars, loss of life, rise in energy costs, regional instability, and damage to alliances Trump has wrought. Congressional Republicans refused to invoke the War Powers Act — or even to conduct meaningful oversight hearings — and applauded a senseless, unconstitutional war. Now they seem prepared to rubber-stamp a preposterous demand for $200B more in war spending. Republicans will have no place to hide come November when voters come looking for politicians to blame.
The latest CBS/You Gov poll has nothing but horrendous news for the Iran war cheerleaders: 90 percent say the war will make gas prices higher in the short term, 58 percent over the long term; 63 percent predict it will weaken the economy (a plurality assume we will be in a recession); a plurality of 49 percent think the war makes us less safe; and 57 percent say the war is going badly. Some 62 percent disapprove of how Trump is handling the war. Perhaps Republicans should have fulfilled their constitutional obligations rather than contenting themselves with sitting on the sidelines.
Meanwhile, Trump’s web of lies about immigrants and voting fraud have entangled him and Republicans in a political knot. Trump’s lie about mass voting fraud drove him to insist on the unpassable voter suppression SAVE Act. He then made that a precondition for any deal to resume DHS funding. Even to Republicans, this made no sense.
When Senator John Thune (R-SD) initially recommended that Trump agree to Democrats’ proposal to pass a DHS funding bill that would pay for TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard (leaving ICE funding for later negotiations), Trump rebuffed him. By Monday night, however, Trump was considering a deal to do just that, namely to fund the rest of DHS and handle funding for ICE in reconciliation.
What happened between his refusal to relent on funding and his capitulation? Trump trotted out another senseless and entirely performative maneuver: deploying ICE to airports. ICE agents, untrained for any TSA duties, stood around with virtually nothing to do (reminding one of the National Guard deployed to D.C., who largely loiter around metro stations). This underscores Republicans’ responsibility for bollixing up air travel, Trump’s feebleness in resolving messes of his own making, and the dangerous transformation of ICE into a roving street militia Trump deploys to intimidate and harass Americans.
All the ICE/airport stunt accomplished was to trigger a robust blowback from Democrats and civil society groups, demonstrating once again Trump’s talent in supercharging the Resistance. Deploring Trump’s use of ICE as his “personal dystopian police force,” Public Citizen observed: “The confluence of authoritarian overreach of this moment is striking.” The ACLU likewise condemned using ICE at airports “despite their lack of training for airport security and interactions, and their clear track record of abusing their power, including through using excessive force against citizens and immigrants alike.” (Unsurprisingly, this venture, the ACLU noted, was the first time a president “sent armed ICE agents to airports to replace trained security agents and instill fear in families and other travelers.”)
Trump’s compounding calamities have fractured Republicans internally. Cultists demand perfect fidelity to Trump on the war abroad and bullying at home; others fret that a war betrays their America First ideology and the SAVE Act is a legislative cul-de-sac that now compounds the DHS shutdown disaster. (MAGA provocateur Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has become a chief enabler of Trump’s destructive schemes, “sparking a wave of mostly private animosity from GOP colleagues who believe his plan to push through legislation overhauling how federal elections are conducted is ill-conceived and potentially harmful to the party’s chances in the midterms,” Politico reports.)
Republicans fret privately that the Trump reign of chaos, coupled with the highly unpopular war, spells doom for them in November. One is tempted to ask about the private Republican hand-wringing:
What did Republicans think would happen when they fully empowered a delusional narcissist, one who is so clearly ignorant of government and keen to pursue his own wealth and power, the country be damned?
Some dim-witted MAGA Republicans remain true believers and actually think Trump’s antics will pay off. Others know Trump is nuts and recognize the party is headed for disaster, but lack the courage to say so. They are banking that they will survive the blue wave coming in November to fight another day. Their lack of patriotism may be galling, but their self-preservation strategy looks increasingly daft.
The damage Trump and his flunkies have inflicted on our democracy will reverberate for years to come. American families may take years to recover from the economic hits. It is a small consolation that MAGA lawmakers and right-wing media stooges, who have chosen the route of cowardly compliance over constitutional duty and self-serving propaganda over truth-telling, will shoulder much of the blame. History in the long run and voters in the near term will hold Republicans fully accountable for the blunders they countenanced.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
I live in a military community that is about 80% Republican. The GOP folks, many of whom are usually quite provocative and hyper-critical of Democrats, are currently very quiet on social media. No insults, and they are not even claiming that Trump is playing chess with his exceptional MAGA mind while Democrats are wandering in the wilderness. That is one of their favorite claims. They appear to have nothing to say. The local Sinclair station always posts a provocative, divisive claims on social media to incite conflict, and the MAGA people have gone silent. The Democrats are now the people writing the insults and jabs about our unhinged grifter-in-chief. Plus, Democrats are actually busy flipping seats ahead of the midterms.
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The curse-worthy elected and appointed GOP were put in place by people and corporations with massive funding, and by ignorant, insouciant voters. (Facilitated by the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, aka the one dollar one vote decision.)
Anti-intellectualism has been a part of our national makeup from jump street. The first European explorers and settlers were so attached to their religious beliefs that they came intending to impose Christianity on the locals. This led to starvation, burning down the villages of the native people in the name of some deity, and a foundational history of resentment, ill will, bitterness, and Evil. Most of us who were not already here or brought as slaves came here with Evil on our minds, thinking it Good. This is not just willful ignorance, it’s anti-intellectual. I don’t have to think, it says.
Think also of the 1925 Scopes trial, in which William Jennings Bryan argued Christianity against Clarence Darrow’s evolution. Consider vaccine conspiracy theorists, who are convinced that it is possible to put a microchip into their bodies via a vaccine. Note to Ignorami- size matters.
Many Americans might not be anti-intellectual except for the fact that intellectuals and well trained people are granted policy-making and regulatory Authority and Authority is to be rebelled against. The authority of the educated is suspicious, and anti-US. State legislatures and Congress obscenely underfund our schools, libraries and museums, and Republicans try to characterize universities and libraries as hotbeds of moral depravity.
We do not learn critical thinking. Americans’ Republican officials and fossil fuel industry spokespeople, Fox News talking heads, and their running dogs and useful idiots willfully ignore facts of heat, flooding, wildfire, drought, hurricanes, rising seas, our global climate crisis, and decline to restore funding for wind and solar power, instead paying our money for more fossil fuels.
Results: many people and species are heading for early, unnecessary, painful deaths. There will be avoidable pandemics, epidemics, and starvation, heat, fire, flooding. Some people will be able to create wind and solar energy sources but the distribution of access to resources may not change.
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I have been here before. I have expected an electorate to turn on the obviously corrupt maga movement at the ballot box only to see Trump elected for another term, this time a term characterized by massive corruption, domination of news due to corporate buying of the news outlets, and normalizing of hideous treatment of the constitution in the hands of the maga version of the brown shirts. Will all this move people to go to the polls? Republicans are hoping to see voters so disgusted by the behavior of their elected officials that they give in to despair. Let us hope that this does not occurr.
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