I Know Who Wrote the NYT OpEd

You know, it occurs to me that in a meaningful sense we already know who the anonymous OpEd writer is.

It’s the entire Republican party.

I mean, it’s been pretty clear all along that what the OpEd writer described is what’s happening. Trump is an unhinged, uncurious madman with the impulse control of a hangry threenager and even less understanding of how the world works. He spends most of his time watching TV and tweeting while the staff does the whole running the government thing, which has devolved to playing day-care damage control and occasionally putting something from the wildly unpopular GOP wish list in front of the child-in-chief to sign.

I never thought I’d say this, but Donald Trump may not have been entirely wrong when he tweeted ‘TREASON?’ How else describe ignoring the President’s orders, or picking and choosing which ones to execute and which ones to blow smoke up his ass about?

That I’m glad they’re doing it is beside the point. I think it’s great they agree with my own assessment, which is that Donald J Trump is singularly unfit for the office he holds. But it’s the *not* invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that’s the Constitutional crisis here. As so many others have said, if you know the guy in the Oval Office is unfit, the Constitution has remedies for that. Use them.

But that’s not the GOP’s way of doing things anymore. Between gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and the way they worked (and then changed) the rules of the Senate, the Republican party has made it crystal clear that they’re neither competing for office nor governing in good faith and in accordance with the principles of American democracy. They are, rather, wholly fixed on enacting an extremely unpopular policy agenda in service to their billionaire donors, and they’ll do it by hook or by crook.

Which brings us back to their Devil’s Bargain with Trump. Sure, he’s unfit. Sure, he’s as bad at the job as a person could be. Sure, he requires the same kind of management a toddler with an assault rifle requires. But they decided, same as the anonymous OpEd writer, that all that was a price worth paying so long as they got to ram through their anti-democratic, anti-American agenda. They got their giant tax cut for the 1%, they got to sell off public lands and roll back basic regulations that keep the air breathable and the water safe to drink, they’ve packed the judiciary with conservative ideologues and activist judges. Hell, they are, right now, ramming through a lifelong Republican political operative, who cut his teeth in the great Clinton Penis Hunt, then worked in W’s White House during the torture years (and oh, so much more), in a process so obviously rushed and rigged it would make Pinochet blush, onto a lifelong position on the Supreme Court, where he’ll help deliver the rest of their unpopular agenda (hello gun rights, goodbye abortion).

So yeah, color me unsurprised that they’re undermining their own President, whom none of them liked or wanted, but whom they hitched their stars to, nonetheless.

It might have been a specific person who wrote that OpEd. But the whole rotten party is implicated. And there’s nothing heroic about it.