Which yellow-dog Republicans should be indicted in Trump-RussiaGate?
If you’re a Republican these days, your job is to stand by your man. You know that Trump is bad news: repugnant, morally irredeemable, pugnacious and personally repulsive—an old man you wouldn’t let get near your daughter. But none of that matters if you’re a Republican. You have a grim job to do, and that is to protect him.
There used to be a term, “Yellow Dog Democrat,’ meaning someone who would vote for anyone, or anything, as long as the candidate was a Democrat. Nobody knows the phrase’s origin, but no less a personage than Abraham Lincoln used it. It was 1848; Lincoln, in his second term in the U.S. Congress, was campaigning for the Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor, whose opponent was the Democrat, Lewis Cass. Lincoln used his customary wit to chide Cass:
“A fellow once advertised that he had made a discovery by which he could make a new man out of an old one, and have enough of the stuff left to make a little yellow dog. Just such a discovery has Gen. [Andrew] Jackson’s popularity been to you [Democrats]. You not only twice made President of him out of it, but you have had enough of the stuff left to make Presidents of several comparatively small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make still another.”
Lincoln’s implication was that Democratic voters would support “small men” simply because they were Democrats. (Taylor ended up winning, largely because he’d been a hero in the Mexican Wars, but his presidency was a failure, one of a string of do-nothing, one-term presidencies leading up to the Civil War.)
Well, maybe Democrats used to prefer yellow dogs to human Republicans, but nowadays it’s Republicans who are supporting the yellow dog, whose name is Donald J. Trump. Much wonderment has been expressed by observers as to why so-called Christians are lining up behind a bad man, and what it will take for them to come to their senses and break with him. Trump is playing them like a fiddle: in all his 71 years nobody ever accused him of having a religious bone in his body. But his embrace of evangelicals (the 700 Club interview, the laying on of hands)—patently phony as both were—apparently were enough to bamboozle these credulous people into thinking he’s one of them.
Here are the groups and individuals that are complicit in Donald J. Trump’s crimes of election fraud, collusion with enemies, perjury, obstruction of justice, misprision of treason and, possibly, treason itself:
-The Trump family and members of his inner circle, including the communications people
-Conservative Christians
-The Republican Party, which has become a Mafia of organized crime
-Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the House and Senate leadership, whose support for Trump is exactly analogous to the support of the Nuremberg defendants for Hitler
If there is justice left in America—and I think there is—Robert Mueller will slam these criminals and criminal enterprises, bringing indictments as needed. The Republican Party will, I expect, be hurt for its sufferance of Trump’s ill-doings. As for conservative Christians, we mere mortals are in no position to judge them. We will leave that to their deity. But we can shame them, and isolate them until they have shrunk to small cultish enclaves, scattered among the churches and trailer parks of Deep Red states. Like those fanatical Japanese soldiers on Pacific atolls who fought World War II for decades after the war actually ended, these yellow dog Republicans—dead-enders—will never give up, but will froth and snarl as long as they have breath. As life drains from their bodies, they will wheeze out a final “Benghazi!” Eventually, they will die out, becoming only a pathetic, dark stain on American history.
