Dear Republicans:
Stop acting surprised that the national nightmare you’ve supported and enabled for the last five years, in one of his final acts as president, sent a lynch mob to the U.S Capitol to try to take down the government in his name. You are responsible for this.
Yes, yes, I know. You didn’t agree with everything he did or said. (Or as you so often said when confronted with his latest racist diatribe: YOU wouldn’t have worded it that way – which always made me wonder, how exactly WOULD you word blatant racism?).
And yes, we all know that you supposedly felt – or at least claimed to feel – an obligation to support him because, after all, he WAS the leader of your party. And you DID like his policies – tax cuts, right wing judges, less regulation, blah blah blah. So what’s a little racism, xenophobia, calls for violence, child abuse if they let you get the goodies you want, right?
But let’s be clear and let’s be frank. If you are still making these excuses, you are full of it.
First. You didn’t support Donald Trump because he shares your political philosophy. Donald Trump doesn’t HAVE a political philosophy. He’s not a conservative and he is not a Republican. Donald Trump has only two life purposes and they are all consuming: 1) spreading his hatred and racism ; and 2) feeding his insatiable malignant narcissism. That’s it. Period. Everything else is BS. And anyone with half a brain knows it. And since you’re not stupid, you surely know it, too.
And you can be sure that if Trump for one second thought that the Democratic Left would satisfy those two desperate needs of his, he would abandon the Republican Party in a minute, declare himself a liberal and register as a Democrat without another thought.
And here’s another thing Republicans who got themselves wrapped around Trump’s axle still don’t seem to understand – or at least you still refuse to admit. You think you were just using him to get what you want, but somewhere along the way, he unexpectedly morphed into a monster and, try as you might, you lost control of him. You claim you tolerated his bigotry and crassness and lies and cruelty and criminality because he gave you right wing judges and tax cuts and less regulation. And he wasn’t Hillary.
But it was the other way around. You didn’t lose control of him, because you never had control of him in the first place. He had you at “birtherism” and you happily went right along for the ride over that cliff.
Trump used you and you let him. He didn’t give a damn about your tax cuts and judges. He only cared about getting what he wanted and you eagerly gave it to him, long after it should have been clear what and who he is. You didn’t unknowingly create a monster. You willingly and knowingly opened the front door and let a full-blown monster into our home. And last week that creature spewed out his rabid, foaming spawn into the sacred halls of the center of our democracy, looking for blood and finding it.
You didn’t create this creature – he was a fully-formed monster when you let him in. But he does belong to you and so does the mess he created. And it’s long past time you stop ducking responsibility, making excuses, and pretending you had no idea it would come to this. It came to this the first time you looked the other way and turned a blind eye to Donald Trump’s evil because you thought there was something in it for you.