Unfair to Middling

How I Came To Jump off the GOPrecipice Without a Net

I grew up as a preacher's kid in a Baptist household. It was a conservative enough home life, but somehow I ended up in a conservative bubble in an otherwise liberal state. Oregon had its last Republican governor, Vic Atiyeh, through most of my years of school. Jimmy Carter was a pretty unpopular president, and then Ronald Reagan swept into office in a landslide that only grew bigger for his second term. I grew fairly comfortable in the idea that people around me thought the same way I did—or at least, similarly. In middle school, the mock election we did in social studies had one outlier (that I recall) who supported Mondale over Reagan for the 1984 election, and there really wasn't a lot of discussion around that. In my junior year of high school, I remember writing a persuasive paper for my English class that was about a political issue. The teacher commented on it in a way that made me realize that she and I stood on opposing sides of the issue—but she complimented me on my arguments compared to those of other students who had written on a similar issue, and by that point the teacher had already managed to antagonize not just me but my mother as well about her teaching style versus my learning style (to be charitable). But, the point is, I was largely surrounded by people who agreed with me at least on a macroscopic level. It wasn't even really an echo chamber like you get right now, so much as it just happened to be the way things were at that point. I had Republican leanings because everyone around me had Republican leanings, it seemed. (George Kirkwood, a high school friend, being the most notable exception.)

College was a bit of an awakening for me. I went to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Harvey Mudd was part of a collective of five cooperative schools. Students registered at one of the schools could attend classes at any of the other schools. Mudd, as a science and engineering school, was largely apolitical. Scripps, a women's liberal arts college, did not wear its politics on its sleeve (at least as far as I knew). Claremont McKenna was known as a business school and tended a bit right, while Pitzer (social sciences and philosophy) and Pomona (liberal arts) tended much more to the left—Pitzer, in particular. Both Pitzer and Pomona seemed to feel it was their duty to host at least a monthly protest march over all five campuses, and to litter Mudd walls and cafeteria tables with political fliers. By and large, Mudd students tended to ignore them, but there were some activist students I recall from Mudd, too. But, overall, the atmosphere in the area felt much more liberal than I was used to. Still, I was focused on my studies—college was very different from my previous schooling in how hard I needed to work for it—and the general novelty of being out on my own, and I pushed politics off to the back of my mind.

Once I had my first job, I settled into a more or less nominal political role. I voted, and I researched the issues, but as often as not I would read far enough into the Republican opinions to agree with them and vote more-or-less straight ticket. It didn't help much that I was living in what was, at that point, deep blue California. It wasn't, say, San Francisco or Berkeley, but Silicon Valley was not particularly interested in conservative politics. I settled myself into the role of "loyal opposition" and resigned myself to the idea of my vote not really counting.

The online community I had found, by that point, was pretty solidly anti-conservative. We had other interests to tie us together, but I, by and large, did not wade into politics with them. When I did, it was generally an unfortunate conversation. Comment sections in early blogging forums were often echo chambers, and my conservative views were generally unwelcome. But no one was willing to engage, either. The default assumption was that anyone who disagreed with the proffered agenda—or who even asked questions about it—was a bad-faith actor fueled by hatred. On more than one occasion, someone, discovering my conservative leanings, would exaggerate it into a ludicrous caricature and mock me over it. After a few unsuccessful attempts to learn anything about the assumptions going into the "other" side's political philosophy or how they would answer doubts I had about how their ideas could be implemented ("your kind isn't interested in actually listening, you just want to take our words to use them back against us"), I simply gave up on any meaningful discourse, decided I wasn't welcome, and cemented further into my conservative views. I kept my head down and my mouth shut, continued voting mostly straight ticket, and stopped trying to engage.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, the Clinton impeachment occurred. I have my suspicions to this day that on some level it was revenge for both Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair. But the Republicans insisted that "character counts," and, well, Clinton probably shouldn't have lied under oath, so I looked the other way. I even had some small sympathy for the First Lady at the time, watching how her husband's cheating on her became a national issue. Unfortunately, she spent that goodwill and then some by appearing in a radio ad for the Democratic Party in California, where she claimed that only Democrats were interested in solving any of the problems that the state and the nation were facing. Being told that, if I didn't belong to her party, I didn't want things to get better was kind of a slap in the face. I decided that any sympathy I'd had had been misplaced. This would come back to bite the Democrats in 2016.

As things went along, I got tired of the trope of the Democratic Party taking potshots at the intelligence of their political opponents. For me, it started with the Quayle "potatoe" affair, and then I watched as Bush Jr. and Palin both were more or less written off as idiots. (How many of you were aware that Palin never said she could see Russia from her house—that was Tina Fey impersonating her on Saturday Night Live?) The message I received from the Democrats was clear: "Anyone who doesn't agree with us is stupid." There was no room for honest disagreement. If you wanted to entrench me, it was a good way to do it.

But it wasn't all sunshine for me on the other side of the street, either. I watched uncomfortably as the Republicans started to become more absolutist in their positions. After a scary experience with secondhand smoke in high school, I have come to be in favor of tight tobacco regulations, but I was getting fliers from Republican groups insisting on "no" votes for any and all tobacco regulations that would use fees on tobacco purchases to go into smoking prevention and recovery programs, solely because it was a "new tax" and they demanded no new taxes. I watched gun violence growing more pronounced, with mass shootings targeting schools and festivals, but the Republicans, in lockstep with the NRA, opposed any further gun regulations. This all-or-nothing approach started taking over all of their interactions, and I became uneasy as I struggled too see nuance in positions. If I was unhappy with Hillary Clinton insisting that only Democrats wanted solutions, I was also unhappy with the GOP resisting dialogue or compromise because everything had to be 100% their way, black-or-white. It was during my growing unease that the Republican Senate under McConnell stonewalled the nomination of Obama appointee Merrick Garland. There is nothing in the Constitution specifically forbidding this approach, but it seemed to me that this was clearly not what the framers of the Constitution had intended—to leave a vacancy on the Supreme Court for ⅘ of a year, not for any obvious flaw on the fault of the candidate, but simply because the party in control of the Senate was hanging their hopes on winning the White House in the upcoming year. I still wasn't thrilled with the Democratic Party and how its adherents had treated me, but the GOP was quickly burning through my goodwill towards them. I watched as Republicans and prominent televangelists continued to stumble through scandal after scandal, but somehow the GOP as a whole never seemed to be able to repudiate its wayward members and allies. And I started wondering: If I wanted the Democratic Party members to see me not as an enemy of the country, but as someone who wanted the best for the country, just seeing a different path towards that best, then shouldn't I extend the same grace to its candidates? With that thought in mind, their policies started looking less threatening than Republican rhetoric would have me believe.

Enter Donald J. Trump. [ominous music here]

 The 2016 primaries turned out to be somewhat wild. Honestly, when Trump threw his hat into the ring, I thought of him as a joke. He would be the wingnut candidate who made the others look sane in comparison. I did my research and tried to figure out which candidate in the Republican field came closest to my views. I wasn't comfortable with Cruz for reasons that I still can't articulate, so I settled in behind Rubio with Kasich as a backup. And then I watched with growing amazement, and then horror, as Trump started putting in a stronger and stronger showing. Trump? Even before his candidacy, Trump had a reputation that was far from sterling. A "Foxtrot" comic strip from 1990 lampooned Trump for acting like a spoiled rich kid, and nothing he had done since really changed that. He ran casinos, he shouted "you're fired!" at contestants on The Apprentice, and he launched ill-fated products like "Trump Steaks" and "Trump Ice." He suffered through six bankruptcies and yet somehow still branded himself as a superior businessman. As his popularity grew, he continued to leave decorum behind. He dug up any dirt he could about his opponents, and made up what he couldn't find—not unlike his birtherism claims about Obama. He made up insulting nicknames for his opponents. When the infamous "grab 'em by the p****" tape surfaced, I thought surely that would be the end of things. But, no, Trump wrote it off as "locker room talk" and dismissed it as well as any other sexual harassment allegations that wee leveled against him. Eighteen years ago, as a Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, character counted. But now that Trump was promising the Republicans the moon, suddenly character didn't matter all that much—because he might deliver.

In May, Trump was named the presumptive nominee for the Republican primary. And, with my growing disillusionment with the Republican Party reaching a threshold, I contacted the county registrar of voters and had my party affiliation purged from the record. In my disgust, I sent a letter to the RNC about my unease with Trump as a candidate, explaining that I had left and why I had left. I got what amounted to a form letter back from then-chairman Priebus that showed no consideration of any of my concern about a Trump presidency.

So, I requested a primary ballot for the Libertarian Party, only to find that they had already held their convention and nominated their presidential candidate before California even held its primary. Nevertheless, I continued to watch the Libertarian campaign, before deciding that Johnson just didn't have what it took to become president. I couldn't support Trump and his seemingly bankrupt morality, but I was still annoyed at Mrs. Clinton for the long-ago radio ad—which her comment about a "basket of deplorables" only helped solidify that irritation. (Despite loud generalized assertions otherwise, my objection to Hillary Clinton for president had nothing to do with her gender.) Stuck between Trump's inability to be civil on one side and Hillary Clinton's seeming campaign strategy of "it's my turn" on the other, when it came down to the election proper, I threw away my presidential vote on a write-in for Marco Rubio (which never counted because Rubio was not certified to be a write-in candidate for California...and which I have since come to regret). I did not want to see Trump become president, but California was so blue my throwaway vote wouldn't matter, and I still had deep-seated reservations about Clinton, so I wasn't sure what to do.

Many Republicans since Trump's inauguration have insisted, loudly and repeatedly, that the Democrats never gave Trump a chance as president and were opposing him from Day One. To this, I must reply that Trump made it abundantly clear that the tone of his presidency was going to be absolutely antagonistic to anyone who did not agree with him. From chants of "lock her up" to hanging epithets on everything that moved ("crooked Hillary," "cryin' Chuck," "nervous Nancy"), Trump made absolutely no effort to behave civilly towards anyone who was not walking in lockstep with him. The Democrats gave Trump exactly as much chance as he gave them.

That was how we went into Trump's presidency. He had already taken great pains to alienate anyone who wasn't in his fold. He came out of the gate insisting that, somehow, the media that had propelled him to stardom in his reality shows and with hyped hullabaloo over his unlikely campaign was out to get him. Everything from the size of his inaugural crowd to stores carrying his daughter's merchandise to parents of veterans became a fight that he couldn't wait to pick. Fact-checking organizations had a field day picking apart his specious claims, gleeful for the activity until the magnitude of his desire to stretch the truth sunk in.

From what I can see of Trump, he is not fundamentally dishonest—that is to say, he does not lie because his nature is specifically to lie. Rather, I see a Trump that is fundamentally egotistical. He admitted that he went after the presidency mainly because he didn't want to look back at his life and say that he could have but didn't. In other words, he didn't have the interests of the country or the people at heart: he had the interests of Donald J. Trump at heart. He needed to trumpet his greatness to everyone, and if that meant bending the truth to get there, so be it. He needed it in his ego to have had the largest inaugural crowd ever, and so that became the message. Any other evidence was made up by the media that hated him. His tax cut was "the biggest in history." His wall would be "beautiful." He was the most popular Republican in history. The only way he could possibly lose the election was through fraud. His Ukraine call wasn't just appropriate, it was "perfect." Everything about him was necessarily superlative. If something contradicted that, it was wrong. It was worse than wrong, it was "fake news." And anyone who distributed "fake news" was, by extension, the "enemy of the people."

No one could disagree with him. Any Republican who dared gainsay him was a RINO: a "Republican in name only." The Republican Party was Trump. Trump was the Republican Party. This became painfully true through the 2020 election, when the RNC failed to put forth any meaningful platform—it just said its platform was the same as in 2016 (which was largely "undoing whatever Obama did," despite the fact that Trump had already had four years to do that, two of which included a fully aligned Congress) and that they were doing whatever Trump wanted to do. What Republican soever spoke against Trump would be subject to character assassination and a targeted campaign to ensure that they would not be reelected—for example, former senator Jeff Flake. It became sort of a hallmark that any Republican who spoke out against him would have to first announce that they were not running for reelection. This continued all the way through the disaster of the 2020 election, where Georgia Governor Kemp and Secretary of State Raffensperger were also targeted as "RINOs" for refusing to bow to Trump's will and certify the state's electoral votes, which he had not earned, for him. Anyone who disagreed with Trump was sidelined at best (Fauci) and frequently drummed out. Trump was the best at whatever he happened to be talking about. Doctors were "surprised" at his acuity in dealing with COVID, he claimed. What Trump wanted was always the best, and any experts who disagreed with him were part of the "deep state" conspiracy that stood against him.

It was in this environment that I decided I would rather be an independent than a RINO or a Republican collaborator. The Republican Party, by this point, had demonstrated that it was more willing to follow the siren song of a narcissist promising power than to stand by principle. Any Democrat who had had Trump's same background would have been excoriated by Republican campaigners. But the GOP was willing to turn a blind eye to Trump's many faults—his crass words, his outrageous behavior, the many accusations of sexual misconduct: in short, his moral failings—because he had a groundswell of support. I felt it was more important to stand on principle than to follow the party, and so I parted ways in what I then hoped would be a brief parting. Maybe Trump would show himself to be a more able man than the campaign had presaged. Maybe the bluster was just campaigning and he would settle down once in office.

No, and no.

Trump's promises fell by the wayside. "Repeal and replace" the ACA with something "better" never happened, although the GOP did its best to gut the law without providing anything in its place. Mexico never paid for the wall—Trump's claims that they were indirectly paying for it through the USMCA notwithstanding, which was also an exaggeration. The wall never reached as far as he promised, anyway. Massive infrastructure projects never materialized. Tax cuts did come through, although they were not only temporary, they would lead to tax increases after four short years. Even though world leaders were found mocking Trump at summits, somehow Trump claimed to have restored respect to America in the eyes of the world. None of this mattered to true believers. It was all "fake news," or somehow landed on any opposition despite a Republican majority in Congress for the first two years of the Trump presidency. I am not trying to make a claim here that Trump didn't accomplish anything, only that his list of accomplishments feels exaggerated, and his touting of "promises made, promises kept" needs a lot of qualification to stand up as true.

From my newly independent standpoint, I started reevaluating what the Republican Party was showing it stood for, especially in light of the conservative Christians who insisted that the Republican—and only the Republican—Party would stand for these good Christian values. Since I was raised Christian, this distinction seemed important to me. I'm not even going to dive into the minor quibbles like Levitical laws about eating shellfish and wearing blended garments. (Those dive into questions of divine law that earlier theologians, including Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, have already addressed and are tangential here.) But in larger contexts... yes, the Bible does say that "if any would not work, neither should he eat" (2 Thess. 3:10). But the 1600s English there uses "would" in a sense of "be willing to," not simply "does not." Modern translations try to clarify: "if anyone does not want to work, neither should he eat." Republican attempts to write off everyone on government assistance as "welfare queens" draw on this mentality of the Protestant work ethic that John Smith instituted at Jamestown. But this ignores not only context, but other Biblical passages as well:

Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their affliction.... (James 1:27)

And the one who wants to go to court with you and take your tunic, let him have your outer garment also. And whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matt. 5:40–42)

You shall not subvert the rights of an alien or an orphan, and you shall not take as pledge the garment of a widow. (Deut. 24:17)

Thus says Yahweh, “Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver the one who has been seized from the hand of the oppressor. And you must not oppress the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow." (Jer. 22:3)

You must not oppress the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, and the needy. (Zech. 7:10)

The fact that this is a repeated theme through both the Old and New Testaments suggests that it is important.

Somehow, though, capitalism seems to have crept into  this Christian doctrine—I suspect, through Repblicanism influencing conservative Christianity. I remember the Cold War and the vestiges of the Red Scare it carried. Communism in many nations—the USSR, China, North Korea, to name a few—was not kind to religion, and, in particular, Christian religion. But this does not mean that the "opposite" of communism (if, indeed, you can say that capitalism is the opposite of communism) must be inherently kind to Christianity; nor does it mean that socialism, as a sort of kin to communism, must be likewise hostile. If you look at early descriptions of the Christian Church from the Book of Acts, you will even see communist or socialist tendencies: "And all who believed were in the same place, and had everything in common. And they began selling their possessions and property, and distributing these things to all, to the degree that anyone had need." (Acts 2:44–45) Jesus didn't mince words when He said that "You are not able to serve God and money" (Matt. 6:24, Luke 16:13). In fact, this riled up the Pharisees, who, Luke noted, "were lovers of money" (Luke 16:14). These same Pharisees received a harsh rebuke later: "'Do and observe everything that [the scribes and the Pharisees] tell you, but do not do as they do, for they tell others to do something and do not do it themselves. And they tie up heavy burdens and put them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing with their finger to move them.... Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees—hypocrites!—because you pay a tenth of mint and dill and cumin [i.e., tithed according to the Jewish Law], and neglect the more important matters of the law—justice and mercy and faithfulness! It was necessary to do these things while not neglecting those. Blind guides who filter out a gnat and swallow a camel! Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees—hypocrites!—because you cleans the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence! Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also." (Matt. 23:3–4, 23–26). The Pharisees, consumed with looking good rather than doing good, came to see their prosperity as a sign of their favor with God, so they loved wealth. (See the book of Job; Job's loss of wealth is seen by his friends Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad as a sign of Job's sin and unfaithfulness, resulting in disfavor with God—which was not correct.)

And at any rate, I'm getting a bit off track here by delving into theology; the point is that I have come to see the Republican Party driving Christian values here, which is the tail wagging the dog. At any point where Christians see an organization with which they have aligned themselves straying from Christian values, I see that they should have a duty to take a stand against that if they can and, barring that, absent themselves from that organization at any point where it violates their values. To the extent that the Republican Party argues against grace, mercy, and generosity to the needy, and succor to refugees, it is no longer Christian and Christian Republicans should not tolerate it.

If they want a "Christian" nation, then single mothers should not be forced to choose between rent and health care; between working to support their family and carrying a baby to term with appropriate medical leave; between being able to afford food for their families and being able to afford child care so that they can work to put food on the table. Refugees should not be turned away at the border because "our country is full" and they come from "s***hole countries" and are not the "best and brightest." We should not be bailing millionaires and billionaires out of bankruptcy and business trouble while our young people dig themselves ever deeper holes of debt to get an education and while people beggar themselves for emergency medical care.

As a partial aside, I want to add in here that the George Floyd incident broke me. For years, I had been listening to the Republican side of things that, yes, there certainly were a few cases of bad, corrupt cops who operated in a racist fashion, but  by and large, these were isolated incidents and any story of a coherent narrative oppressing Black people was an exaggeration: that we, as a country, had largely moved past that and any protests were from people who were trying to milk an advantage out of any remaining guilt from the past. It was easier to believe this from my position on the West Coast, where there were few lingering scars from the past such as the eastern parts of the country had. Where my middle school had been largely White but the Black kid was easily elected student body president and no one even made a big deal about it. But, as I said, George Floyd broke me. I had written off the earlier "I can't breathe" protests as stirring up a tempest in a teapot, trying to turn an isolated incident into a pattern. Except, here was George Floyd, pointing out to me that it wasn't an isolated incident. It felt like we, as a society, had broken a promise by permitting this to happen again. We'd said it was just a one-off, and it wasn't. We said we weren't just letting this happen repeatedly, and we were. I couldn't fathom how a cop could ignore please of "he can't breathe" when there had been protests about the same thing just six years earlier. The only thing that made sense to me at that point was that I had been wrong to listen to the voices saying that there wasn't a systemic problem. I couldn't believe that anymore. Kaepernick hadn't been trying to pull a stunt for attention, he was giving a cry for help that we were ignoring. And it felt like the party I had left was still trying to deny all that and sweep it under the rug.

What I see from four years of a Republican Party under Trump is that Trump, with the party in tow, is driving away from all of what I just mentioned in favor of, frankly, the rich. Capitalism is not inherently bad—nor is socialism, nor is communism. But all of them have their flaws and weaknesses, and to let any one of these run away wholly unrestrained is to free these flaws to wreak havoc on the nation that implements them. The Republican Party under Trump dived into new levels of violence and extremism that scare me. I received a death threat for daring to voice the opinion online that the Senate opposing the appointment of Garland had been a mistake for the GOP. Seriously.

Let me be clear: I think that Trump, and the GOP through him, is using conservative (and especially evangelical) Christians. He promised them certain things, in exchange for every other piece of power he could get. And in that power were things that they should have been concerned about and failed to be. As long as they got their abortion ban and an easement on the Johnson Amendment, and somehow lower taxes and their right to have whatever bloody gun they wanted got lumped in there, too, then the rest didn't matter. Affordable health care didn't. Maternity leave didn't. Fair treatment for workers didn't. Stopping police brutality didn't. Protecting systemically oppressed minorities didn't. Mercy for refugees didn't.

Why do I think Trump doesn't care about all of this? Despite some hyper-partisan Christian celebrities like Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Stephen Strang and Eric Metaxas putting forward a specious argument that Trump was somehow a "baby Christian," and Trump being more than happy to subject himself to being seen with them, Trump showed no real interest in behaving like a Christian. The Sunday after he got up and made a nice speech about how important it was to free churches to meet in person, even in the face of the COVID pandemic, Trump spent the next Sunday on the golf links. Trump paraded through DC to a church that didn't even give him permission to use it in this manner, gassing protesters out of the way, for a photo op with a Bible that wasn't even his. The Bible says that a Christian life should be known by its fruit, things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control; but Trump evinces few of these things. He is angry all the time when things don't go his way, impatient, insulting, loyal only to those who are first loyal to him, prone to going off on his own flights of fancy no matter how appropriate...

To quote the movie "Labyrinth," this sense is what I get from Trump: "I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave." That is not how it should be for Christians. And that is why I had to walk away from the Republican Party under Trump.

And that is why I am not going back right now. Or perhaps ever. With Trump having stirred up a restless crowd in January, and refusing to speak up to calm them down even as it turned into a riot that invaded our seat of government and resulted in multiple deaths, you would think that the GOP would have nothing to do with him at this point. And yet, on Jan. 28, barely three weeks after that debacle, the House minority leader, McCarthy, took it upon himself to visit Trump at his home in Florida to discuss, among other things, "taking back the House in 2022." Trump should be in disgrace. High-ranking Republican leaders should absolutely not be meeting with him to discuss party strategy. I cannot go back to that. I cannot.

And yet, this is not to say that I am ceding my loyalty to the Democratic Party, either. Right now, they seem to be the more sane of the two, but it has been made abundantly clear that I am not welcome there, either, unless I toe the line. I hear arguments that ex-Republicans are Not To Be Trusted at all, and they can join up and vote but need to sit down, shut up, and listen without asking questions, and Do What They Are Told. I have ethical qualms about certain Democratic positions, but I have found experientially that trying to ask questions or hold a discussion about certain ones will result in me being shut down in a hurry. I will be yelled at, I will be talked over repeatedly, I will be called names and insulted, and I will have very emotional how-would-you-like-it-ifs thrown at me hypothetically and then told to my face that I am lying if I don't answer how they expect me to. I choose not to discuss the specifics of these topics here because, frankly, I have received enough emotional abuse over my attempts to understand and discuss these topics and do not have any faith at all that future attempts will generate any light rather than heat.

Which leaves me as I stated to begin, "jumping off the GOPrecipice without a net." I don't have a political party to land in. I don't think that either party is going to represent my views and interests fairly. I have been distrustful of the Democratic Party for many years, in part because of, honestly, indoctrination, but in part also because of what I have experienced at the hands of its adherents. But at this point, I can no longer trust the Republican Party, having seen it sit on its hands as its leader lied his way through four years of presidency, and even now watching it still kowtow to him.

The one party has walked away from where I once stood and betrayed me. The other tells me "unity" while denying the legitimacy of my beliefs. (Seriously, one person told me "no one really believes that" in response to one of my opinions, which was at best insulting and at worst a form of gaslighting.) And so here I stand, trying to thread the needle as best I can. I am not saying that I won't support any candidate from either party. But I feel like I can't trust either party to protect my interests. The Republicans are so hell-bent on power that they are shedding all their proclaimed morals to get it. The Democrats feel like they insist that anything that occurred alongside old abuses of power must be overturned and thrown out, regardless of whether it can be redeemed, and that they must rush headlong into the new without waiting to make sure that the new is necessarily better or right. I make uneasy...well, "alliances" isn't even the right word right now. I'll offer conditional support to whomever I think will do the least damage. And right now, I feel like any Republican who won't stand up to the damage that Trump has done is endorsing that damage, and cannot be trusted.