Bret Stephens is a conservative opinion columnist for the New York Times. Many of his pieces have struck me as entirely wrong-headed, but he has two saving graces: he is a staunch Never-Trumper, and, even for a professional columnist, he has a hell of a way with words.
His piece in today’s paper is a case in point. One passage struck me as so perfectly put that I had to read it out loud to Jennifer:
From the moment Trump became the G.O.P. front-runner in 2015, it was obvious who he was and where, if given the chance, he would take America. He was a malignant narcissist in his person. A fraudster in his businesses. A bully in his relationships. And a demagogue in his politics.
He did not have ideas. He had bigotries. He did not have a coalition. He had crowds. He did not have character. He had a quality of confident shamelessness, the kind that offered his followers permission to be shameless, too.
Exactly. And the larger point of Stephen’s column is also one that I ringingly endorse: that a large portion of the responsibility for Wednesday’s siege of the Capitol lies with Trump’s apologists and enablers in the Republican Party. As Stephens writes,
For five years, Republicans let him degrade political culture by normalizing his behavior. For five years, they let him wage war on democratic norms and institutions. For five years, they treated his nonstop mendacity as a quirk of character, not a disqualification for office. For five years, they treated his rallies as carnivals of democracy, not as training grounds for mob rule.
For five years, they thought this was costless. On Wednesday — forgive the cliché, but it’s apt here — their chickens came home to roost.
Stephens regrets the damage these quislings have done to the Republican Party. I do not. As much as principled Republicans may wish it were otherwise, their party was sowing divisiveness and nihilism long before Trump took office. Its leaders have been lining up the Molotov cocktails for years. Trump simply lit them and doled them out to his devoted fans. A deep and lasting fracture of the Republican Party would benefit the country. The tragedy is that the country itself has been fractured as well.