Authentic Conservatives Have No Political Party Now
Kelly Loeffler looked like a standard-issue Republican when she was appointed senator from Georgia in December 2019. She came from a super-rich family (like plenty of Democrats as well), she was pro-gun, anti-immigration, and pro-business. Originally pro-choice, her position on abortion evolved in time for her to be accepted by pro-life gatekeepers.
Once in Washington, D.C., though, Loeffler quickly got with the program. She described the impeachment of the president as a "circus" and lambasted Mitt Romney for even voting to call witnesses, whom she was sure would "slander @realDonald Trump." Now, she's encouraging hero worship of Trump, tweeting: "COVID stood NO chance against @realDonaldTrump."
This is servile, particularly at a moment when he is literally endangering others' lives. When she appeared, maskless and within inches of others, indoors at the White House announcement for Amy Coney Barrett, she not only endangered her own health and the health of her loved ones, she became a soldier in the disinformation war Trump is fighting to dissuade Americans from taking the threat seriously.
Only yesterday, Republicans were livid that President Barack Obama downplayed the threat from terrorism. I recall being appalled that no leading American statesman attended a Paris rally following the 2015 massacre at Charlie Hebdo headquarters, though European heads of state were there, along with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and even the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas. Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris at the time, but he skipped the march. Republicans fervently believed that failure to confront terrorist threats to the nation was malfeasance at best and betrayal at worst.
Yet now, to compensate for the inability of the current president to manage a two-car funeral, we are asked to believe that declining to confront the threat from a virus is neither malfeasance nor betrayal but instead some sort of macho heroism. Tomi Lahren of Fox Nation tweeted that Joe Biden should carry a purse to go with his face mask. The fawning Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweeted: "President Trump won't have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from President Trump." And Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said this:
"Maybe it's a flaw of Trump... he didn't hide from the virus. The reason he didn't hide from the virus is he didn't want America to hide from the virus. If he was going to ask America to get back to work, right? ... So he took the risk, he got the virus, but he was doing it for us."
He suffered for our sins? Yep, that's Trump all over.
Let me offer a few more flashbulb glimpses of the state of the GOP today. A quick glance at the Trump fans who gathered outside Walter Reed Hospital over the weekend revealed one holding a sign mentioning QAnon (there may well have been others), and another with a placard cheerily emblazoned "Super-spreader event."
Flash: Greg Abbott, Republican governor of Texas, apparently abandoning several common-sense measures to cope with the coronavirus like expanding early voting, has now announced that he will limit the number of ballot drop boxes to one per county. Texas has 254 counties with an average of about 114,000 people in each. But, of course, they vary in size. The single ballot drop box in Loving County will only have to handle the county's 169 residents. The box in Harris County, home to Houston, will have to accommodate 4.7 million. They better get a big box.
Flash: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has tested positive for the coronavirus (along with Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina), said he remains opposed to mask mandates because "while masks can reduce the risk of infection, they're not a cure-all." Is Johnson also opposed to food safety mandates, because while they decrease the incidence of poisoning, they're not a cure-all?
Flash: Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), one of the last semi-sincere conservatives, bows out. He never wavered from his free trade principles and opposed Trump's revised NAFTA treaty because it flouted those principles. He joins the 40 percent of elected Republicans in Washington who have resigned or retired since 2017.
Flash: The National Republican Congressional Committee has targeted a New Jersey freshman Democrat with ads aimed at linking him to what QAnon supporters believe is a Satanic, cannibalistic, child-abuse conspiracy backed by Hollywood and Democrats. The grounds? Rep. Tom Malinowski supposedly opposed expanding a sex offender registry. He denies this, but frankly, even if he had, it's a totally reasonable position to adopt. I've written about the gross miscarriages of justice those registries can cause. The NRCC is not a fringe political action committee. It's the official campaign arm of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, and it now issues official statements that read like supermarket tabloids. "Rep. Tom Malinoski lobbied to protect sexual predators."
This GOP is inhospitable to conservatives (see former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan among many others), moderates (see John Kasich) and people of decency and courage (see Utah Sen. Mitt Romney). Rather than purging its ranks of kooks and conspiracists, it welcomes and courts them. Rather than fight fair, it seeks to win by keeping people from the polls.
America needs a sane, serious, humane, center-right party that aims to persuade, not to dominate. This GOP is not it.
Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her new book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
