Trump's 'moral character' should have made 'this unfolding disaster' obvious to his apologists: columnist
In a column for the conservative Bulwark, longtime political commentator Robert Traczinki said that so-called "never-Trumpers' have every right to be smug after Donald Trump lost the White House in 2020, had a major part in the GOP's 2022 midterm "red wave" failing to materialize and now has GOP lawmakers forced to defend his consorting with neo-Nazis and antisemites.
According to the columnist, Republicans and conservatives who have been excusing the former president's excesses for over six years should have seen the chaos he has created coming given his sordid history that was known before the first vote was ever cast for him.
Writing as a "never-Trumper" himself, he explained, "... our basic warning about Trump was about the kind of man he was. It was about how he thinks, or fails to think, and what he values, or fails to value.
This concern was dismissed as merely an aesthetic objection to Trump, as if we opposed him because we found his style too down-market, his manners too crude," before adding, "Yet can we really call Trump’s current behavior an aesthetic blemish? The glaring faults of Trump’s moral character—notable even when measured against the low bar set by other politicians—clearly made this unfolding disaster inevitable."
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Singling out Trump's dalliance with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at a Mar-a-Lago dinner before Thanksgiving, Traczinki claimed it should not have come as a surprise with the celebrity-obsessed former president.
"Trump is the kind of man for whom there is no moral consideration that outweighs the prospect of getting the members of his country club to gape at him because he is meeting with someone famous. That is the man’s moral core," he wrote while noting the former president "... has yet to say anything really bad about Fuentes and his views."
He then added that Republicans, since the rise of Trump, haven't exactly covered themselves in glory either, citing a tweet from the Twitter account of the House Judiciary Committee that was up for days before being deleted, that simply said, "Kanye. Elon. Trump,” implying they are the future of Republicanism.
"Kanye. Elon. Trump. That seems to encapsulate the price conservatives are going to pay, and keep paying for a long time, because they were too opportunistic in following flamboyant celebrities and willingly sacrificed any concern about principles, character, and intellect," he wrote before concluding, "It’s a lesson to keep in mind when conservatives get tired of all the losing."
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