"At this point, [Trump] could be caught walking out of a Federal Reserve bank with two giant sacks of money in his hands and no Republican would vote to impeach him for grand larceny," a Senate GOP staffer told the L.A. Times.
The aide then pointedly characterized the rank-and-file tree sloths and prosimians whose blinkered assessment of all things political has been reduced to this:
"Our voters want two things from their congressmen: [dumping] on the media and blindly defending the president. That’s what being a Republican has come to."
A marvel, it is, that the prehensile adherents to this party — once the party of Lincoln, T.R., Eisenhower — still call themselves Republicans; and utterly mystifying is that their tree sloth brothers still call themselves conservative.
In their defense, however, even Merriam-Webster is behind these radically metamorphosed times, defining a "conservative" as one "tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : TRADITIONAL; marked by moderation or caution; marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners."
Just visit a pro-Trump website, say, at Reddit or 4chan, and witness the moderation, elegance, style and manners of the keyboarding primates who gather there to share "ideas." Most of their scrawled entries — and this is rather typical of chimpanzees — are jackhammeringly incoherent; the others are simply venomous toward anyone who lacks their philosophical elegance.
This is what has brought so low the conservative-holdout Ross Douthat, who reflected yesterday that "my days of writing high-dudgeon columns demanding that Republicans act in concert against Trump are behind me; cynicism and bemusement define my attitude toward G.O.P. decadence these days."
Yet it seems the Trump campaign isn't quite as defiantly chipper as the rib-scratching rabble. "I think he’s badly wounded right now," confided a campaign advisor. "I’m suddenly very worried about 2020."
He or she, I'd wager, is especially worried because the candidate can't seem to distinguish between the Mueller investigation and the Ukraine scandal: "I thought we had won," said Trump last week. "I thought it was dead."
Trump's spirits will return, no doubt, when he returns to his otherworldly Bund rallies and their undulating oceans of adulation. Meanwhile, campaign advisers such as the ever-scrupulous Kellyanne Conway have put together a $10 million television buy in this, their time of trouble, announcing “They lost the election. Now they want to steal this one. Don’t let them."
You too can be a Trump media consultant. All you need to know is how to turn tables.
The L.A. Times adds a humorous note: "Although Republican support in Congress appears solid, that firewall could falter if damaging new revelations emerge or if lawmakers find public support crumbling back in their districts."
The latter is most unlikely, while the former is amusing but also bewildering. Damaging new revelations have already "emerged" — that is, exploded — mostly in Trump's own words and actions. But congressional Republicans don't give a damn. See opening quote.
Thus, as did Groucho Marx, we say hello and goodbye — we really must be going — to the necrotic party of Trump. This blight on the nation is so distant from respectable Republicanism, it's unrecognizable as such. The good news is that the party of Trump is necrotic.