Conservative columnist Bret Stephens says he dreads the bind that President Donald Trump has put the GOP in as Republicans stagger off into their uncertain future.
Stephens was speaking with the New York Times "Opinions” politics round table on Saturday when the panel landed on the self-dealing involved in Trump’s derailed slush fund settlement and the gobs of cash the Trump family raked in as a result of their occupation of the White House — within the span of little more than a year.
“Talking to Republicans or Republican-leaning figures who occasionally speak to the president himself — not politicians, but well-off people. The two things that have really hurt Trump in their eyes are the slush fund and the reporting by The Times that Trump or his family enriched themselves by $2.2 billion last year. That sits very ill, even among people who are his voters, and in some ways, his peers, because it reeks of a form of corruption.”
“Kleptocracy,” offered retired broadcast host Robert Siegel.
“And that reminds me a little bit of my youth in Mexico, when José López Portillo was president, and the corruption was so very much nakedly on display,” said Stephens … Because the rule of law [was] something that even most Republicans value. And I don’t think that they objected so much during election years, when they could tell themselves the alternative is that much worse. But what you have with Trump is really putting into the shade whatever might have been said against Hunter Biden and his own dealings — which, remember, were Topic A of discussion on some of the Fox News shows just three years ago … but this is something else.
Political pundit and author Molly Jong-Fast pointed out that the slush deal was particularly egregious with interim AG (And Trump’s former personal attorney) Todd Blanche scheming to give the Trump family immunity from audits. Still, she said this is the corruption that now defines the new Republican Party, and Stephens said party members now have no choice but to embrace the dirt or walk into the horizon. He used former South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former GOP US Rep. Liz Cheney as examples.
“When Graham flipped [to Trump] … I took it really bitterly. Maybe because I sort of set my teeth, as a conservative, against Trump, and that he had betrayed everything that I thought were his principles to curry favor with power,” Stephens told the panel. “After he died, it actually hit me harder than I thought it would. And in part because — say what you will about Graham’s choices — in the last week of his life, he accomplished consequential things — like a sanctions bill on Russia that the president is willing to sign … and probably saving NATO from Trump’s de facto destruction of the organization. And I remember asking myself, after he died: Well, if that’s what he was able to do by sucking up to the president as nakedly as he did, maybe I shouldn’t scorn him or hold him in such contempt, as I had for years, after he had, as I thought, gone over to the dark side.”
“I mean, I know everyone says ‘well, it was a devil’s bargain.’ But some devil’s bargains, you might say, are worth the price,” Stephens insisted. “Would Ukraine be safer today if Lindsey had gone up against Trump, gotten himself primaried six years ago and were blabbing from a seat on a CNN panel today? I’m not sure that’d be the case.”
Lindsey, he argued, didn’t do what Liz Cheney did — which is essentially get himself evicted from the party.
“I have great respect for Liz Cheney, but she’s not an influential person anymore,” said Stephens. “She’s a person who sacrificed herself on an altar of truth. And that’s great, but the world, sadly, moves on.”
