Donald Trump has finally found a way to screw up that’s hurting him with his own party
It wasn’t anything Donald Trump said or did during his toxically undemocratic campaign that pushed his own Republican Party over the edge. It wasn’t his treasonous plot with a hostile foreign government to rig an election. It wasn’t any of the classless, un-American, incoherent, or incompetent things that Trump has done since he took office. But just when it began to appear there was literally nothing Trump could do to motivate the GOP to take a stand against him, he finally hit on it.
Turns out the wake-up call the Republican Party had been waiting for was when Donald Trump began attacking lifelong racist Jeff Sessions. Nevermind that Sessions has spent his entire life being a viciously racist piece of human filth who punched his ticket to hell a long time ago. Nevermind that Sessions appears to have participated in a treasonous plot to help rig the election. None of that matters to the GOP, because Jeff Sessions is a legend to them. After all, for decades, he was a Republican Senator himself. And that’s set off the Republican leadership with a vengeance.
Orrin Hatch made a point of quickly siding with transgender soldiers today, seemingly just to push back against Trump’s attempted ban. Rudy Giuliani told CNN that he disagrees with Trump and he thinks Sessions was right to recuse himself. Chuck Grassley tweeted that he won’t allow any replacement Attorney General nominee to get out of committee. Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News and begged Trump not to fire Sessions.
Trump is finally losing the support of conservative Republican leaders by the minute, because after he spent the past two years attacking just about everyone else in America, he’s now attacking one of them. It tells you perhaps all you need to know about the true nature of conservatism. But it also means that, after two years of largely getting a free pass from his own party, Donald Trump has finally found a way to screw up that’s hurting him with his own party. Stay tuned.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report