This is on you, my Republican friends. For years I listened to your passionate commitments to freedom and democracy. I made hundreds of commercials laced with the iconography of the robust patriotism of America as the last, best hope. I watched you tear up to Ronald Reagan demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” I heard your Kiwanis club speeches, your high school commencement speeches, always proclaiming without a hint of doubt that America was the leader of the free world.
I was there. I heard you. And you lied.
Not just any typical politician’s mendacity about cutting taxes or reducing the deficit. You lied about what it meant to be an American. You lied about being patriots, for no patriot would stand quietly by and allow America to become a Russian ally.
America executed the Rosenbergs for far less. Their crime was helping the Soviet Union acquire a nuclear weapon, which was an inevitability. You inherited the legacy of the Greatest Generation only to ally with a mass-murdering tyrant invading a European democracy. That was not inevitable. It was unthinkable.
I know you. I know your vanities, your need for approval, your desperate craving to be accepted by your tribe. Today you take comfort that almost all of you have remained silent in the Great Betrayal. This is the mentality of the mob. You know you are doing something morally grotesque, but you look around and convince yourself that it can’t be that bad if your peers are with you.
But it’s worse. Cowardice is contagious, just as is courage. Many of you have fathers or grandfathers who left their homes for Europe to fight and die in places they never knew existed and couldn’t pronounce. They did it because they knew that if a bully goes unchallenged, he will only become more vicious. They did it because the sight of women and children slaughtered by a genocidal dictator made them want to fight, not look away. They did it because they were Americans, and America is more than a place on the map with a flag. They did it because they were driven by a basic sense of decency and fairness that you buried deep within your focused-group souls because acknowledging it fills you with shame.
Like spoiled children, you have squandered this legacy, forgetting the blood and sacrifice that forged the greatest gift one generation can pass to another: freedom. I know what you are telling each other because it’s what you tell me when I engage in the self-flagellation of asking, “Why? Why are you doing this?” Your defense is that the American people voted for Trump, and while you don’t agree with the United States joining a reconfigured Warsaw Pact, it’s Trump’s decision, not yours.
This is like a murderer claiming he didn’t kill his victim, the bullet did; I just pulled the trigger. It is the most childish of get-out-of-moral-crisis cards. You campaigned for Trump knowing he was elected in 2016 with the help of the Russians. Marco Rubio knows that, because he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation that included “specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russian government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.” But there Marco sits in the Oval Office, never looking more little, nodding dutifully when an American president delivers for Vladimir Putin in ways not even the most optimistic Russian intelligence officer could have imagined.
I was part of the Republican Party when we attacked Michael Dukakis for inadequately expressing outrage when CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked him in a 1988 presidential debate, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” Yours is the same party that now nods and smiles while Donald Trump rapes the Statue of Liberty and murders America’s moral standing in the world.
These Republicans are giddy over control of the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court. So were the Prussian aristocrats who supported Hitler in 1938. Expecting them to stumble over some red line that will move them to choose America over Donald Trump is like believing that noted chef Jeffrey Dahmer planned to open a vegan restaurant. Once you continue to support a man who mobilized a mob to break into your workplace to kill you and your colleagues, what line is left to cross? Will Donald Trump’s position on the Law of the Sea Treaty finally be enough to stir your conscience?
What will happen to this Worst Generation of Republican elected officials? I’d like to think they will be around to see the evil of their weakness destroy their careers, just as the German industrialists who grew fat on Hitler’s war machine saw their empires in ruins. Alas, most will probably stumble along and, when Trump is gone, plead for heroic status for their behind-the-scenes efforts to blunt the worst of Trump’s madness. “If it wasn’t for me, the battle for Greenland would have been far more bloody.”
But I doubt they can escape history’s judgment of their weakness. The victors write history, and while American political evil looks like a booming growth stock, betting against America has always proven foolhardy. In the meantime, let us not pretend that those who have failed this moment are still good men and women. They are about the business of committing one of the most despicable acts of public perfidy in modern history. Their lack of shame should only shame them more. Hold them accountable. If not all traitors, they are betrayers of a sacred trust. Do not forget, do not forgive.
