The president opened his talk at the National Prayer Breakfast and many of the pastors and politicians who claim to hold it sacred chuckled approvingly as he openly rejected the core of Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies. At the White House a few hours later he held another triumph in which he apologized not for his role—his obvious and damning role—in the tribulations of impeachment but for the evilness of others and the toll their “bullshit” (his word) took on him and his family. He denounced those who claim to pray for him and ridiculed those who do “wrong”in the name of God. The latter would be a worthy target of ridicule were it not for the fact that, in his mind, doing wrong is staying loyal to an oath or telling the truth under one. Loyalty to him, and him alone, is how one stays on the right side of things. Let me hear no more about “situational ethics” from his Praetorians.
I have criticized—and defended—Mitt Romney many times. But the effort, admittedly mostly from the worst goons, buffoons, and satraps of Trumpism, to describe him as a person of low character in defense of President Trump is one of the ugliest political spectacles I have ever witnessed. Has Romney at times been calculating? Of course. He’s a politician. But the suggestion that he is not an honest or decent man because he was “disloyal” to such a profoundly dishonest and indecent man is an exercise in mobbish immorality and the madness of crowds. And by the way, all of these gibbons and poltroons yammering on about how he was disloyal never seem to dwell on the question of why Trump should demand his loyalty in the first place? What does Romney owe Donald Trump? What trust or bond has he “betrayed”? Romney wasn’t elected because of Donald Trump.
If you honestly would prefer your children grow up to be more like Donald Trump than Mitt Romney, I don’t know that there’s anything left to talk about.
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