By: Gerard Baker – wsj.com – Januaery 29, 2024

Say this for Tim Scott: At least he understands it’s all-in or nothing at all. There can have been few sadder displays of human abasement than Mr. Scott’s performance last week. The South Carolina senator rightly likes to make much of his family’s ascent from sharecropper to Congress in a couple of generations. I couldn’t help but wonder what his grandfather would have made of his stepping awkwardly forward at Mr. Trump’s New Hampshire victory party to say the reason he endorsed the former president rather than the South Carolina governor who appointed him to his seat was that “I just love you.”

The saddest thing is that we all know this Faustian bargain is no such thing. At least Dr. Faustus got 24 years of magic and mischief for his soul. These guys get what? A year or two of not being insulted by the master? A brief respite from the venom of Trump cult members before they get discarded along with everyone else?

Ask Mike Pence how it works out. Who can forget that cabinet meeting in 2017 when the vice president led the minions in unmanning themselves as they submitted their tribute to the leader? Less than four years later, the president he lionized was expressing solidarity with the mob baying for Mr. Pence’s blood.

To be fair, we all at times face choices between preserving our opportunities and preserving our dignity. It’s the rare human who never accepts some degree of self-erasure to achieve a larger objective. In the tangled conscience of these men, I am sure there’s a skein of moral logic that leads from their unsightly compromise to some ultimate good.

But the dismaying reality for people who care about the promotion of conservative ideals is that this has gone way beyond the accommodations that ambitious and unprincipled men feel they must make for their careers and their political objectives. It represents a hollowing out of the Republican Party as a vehicle for those ideals.

You can believe in the importance of party loyalty; you can even believe that Trumpian populism is the right course for the party and the country. You can’t be a democratic Republican and believe that this course requires the purging of all alternatives, the rededication of the party to its purification through loyalty to one man.

This purgative urge was on display last week, when the Republican National Committee came close to suspending the party’s primary after just two contests and declaring Mr. Trump the presumptive nominee. That this was too much even for what now must be the most craven political institution in America perhaps offers some small shred of hope. Perhaps. For that reason alone we should hope that Nikki Haley keeps her campaign going.

The ultimate irony is that in the end, through their self-degradation, the enablers of this purge prove themselves in at least one critical way far worse than the man who makes them do it. They demonstrate that they are what he and large numbers of voters have long suspected them to be—desperate hacks who put their own advancement ahead of any other principle or consideration in life.

There’s a variation of an old joke in which an elderly Winston Churchill finds himself alone in a train compartment with a comely young woman. They fall into conversation, and he says: “Tell me, my dear, if I offered you a million pounds, would you sleep with me?”

The woman is a little taken aback but ponders for a moment and says, “Well, you are a very old man, sir, but obviously very distinguished. I would have to think about that.”

“While you’re thinking, let me ask you another question: Would you sleep with me if I gave you one pound?”

“Mr. Churchill,” she responds, indignant, “What kind of woman do you think I am?’”

“Miss, we have established what kind of woman you are. Now we are merely negotiating the price.”

For the past eight years we have watched a generation of Republicans engaged in this transaction. We have established what kind of men they are. No wonder the Republican Party was so ripe for capture. How fitting if a woman could now demonstrate some real virtue.

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Source: Republican Submission to Trump Reveals the Rot Within – WSJ