Frank Rich: What will happen to the Trump toadies?
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/what-will-happen-to-trumps-republican-collaborators.htmlLong but excellent. Here are four sample paragraphs, but it's really worth reading the whole thing. ..
. . . No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putin’s talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.
If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trump’s dwindling all-white base over the common good.
. . .
All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trump’s Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse . . . their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. . . .Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering America’s national security to an international rogue’s gallery of despots. That selective short list doesn’t take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trump’s actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. . . . Trump’s collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixon’s collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongman’s, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out — it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trump’s collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it — whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).
. . . .
No less a sage than Ted Cruz told friends while preparing his 2016 convention speech that “history isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” according to the Politico journalist Tim Alberta’s account in American Carnage. But so harsh was the base’s blowback after he refused to endorse Trump in that address that he has been holding Mussolini’s jacket ever since. What are Cruz and all his peers afraid of? “Every member of the French Resistance faced the strong possibility of torture, deportation, and death,” wrote Charles Kaiser, whose book The Cost of Courage tells of one Resistance family during Vichy. “The most a Republican senator risks from opposing a corrupt and racist president is a loss at the polls.”. . . Trump’s enablers and collaborators are more Londonderry than Hogan. It is too late for them to save their reputations. We must hope that it is not too late to save the country they have betrayed.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and the long arc of history will surely indict them.
But........Dick Cheney 
He did an excellent job of drawing the comparison with the Hitler appeasers without accusing Trump outright of being a Hitler. I'm not as charitable. I do think Trump is a Hitler wannabe.
Coincidentally, I finished reading "The Remains of the Day" yesterday shortly after having read this article. It left me with a lot to think about in a number of ways. Wish I had a book club to discuss it with. 
I've been looking for something new to read. Looks like I should check this one out.Thanks for the tip!
Maybe he's in denial like many Americans and most of our main stream media.
We basically live in a two-bubble world. As progressives, ours is open and exposed to the elements. Faithful Republicans however, live in a bubble built and maintained by the ultra-wealthy and a group of powerful international oligarchs, plutocrats, fascists and dictators in government. Our Republican politicians, UK's Tories, etc. all are their servants, parrots of dogma and minions.
So long as Rethug politicians toe the line and never criticize other Retugs or Rethug policy, they're set for life. Like an insurance policy, they will always be seen as worthy of reward within the bubble after exiting politics and get good paying jobs in media, industry or commerce, big finance/banking/investment houses, think tanks, churches or lobbying firms.
Any of them that commit the mortal sin of disagreeing with the status quo or of openly criticizing a Rethug politician will forever be relegated to common labor, shunned and disgraced in the media. Their families and friends even best watch their backs.
Republicans also make it quite clear by their actions that they don't give a shit about what happens outside their bubble.
So no, Mr. Rich. Those of tRump's people that don't go to jail will simply disappear into the elite woodwork of American and retire quite wealthy. Their churches will further protect them socially, forgive their sins and shower them with accolades.
KY..............
In addition to Trump himself, I would list McConnell (2), Nunes (3), and Giuliani (4).
But we all know that's not gonna happen! 
