10/07/2024
Hitching their wagon to Donald Trump was a Faustian bargain for the GOP. And now they may be paying the price.
"Underneath all of the campaigning and commentary and polling and panic of the 2024 election cycle, there is a truth that we are collectively unable to plainly state: Donald Trump is unfit to be President of the United States. "
"He is unfit in his temperament: childish and thin-skinned, easily distracted and baited, quick to react with anger to perceived slights, whiny and recalcitrant when he does not immediately get his way.
He is unfit in outlook: Trump has few sincerely held beliefs and no understanding of or interest in the details and nuances of policy, frequently frames the purpose of government as a protection racket, and reaches for violence—through either the police or the military—when met with even peaceful disagreement.
He is unfit in judgment: routinely accepting unvetted information and outright propaganda from fringe extremist groups, embracing specious and uninformed arguments if they flatter his ego, fill his coffers, or affirm his beliefs, rejecting important and actionable facts if they contradict his worldview, and coordinating with bad actors from foreign despots to domestic terrorist organizations.
And even if one were to treat this litany of offenses against decency and common sense as a matter of opinion, Donald Trump has rendered himself unfit for any office of public trust at any level of government in the United States for his actions from November 3, 2020 to January 6, 2021, wherein he betrayed his oath to the Constitution in his prolonged and corrupt efforts to overturn the will of voters in five state elections and install himself as dictator, culminating in whipping up a lynch mob and sending them to capture and kill his vice-president and any resistant member of Congress."
"Yet none of this is the focus of our endless election season. The press condense and rewrite Trump’s disturbing and unhinged statements, and downplay his advanced age, despite expressing concerns about the sitting president’s age-related health and mental acuity.
Instead, Trump’s manifest unfitness is not the subject of breathless speculation or insider scoops, nor are there any questions to officials or voters as to how they can support someone who does not meet the barest requirements for conduct as night manager at a truck stop Dairy Queen let alone Commander-in-Chief of the most expensive military and the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. "
Hitching their wagon to Donald Trump was a Faustian bargain for the GOP. And now they may be paying the price.