WashPost columnist Catherine Rampell—Princeton Phi Bet and winner of the Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism—is struggling with the evidence:
The real question is why congressional leaders, including [now former House Speaker Paul] Ryan,1 repeatedly cave to Trump’s latest tweets and fleeting fancies instead of writing him off as the flake that he is. Why not at least try to whip the veto-proof votes — for a budget, really for any piece of legislation — necessary to simply govern without him? The only thing you can rely on Trump for is unreliability.
Here’s the answer, Catherine: Republican congressional leaders—and all other Republican “leaders”—always cave to Trump because they have to. Because if Trump goes, the Republican Party—and all its too too2 sullied flesh—would melt, dissolve, and resolve itself into a dew,3 and I mean that both seriously and literally. Republican voters all across the country are far more loyal to Donald Trump than they are to any set of ideas whatsoever.
Yes, the Ann Coulters and Rush Limbaughs wailed their wails when Cap’n Two Scoops bailed on their (not his) beloved wall, but they were cries of despair. “My Donald, my Donald, why hast Thou forsaken me?” For without Donald there is nothing. And those brave retiring Republicans, they wailed too, but did not lift a finger—that is to say, cast a vote against him—even after declaring for retirement. You actually want me to do something? Gee, isn’t whining enough?
Afterwords
Because the Republicans are entirely dependent on Trump, any thoughts of impeachment should be discarded, barring the release of a video of Trump, not observing a golden shower but getting one, preferably from Vladimir Putin. Even then, it would be touch and go. I have bitched about the Republican Party’s obeisance to Donald many times.
2. If you search for “too too” on the web, the first thing you will get is “too too skirts”, which are in fact tutus. The more you know. (I expected them to be skirts that are just “too too”, which they more or less are.)
3. When I finally got to the “right” “too too”, a link took me to an extract from The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's Tragedies, written by one E. M. Spearing, Fellow of Newham College, Cambridge, published in 1912, which contains the following tidbit: “The Senecan drama, crude, and melodramatic as it seems to us, appealed far more strongly to the robust Englishmen of the sixteenth century, whose animal instincts were as yet only half subdued by civilization.” How fortunate we are to live now, eh? I definitely want to read Spearing (full text here) and Seneca!
