Can We Please Be Done with This Already?

I wish I could vote for Republicans again, but every day Trump sticks around makes this less likely.

Kevin Williamson urges everyone to read Noah Rothman, and I agree.

From Noah Rothman:

[Trump's] plan is as diabolical as it is nonsensical. It is somehow more disdainful of the conventions that have preserved American comity than even progressive schemes to pack the courts, destroy the character of the Senate, and add new states to the Union. At least those advocating such harebrained schemes acknowledge the institutional obstacles in their path. For Trump's allies, the biggest impediment to achieving their objective—the votes of hundreds of thousands of Americans—are simply waved away….

There is no modern analog for the display Republicans are engaging in—no parallel to which the right can point and claim their actions are justified by the standards of decency Democrats violated long ago. This is new. And though it may soon become more dangerous than it is today, the flailing tantrum in which the president's final phalanx is engaged isn't frightening as much as it is pathetic.

And from Kevin Williamson:

And what we are seeing now, in the twilight of Trump's kookery, is the merger of QAnon, the Republican Party, and the large part of the conservative movement that earns its bread by peddling miracle veggie pills to gullible elderly people on the radio…. Rather than ask whether conspiracy kookery is relevant to Republican politics at this moment, it would be better to ask if there is anything else to Republican politics at this moment. And maybe there is, but not much.

I'm a Georgia voter who -- as a believer in the benefits of divided government -- could have been persuaded to vote for the two Republican candidates for Senate in their runoff elections. I came of age politically in the era of Reagan and fusionism, my resume screams Fed Soc, and I've always felt most at home in the Republican party. As a Biden voter who's been feeling happier about that choice every day since the election, I'm already looking forward to all the anti-Biden-Administration blog posts I'll write next year. I must be the most un-Democratic of the Democrats these days. I'd love to be able to vote for Republicans again, maybe for the first time since 2014, if the party ever rejects Trump and Trumpism. (I say "maybe" because I can't remember whether I voted for a Republican down-ballot in 2016.) But that's not going to be this year.