John McCain’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Country First,” does not describe the worldview of Republicans, suggested Charles Pierce on Monday. For them, the Esquire blogger implied, it’s more like “GOP über alles.”
The peg for the post was chit-chat in the political and media worlds about whether President Trump is of sound mind, or, as Pierce put it, about “the possibility that the presidential trolley has left whatever tracks it had in the first place.” For example, Al Franken claims that some Republican senators think Trump is “not right, mentally. And then, some are harsher…I've heard great concern about his temperament.”
The problem, Pierce argued, is that Trump’s mental stability seems unimportant to most GOPers, who are focused on advancing a right-wing agenda. Under those circumstances, “it's hard to imagine a kind of mass mutiny that puts Mike Pence into the Oval Office, which is, of itself, a slightly smaller bag of horrors…The only people with the actual power to rein in [Trump] or to spare the country from further damage” are congressional Republicans, who with scattered exceptions are “not ready to do that, at least not until they get their tax cuts through…The Republicans declared party-over-country a long time ago. If you're just noticing now, you haven't been paying attention.”
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Then again, Pierce indicated, maybe the whole Trump White House is goofy. He opined that when presidential advisor Stephen Miller appeared last weekend on the Sunday shows, he “generally represented the current administration as a collection of cosplaying authoritarian yahoos who just blew in from an appearance at PinochetFest at the Heritage Foundation.”
