Outside Counsel

I think (I hope) that a lot of people have known that Trump is a mountebank for a long time. I'm thinking that we are rounding into the place where the intelligent among his supporters should admit that their support for him was really just coming out of a fervent dislike of social progress, rather than outright bullying, and now would probably be a good time to fess up to merely trolling. You can go back to being cranky Republicans when you admit that you let your contempt rule your rationality.

Of course, this will probably never happen. Even today there are people who will admit that Nixon was a crook with only the greatest reluctance. 100% of Trump supporters support Trump, and none that I've met are willing to admit that they should have known better. No-one wants to be made to appear foolish, and the capacity for admitting a mistake is a rare quality. I feel confident in predicting that the Republican Congress will not evolve into this capacity until every (white) man jack of them are convinced that he is of no use in advancing their agenda. Since he has demonstrated this already you'd think they'd  be working on this, but one of the realities of 21st Century Republicanism is that they tend to the stupid. And hateful. Indeed, one of the things I realized last week (about which more anon)  is that the rise of Trumpism is really a reflection of contempt for the norms that underlie our most basic social conventions. You will find pundits who will tell you that the Republican base is comprised of persons who have been economically disrupted, and perhaps that is true for some of  them, but for the most part these people are engaging in uninformed scapegoating. Make no mistake-- the Constitution was intentionally designed to give power to persons and economies that were cruel and exploitative and well past their historical utility, and now we are seeing how that echo reverberates.