The Bolton Bombshell and the Unwaveringly Pro-Trump G.O.P.

[babylonsister]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-bolton-bombshell-and-the-unwaveringly-pro-trump-gop

Letter from Trump’s Washington
The Bolton Bombshell and the Unwaveringly Pro-Trump G.O.P.
By Susan B. Glasser
January 28, 2020

snip//

At any other moment in Washington in my lifetime, I would have predicted with absolute confidence that the Bolton revelation would force Republican senators to switch their position and support witnesses. And not just a few, but almost all of them. But this is now, and the unthinkable and inconceivable have become increasingly routine. Here it was, the proverbial smoking gun, right in the middle of the trial, crucial evidence that Trump, his advisers, his lawyers, and his enablers on Capitol Hill knew about and were trying to suppress. Just last week, Trump’s legal team told senators that “not a single witness with actual knowledge ever testified that the President suggested any connection between announcing investigations and security assistance.”

In fact, the President and his aides knew that Bolton had done more than suggest it. He had put it in writing, sent his account to the White House on December 30th, and was prepared to raise his right hand and swear to it under oath. But we have had so many smoking-gun moments in the last few years. This is the post–“Access Hollywood” tape G.O.P., which elected as President of the United States a man who bragged of grabbing women by their genitals on tape, just a few weeks after the recording came to light. In the Ukraine scandal, we have seen this process repeat itself. Facts emerge that show the President’s actions to be inappropriate, outrageous, and clearly, straightforwardly wrong. At first, even Republicans on the Hill seem to waver. But again and again and again they find a way to accommodate themselves to the unpleasant new information, to rationalize and to justify.

On Monday, after watching all this play out, Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who has been forced to forego Presidential campaigning in Iowa in order to attend the Senate trial, said that listening to the Trump defense was like a visit to an “alternative universe.” But Monday proved once again that this alternative universe has become the new normal in Trump’s G.O.P. It is not the exception but the rule. The post-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party will be largely the same as the pre-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party.

[Thomas Hurt]

1. Trump is the ideologue to make all the christofascists' dreams come true.

To the authoritarian freaks that makes him a god king.

[C_U_L8R]

2. I want to know what drugs they're on.

'Cause... wowie.