The Republican monster continues
Donald Trump, one of the worst humans on earth to never commit an act of genocide, has left Washington, D.C. and has mercifully left the global spotlight to fester in his tasteless Florida golf resort. Does his extirpation from the nation’s highest office mean the Republicans have magically become civil and empathetic leaders? Absolutely.
No, sorry, I meant the opposite of that. They’re still the depraved, greed-addled cynics whose decades-long unpatriotic assault on the American system created the milieu for Trump to rise to power in the first place. Just a few days ago, Senate Republicans vowed that President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill would fail the 60-vote margin needed to become law.
After four years of Trump’s battle of attrition against the American people, after his unbridled incompetence at the hands of the Republicans, after a failed coup attempt that they fostered, after over 400,000 Americans have died from a nonexistent pandemic response, and after millions have lost their jobs unnecessarily, the “family values” party has the temerity to deny the public help because, in the words of Senate Minority Whip John Thune, the bill’s “price range is going to be out of range for them.”
Republican Senators then are effectively putting a price on lives, and they’re saying that President Biden’s plan values those lives too much. That’s rich coming from the vehemently pro-life crowd. Republican Senators have become, to use the words of Republican High Priestess Sarah Palin, a death panel.
What I find so astonishing about this is that Republicans seemed to be eager to push Trump off the gangplank and soldier into a new era in which they could feasibly win elections again with incompetent candidates like Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, or Josh Hawley, but they seem poised to completely screw that up already by driving away Trump voters who will perceive them as elite anti-populist scumbags.
Trump took the presidency by being an entertaining asshole. People overlooked Trump’s myriad flaws because they liked him for him. The problem for Republicans is that they’re just a collection of boring assholes who most Trump voters couldn’t possibly bother to keep track of. In rejecting a massively popular bill, they’ve begun sealing their fate for 2024.
Democracy thrives in snarkiness