A Man Without Grace Meets a Party Without Conscience - by Joy-Ann Reid
Just one week into the Trump presidency, Republicans have already shown they are unwilling to stand up to the worst of his instincts.
JOY-ANN REID
01.28.17 2:17 PM ET
Donald Trump is off to quite a start.
He sits atop a globally despised kakistocracy whose first 24 hours included historic opposition marches around the country (and indeed around the world) and top White House flaks beclowning themselves and eviscerating their credibility with shouted lies and the absurdity of “alternative facts.” The first week of the Trump administration included revelations that the president of the United States personally ordered the head of the Parks Service to produce pictures of his sparsely attended inaugural that might mitigate the humiliation of the day he grandly declared a “Day of Patriotic Devotion”; and evidence that he spends much of his time obsessively live-tweeting cable TV news.
Trump is an erratic figure – seemingly fragile, consumed by his own unpopularity and desperate to somehow exceed Barack Obama in public acclaim. He appears trapped by his campaign’s most extreme promises, and locked in the clutches of bigoted ideologues like Stephen Bannon, who push him to follow through on his most demagogic vows: to strip tens of millions of Americans of their healthcare, string a wall across our southern border, cancel multilateral trade pacts and ban Muslim students, families, visitors and refugees from entering the U.S.; a policy that is already causing companies like Google to recall their employees from America. Never mind that the first three of those things will cost American taxpayers billions of dollars (otra vez: Mexico is NOT paying for any wall) and in some cases their health and perhaps their lives, and the fourth is both unconstitutional and morally obscene.
If Trump is a man without grace, his daily outrages would not be possible were he not surrounded by men and women without honor. And indeed, the diminution of the Republican Party is perhaps the saddest part of this sorry spectacle. Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mike Pence used to ++oppose a Muslim ban++ http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/ryan-trump-muslim-ban-224312 as unconstitutional and repugnant. Now they smile and nod and consent as a ban on visitors from majority Muslim countries is implemented – one that will ultimately impact people of all faiths from those countries, and which somehow skips countries where previous attackers have actually come from, but where Trump and his family happens to have business interests.
Republican lawmakers fret behind closed doors about the devastating impact of ripping away tens of millions of Americans’ healthcare, yet in public they grin along and say nothing; or duck their constituents and head for cover out the back door.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/28/a-man-without-grace-meets-a-party-without-conscience.html
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