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The GOP has a long history of richly rewarding and even lionizing party hacks who commit crimes or other foul deeds—from Oliver North to Gordon Liddy to Katherine Harris to Ken Blackwell—it's amazing we're ever surprised when the party backs scoundrels. Its only ethos is winning.
1/ The benefit of being in a party that doesn't want or need government to work, because it fundamentally doesn't believe in government and benefits enormously when government fails, is that all you need is to jam the machine's gears so it breaks. You don't have to *do* anything.
2/ So when the GOP finds a criminal who knows how to win, backing that horse fervently offers the dual benefit of increasing Americans' hopelessness that government can ever be honest or work while also ensuring that those atop government aren't honest and do only nefarious work.
3/ We may sometimes think of Trump as a sort of exception in the history of the GOP, but how often does a Republican do something awful and quickly wind up a "hero" of the Republican base? When has the party clearly tossed out its scoundrels? That'd be counter to its philosophy.
4/ Dick Cheney is a hero for orchestrating a ruinous and false conflict that cost thousands of lives. Did the GOP care that Libby was outing agents in our clandestine services? "Owning the libs" has *always* been—my whole life—more important to the GOP than ethics or governance.
5/ I guess what I'm saying is, what if Trump—despite not believing in any Republican "principles" or being anything but the clear anathema of any "moral majority"—is in fact the natural conclusion of the devolution of GOP politics, as in fact the principles never really mattered?
6/ The GOP is now the party of "owning the libs." It doesn't care about immigration; it knows a wall won't reduce illegal immigration. As long as it seats judges who set us back 100 years and finds ways to prove that government doesn't work, it's doing *just* what it wants to do.
7/ 70% of the GOP would lionize Roger Stone in perpetuity if it discovered that he'd secretly worked with Russia to elect Trump, and had thereafter found some sleazy way to get away with it, by pardon or otherwise. And Stone knows it. And Stone is excitedly waiting for sainthood.
8/ When the only "governing" philosophy of a political party is that it hates the government it wants to control, and wants to reverse the progress of the democratic experiment of which it's a part, why should we be surprised when it makes a malignant narcissist into its godhead?
