For this year’s tally of blatant demonstrations of the utter moral bankruptcy of today’s Republican Party, we could start with the Senate vote on impeachment.
The trial revealed a President as impeachable as one could readily imagine. (And we all knew — or all should have known — that the charges on which Trump was being impeached were only a relatively small piece of the total picture of what just screams “Impeach and Remove this Man While You Still Can.”)
And of course, the Republicans in the Senate had not the least interested in either the obvious guilt of the President or in the obvious grave seriousness of what these crimes indicate about the danger of entrusting such a man should with the great powers of the Presidency.
So the Republicans — with one measly exception — chose to protect a dangerous and lawless President rather than the Constitution they’d sworn an oath that they would protect.
All of which suggests there’d nothing they’d not sacrifice for power.
That same moral bankruptcy is on display now in the pandemic.
As we watch cases spiking in Republican-governed states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona, we should note the moral bankruptcy of Republican leaders who follow Trump in his madness, selfishness, and stupidity, following their leader in dealing with the pandemic in the worst possible way.
Those governors chose to align with Trump’s destructiveness despite the entirely predictable — indeed predicted — result that more of their people would suffer (and presumably some die) as cases spike out of control.
Allegiance to the Intimidator-in-chief, for political self-protection, despite all the major Republican players apparently knowing they’re following “a moron,” an “idiot,” a “threat to the Constitution,” “a man unfit for the office.” (And that’s just quoting the people Trump chose to work closely with him.)
So now those governors are compelled to walk back from the path of Trumpian folly they’d chosen because that’s what you do in that morally bankrupt Party. Compelled to reverse their Trumpian reckless re-openings by the spiking of their pandemic numbers just as the public health types warned.
These governors showing how the Republican Party has become a party of fools and/or a party of people who are morally bankrupt enough to sacrifice their people for what they think will be their political advantage.
(Either they were fools to believe Trump rather than what the experts were saying, or they were morally bankrupt enough that they would protect their power by sticking with Trump, regardless of the cost in well-being and lives of the people they were elected to represent.)
Since the Republican Party has shown itself morally bankrupt at virtually every other juncture, it seems much less likely that these governors are so stupid as to believe that Trump is better to follow than the experts, when it comes to policy on the pandemic, than that they simply bow down to the incompetent and immoral leader of their party even while he enacts the most abysmal failure of leadership in America at least since James Buchanan.
That’s what people do when they are slaves to power, and have no other real values. It is like that Evil force one sees in myth and legend that craves the ring, and would wield its power cruelly and destructive (even of all that’s whole in the world). Bowing down to Power even at the cost of what one is required -— by responsibility, by obligation, by compassion, by a sense of fairness, by love — to serve at such a crucial juncture in a nation’s life, with tens of thousands of lives on the line.
Moral bankruptcy: serving a destructive leader regardless of the costs to the nation. Power is their only god.