I’m sure many here remember how, in the days and weeks after the election, there was a slew of high minded commentators who cringed at Progressive protests of Trump. “Such rigid partisanship” they’d say, “Trump isn’t even in office yet and people are protesting him. These people need to united behind our president and give Trump a chance!” In particular, people may remember an especially groan inducing segment on SNL when Dave Chapelle spent his opening monologue saying just that.
Well, 6 months later, things look considerably different, as Trump wasted no time issuing awful policy after awful policy and a massive Nixonian level scandal in the process. So it’s no surprise that a lot of those people are reconsidering their. In particular, some of you may have notice this piece about Dave Chapelle this morning:
Just days after Donald Trump was elected president, Chappelle went the magnanimous route during his monologue and asked viewers to give the new leader a chance.
But that was then.
On Monday, the comedian expressed regret for his “SNL” remarks at a charity event in New York City.
“I was the first guy on TV to say ‘Give Trump a chance.’ I f―ked up. Sorry,” he said at the Robin Hood Foundation benefit, according to MSNBC’s Willie Geist.
Not to pile on a man whose acknowledging his mistakes, but no shit Dave. What did you think was going to happen? Are you honestly surprised that Trump and the Republicans would pack the cabinet with plutocrats and cronies intent on destroying the regulatory institutions that they’re now supposed to lead, or that they’d ban Muslim immigrants and refugees and start a crackdown targeting immigrants living productive if somewhat legally ambiguous lives, or that they’d turn a blind eye to discriminatory voting restrictions and double down on tough on crime measures that target minorities, or that they didn’t really have a healthcare plan beyond stripping people of health insurance and cutting taxes on the rich, or that he would erode institutions by firing people who got in his way or bend the rules when its convenient for him, or that he’s possibly undermine national security and alienate our allies to brag?
How was any of this surprising to anyone? All the warning signs were all there. They were saying saying all this, directly or indirectly. There was historical precedent, what with the last Republican President lying us into a disastrous war, trampling on civil liberties, mismanaging the government through a combination of crony capitalism and incompetence, and driving the economy into a ditch. None of this was partisan fever dreams, it was all right there, out in the open. Hell, any objective person should be able to look at one of the incoherent, stream of consciousness statements and realize the man may have serious mental defects. And I don’t mean “haha, Trump’s stupid”, I mean the man may seriously have honest to god, diagnosable dementia.
But no, for some reason a lot of people looked past all of that in the interest of appearing open minded and nonpartisan (and of course, feigning superiority over those stupid, hysterical liberals). In order to avoid being blinded by political bias, a lot of self-proclaimed centrists and even some well-meaning liberals allowed themselves to ignore what was clearly in front of them. And they keep doing it, again and again and again, until the evidence had become so incontrovertible they no longer could.
That needs to stop. We need to stop laying the blame for our problems at the feet of abstractions like “partisanship” or “a lack of civility”, and recognize where the problem really lies. And it’s not the individual defects Trump or his politics, he’s only as bad as the system that enables him. Specifically, it’s the metastasizing cancer that’s been progressively eating the Republican Party from the inside out over the period of decades and dragging the rest of us down with them. The idea that Republicans have been getting worse and worse over time isn’t just a fantasy of paranoid liberals, there’s a legitimate deterioration that’s clearly going on.
Maybe this is due to a broken ideology or culture, and after decades of telling themselves that Nixon got a raw deal and that kicking the poor/hippies and riding rough shod over everyone is how real men get thing they’ve finally internalized it to a point where they’re putting up obviously corrupt bullies. Or maybe it’s a structural problem, owing to the way their primaries have allowed a radical base to put the party through a never ending cultural revolution, or that they’ve effectively monetized crazy. Maybe it’s just that they’ve gotten to the point where they realize that they need to start smashing our institutions if they’re going to keep getting their way. Maybe it’s some combination of those factors, maybe it’s something else. It doesn’t matter though, the result is the same. The Republican Party has reached a point of such severe dysfunction that it can’t be allowed to keep going as it has been. It needs to be stopped, not just by Democrats or Progressives, but by any person who can see the obvious damage they are doing.