F*ck Silence by Joe Walsh

Author:Joe Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780063010031
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 8

Fixing Conservatism

Until about January 20, 2017, the term “Republican in name only” (RINO) described members of the GOP who wavered on the party platform. I’ll admit that the goalposts of that “platform” moved depending on the day; what counted as a conservative position one moment could be insufficiently conservative the next (such as when Republicans fought for Obamacare repeal). But in general, you were a RINO if you were a Republican member of Congress who voted for bloated spending deals, “open borders,” or legislation that betrayed a core right-of-center principle. The point is that the label had at least something to do with government policy.

As of January 21 that year, the test for being a RINO shrank to one question: Do you pledge your undying support to our king, or don’t you? I wish I were exaggerating. But there’s no exaggerating the force of a cult’s pull. Let’s remember what Trump said during the 2016 campaign: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”1 Truly, I want to spend a minute taking that possibility seriously. We tend to grimly accept his comment at face value without diving into what “not losing any voters” would actually look like, what contortions are necessary to make Trump committing a crime, to put it in simpler and more realistic words—say, obstructing justice!—come off as defensible behavior. This, my friends, is how we truly uncover the way Trump has bastardized conservatism. Because each time he has trashed norms and tested legal limits, he’s been putting the spirit of his Fifth Avenue theory into practice. Each of these actions on the Trump agenda has required dismissing yet another principle—and these precedents have become scaly barnacles glomming onto the rotting hull that is conservative politics.

I don’t want to give goofy-ass grifters more attention than they deserve—which is literally any—but there’s a Trump sycophant named Bill Mitchell who hosts an internet radio show whose tagline is “Trust Trump.” Those two words speak volumes about the direction of conservatism under this president. It’s about following Trump wherever he goes. If he goes there . . . well, it’s always a matter of his having the chutzpah to go there like previous swampy politicians didn’t. If he asks foreign powers to investigate his political opponents . . . well, the Biden family does seem shady, right? If he’s investigated by his own government for his campaign’s connections to Russia doing something along those very lines . . . well, it’s that traitorous deep state again! If journalists dig into his own shady connections and pretty obvious financial conflicts of interest . . . well, it’s that enemy of the people, the fake news, again! I swear to you, “conservatism” under Trump looks like a fucking conga line. It’s all about putting your hands on the shoulders of the flunky ahead of you and shuffling your feet forward, wherever the procession leads. And because that is the state of affairs—because

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