Republican Lawmakers Are Cowards. Here's Why
The moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party is the gaping chest wound of America.
Democratic strategists and commentators have spent weeks diagnosing the party’s ills, for good reason: They just lost an election they expected to win.
But for the American body politic, that represents the equivalent of examining a sprained ankle while ignoring a gaping chest wound. The gaping chest wound is the moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party.
The GOP’s descent into nihilism has become so familiar as to almost escape notice. Indeed, the reason Democratic shortcomings attract more scrutiny is that serious-minded people now take for granted that only Democrats remain capable of running our government consistent with the rule of law.
The Republican president is an unhinged demagogue motivated by escaping prosecution for crimes, gratifying his ego, and separating supporters from their money. He’s not above maintaining a mutual assistance relationship with our Russian adversaries, who know that Donald Trump divides and weakens America. Trump babbles like a drunk at the end of the bar about taking control of the Panama Canal, Canada, Greenland, and the Gaza Strip. Because he has no principles beyond power itself, neither does his party.
Trump’s chief benefactor is a man-child with the fattest checkbook and largest social media megaphone in the world. Elon Musk’s frenetic posting on X shows him, like so many of his fans, in the grip of paranoid fantasies about the imagined evils of political opponents.
The Republican Congress is dominated by sycophants, extremists, performance artists, and opportunists. Those who know better bow down out of fear, not only for their careers but also for physical safety from attack by their own constituents.
That’s because the Republican voting base is shot through with anger.
They blame their weakened social status, economic circumstances, and general well-being on the civil rights movement, feminism, and globalization. Nearly seven in 10 Republicans say American life has deteriorated since the 1950s, according to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Their anger has divorced vast swaths of the party from reality.
All of that has combined to produce the ugly spectacle of the last month. It has damaged our constitutional system and standing in the world, to the benefit of authoritarians in China and Russia.
The ‘White Grievance’ Bond
Trump has nominated comically unqualified cranks and miscreants for his Cabinet. Republican senators turned back would-be Attorney General Matt Gaetz – too loathsome even for co-partisans – then decided that sinking one presidential nominee was enough. (Only one Republican voted against the confirmation of the extremely unqualified Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence today.)
Defying legal constraints, Trump has moved to gut the FBI and Justice Department, turning both into political strike forces. He has handed Musk and his tech-bro minions a sledgehammer to bash valuable instruments of American soft power such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cloaks its work in transparently absurd lies alleging criminal activity. The administration invokes wild claims about “woke” excess to imperil funding for the National Institutes of Health and halt civil rights enforcement.
These efforts surf atop longstanding GOP efforts to mislead their overwhelmingly-white constituency into believing that unjustified aid for foreigners and minorities wastes a large proportion of their tax dollars. Elite and rank-and-file Republicans bond emotionally over a shared sense of white grievance.
At the same time, that bond camouflages the pursuit of economic policies that help business interests but harm the rank-and-file, such as tax cuts favoring the wealthy and the destruction of the Consumer Finance Protection Board. President Lyndon B. Johnson captured the dynamic 60 years ago as he battled Southern resistance to civil rights.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” Johnson said. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
‘Authoritarian Party’
In a country steadily growing less white and less Christian, the evangelical-led MAGA movement represents a shrinking minority. That fuels the desperation for power that led three in 10 Republicans in the PRRI survey to say “true American patriots” may need to use violence to “save the country.”
Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 convicts encourage that segment to try it again when necessary. The GOP, observes PRRI President Robert Jones, “has turned the corner to be an anti-pluralistic democracy, authoritarian party.”
After winning at the ballot box last November, Trump needed no outside muscle to return to the White House. But he’s now employing the governing version of extra-constitutional force in his second presidency.
Rather than asking Congress to overhaul the federal government, he empowers Musk to shatter agencies without legal authority. Vice President JD Vance responded to one judicial stop sign last week by suggesting the administration may ignore that core feature of the political checks and balances our founders designed.
Their thuggish approach reflects the reality that Trump cannot enact parts of his agenda through the democratic process in Congress. Even with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, they cannot muster enough public support to cut biomedical research.
Not that Trump plans to pursue all his objectives by executive fiat or purely partisan legislation. Sometime in the next few months, Congress will need to raise the federal debt limit.
Attempting a White House workaround, as some extremists favor, would risk destabilizing financial markets to Trump’s political detriment. So Trump wants Congress to shoulder the responsibility, and shouldering responsibility requires grown-ups.
“I can’t imagine the Democrats don’t want to take care of the debt ceiling,” Trump told Fox News. He has learned that Republicans themselves can't handle it.
John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for the ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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Republicans lawmakers aren’t cowards, this is exactly what they wanted; It’s by design. They are currently feinting concern with crocodile tears, and deceptive language, that congratulates the President and Musk for their courage to take on the deep state!
Additionally, they are no longer prosecuting criminals. All of Trumps minions can commit crimes in broad daylight, and walk away scot-free. While the DOJ focuses on the real criminals; his enemy list, and anyone who has slighted him in any way since he was born!
Furthermore, now that most of the damage is done, they can replace the intelligence, military, FBI and DOJ with career loyalists from the top on down, to new recruits; just to make sure these agencies are filled with their own moles, and chaos agents, for decades to come.
And the Band played on!..:)
To talk about a moral and intellectual collapse in the US and blame only Republicans indicates, I fear, a very partisan bias. Yes, what the Republican Party and its candidate for president have wrought is indeed a gaping moral chest wound in America. But honesty and dispassionate reflection must reveal that the Democrats--Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, as well as his boosters in the Party and his supporters in Congress (from the day he was selected, and I mean "selected," as the Democratic candidate in 2020)--have inflicted at least a gaping moral abdominal wound on this country. When it comes to mortal and moral wounds, there is little difference between one in the chest and one in the abdomen.
This grievous moral failure of the Democrats, along with the Republicans, has been particularly true with regard to US support for Israel: Was there any morality in Biden's (and the Democrats') failure to overturn Trump's substantial policy changes in favor of Israe, all illegal by international law (the unprecedented recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, supporting Israel's settlement building in the West Bank)? Was there any morality in Biden's massive material support for Israel's genocide (in the judgment of all relevant international organizations and most holocaust & genocide scholars) in Gaza, in the form of $20+ billion in weapons aid? Was there any morality in Biden's failure to try to stop or even criticize Israel's 2024 assault on Lebanon and Syria, which would not have occurred if Israel hadn't felt assured of unquestioning US support?
These are not merely passing wounds from which the United States will recover. They are mortal wounds that will affect America's moral standing in the world for the foreseeable future.