Read It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump for Free Online

promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University” 24 —no other Republicans of note rallied behind him to speak publicly what most were saying privately.
    How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power.
    The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.

9
HOW DO LIES END?
    Watching the Republican Party is like watching a friend drink himself to death. There’s a mix of sadness and anger tinged by a bit of sympathy for the misery he tries to hide. But alcoholism is a disease, and political cowardice is just what it looks like: weakness and opportunism mixed with fear and self-loathing. Most Republican elected officials wish that one of the other fifteen candidates who ran for president in 2016 were now in the White House. They love to whisper this to each other and to journalists off the record, as if this somehow absolves them of any responsibility for supporting a man who violates nearly every value they avowed their entire careers. Few realize this only makes them look even more pathetic and compromised.
    Those who opposed Trump in 2016 but now accept him have evolved ever more fanciful rationalizations for their moral collapse, such as this piece in the National Review: “Acknowledge Trump’s achievements and help him win reelection. Then roll out a new party, not as a spoiler but as support for conservative principles.” 1 This from the magazine that famously ran an entire issue in February 2016 dedicated to the urgency of Republicans’ defeating Trump. The issue was a collection of essays by various conservatives representing the spectrum of issues that have most defined modern conservatism, from cultural to foreign policy, arguing the urgency of defeating Donald Trump. Some of those authors—Mona Charen, a longtime conservative columnist, Dr. Russell Moore, a prominent Southern Baptist leader, and Bill Kristol, former editor of The Weekly Standard —have continued to stand by their principles and taken the associated heat. At the yearly gathering of conservatives known as CPAC, a security detail had to protect Mona Charen after she said it was wrong for conservatives to support the accused child molester Roy Moore or ignore the women who have accused Donald Trump. “You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that,” she said. 2 The ex-governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist preacher, called for Russell Moore to be fired by the Southern Baptist church for Moore’s principled stand on Trump. Huckabee said he was “utterly stunned that Russell Moore is being paid by Southern Baptists to insult” Trump. 3 With little room in the conservative media for anything but lavish praise of Trump, Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard went out of business. 4
    As I write this in the fall of 2019, the 2020 election looms large with an impossible-to-predict outcome. As discussed before, since the demise of federal funding for presidential general elections, an incumbent president has a tremendous financial advantage. But if Trump wins or loses, it is a fantasy to think that the impact of a nation’s major center-right party embracing a racist unprepared to be president with Trump’s deep psychological problems will not be lasting. Perhaps what passes for the establishment in the Republican Party will be able to conjure a cover story to explain why they embraced a man who mocked the disabled, attacked a former POW hero, paid off a porn star from the Oval Office, defended Vladimir Putin’s murder of journalists, bragged about assaulting women, and implored foreign governments to investigate his political opponents. Let’s say our