Tuesday night was a bloodbath for Republicans, plain and simple. Just when it looked like Republicans could easily clean house, diminished Republican turnout gave Democrats control of the Senate.
By convincing millions of Georgians that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump and his coterie of cronies effectively stole the Senate from Republicans. And now, the consequences. Trump’s fans just made a literal socialist who honeymooned in the U.S.S.R. a lock to become chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is now the swing vote in the Senate, ready to rubber-stamp whatever radical judge Biden plucks from Sacramento to put on the Supreme Court.
So-called conservatives are spending today blaming Sen. Mitch McConnell and the “RINOs” for losing the election. There’s no basis for this. The past five years tell a very different story.
Republicans coalesced around Trump despite many warning signs. Even when he was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault, most of them stayed silent. The Federalist Society handed Trump a list of suitable judicial nominees to ensure that Christians turned out for the guy with three wives, and all Trump had to do was close his eyes and pick a name whenever a vacancy opened. McConnell rammed through his nominees, giving Trump the most lasting success of his presidency in the form of a remade federal judiciary. He replenished the Supreme Court’s conservative contingent with three justices under age 56.
Meanwhile, senators who had built their careers branding themselves as God-fearing Christians rubber-stamped the agenda of a guy who had cavorted with a porn star while his third wife was pregnant and then likely violated campaign finance law to buy her silence. All the while, Trump was allowed to tweet whatever insane conspiracy theories and personal insults he liked, accusing Joe Scarborough of murder, for example, and all he’d get was a handful of senators shaking their head about how concerned they were that the president was palling up to QAnon.
Even the Ben Sasses and Mitt Romneys of the GOP didn’t rally their followers to vote for Biden. If Trump had been accused of murder by someone with a smoking gun as evidence, the Republicans wouldn’t have even addressed it. We know this because when one of Trump’s (many) accusers claimed she had a dress with DNA evidence that he raped her, Republicans didn’t even call on Trump to provide a DNA sample in court.
Trump’s problem has never been a lack of loyalty toward him. At every turn, the entire Republican Party got in line and let him lead the way. In some cases, such as his Middle East policy, the bet really did pay off. In other cases, such as the coronavirus response, more than 350,000 Americans and 30 million jobs died, in part because of the administration’s disastrous testing rollout and outright lies about the efficacy of mask-wearing.
No, the only truly disloyal person is Trump. The moment he realized that he had lost the election, he turned against his party, delivering conservatives a parting shot by losing them the Senate. Think of it as punishment for failing to join his delusion that Hugo Chavez and the CIA had rigged the election against him.
Now, even if Democrats cannot pack the Supreme Court, they will get a bevy of pro-choice judges who treat the judiciary like it’s the third chamber of Congress. Even if Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New deal isn’t in the cards, billions of dollars in new climate spending and onerous environmental legislation on businesses will be. Even if free college for all doesn’t make it, expect to see billions of dollars empowering the same teachers unions that have kept your children out of school for a year.
And remember, there are lunatics who will call you a RINO for having wanted to save the Senate to prevent this.
First, Romney was the RINO, then Rep. Liz Cheney. According to Trump’s own insane loyalty test, every one of his judicial appointees who threw out his 62 risible lawsuits, and the Georgia Republicans who haven’t overturned the election result, are also RINOs. And if Mike Pence doesn’t sufficiently kiss Trump’s feet as he counts the electoral votes for Biden, I’m sure Trump will call him a RINO, too.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one team that’s composed of RINOs, and it’s Trump’s.
