Quote of the Day

It is a monumental mistake to allow people who will accept anything from Trump to set our standards for acceptable public behavior. By any normal metric, this week’s news – the impeachment hearing, the Stone trial, the mortifying Erdogan meeting, not to mention new revelations of the senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s white nationalism – was sensational and historic. The fact that Republicans are insisting otherwise is a sign of the depths of our political crisis. Each one of us must choose whether to treat their mulish disloyalty to their fellow citizens as a given, worthy only of shrugs, or as a shocking affront that demands redoubled political action.

Faced with evidence of Trump’s crimes, a significant part of the right is trying to convince Americans that the president has been set up by the Jewish philanthropist George Soros. The lurid McCarthyite fantasy that Soros controls American diplomats has been a theme in this scandal from the beginning – Rudy Giuliani has pushed the idea repeatedly. . . . These are the sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that deform public life in squalid second-rate oligarchies like Russia and Hungary. In three short years, Republicans have allowed our country to sink to that level – indeed, to sink below it, since foreign authoritarians find it easy to manipulate our president, and scarcely seem to regard him as their equal.

There is nothing Democrats can do to make their Republican colleagues side with upstanding patriots [like William Taylor, George Kent, and Maria Yovanovitch] – who embody the virtues conservatives once venerated – over their dear leader and the mad rantings of his worshipers. All they can do is make plain the choice America faces between hewing to ideals that everyone in public life once at least pretended to revere, or consenting to their defilement. Either Americans will reclaim their birthright and become a liberal democracy again, or not.

– Michelle Goldberg
Excerpted from “Shame on Us for Getting Used to Trump”
The New York Times
November 14, 2019

Related Off-site Links:
Impeachment and the Stone Verdict Show Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals – Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine, November 15, 2019).
Roger Stone Becomes Sixth Trump Associate Convicted Under Mueller Probe – Lisette Voytko (Forbes, November 15, 2019).
“Witness Intimidation in Real-Time”: Trump Tweets Attack on Marie Yovanovitch During Public Impeachment Testimony – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, November 15, 2019).
Fox News’ Bret Baier Suggests Trump Just Broke the Law in “Real Time” with Tweeted Attacks on Marie Yovanovitch – The Week (November 15, 2019).
Marie Yovanovitch Will Not Be Intimidated – Charles P. Pierce (Esquire, November 15, 2019).
Trump Impeachment Hearings: William Taylor’s Unspinnable Testimony – Eric Lach (The New Yorker, November 13, 2019).
George Kent’s Testimony Destroyed the Right-wing Conspiracy Theories Central to the Impeachment Inquiry – Matt Gertz (Media Matters, November 12, 2019).
Giuliani and Trump: Bound by Corruption From the Beginning? – Tom Robbins (The Nation, October 11, 2019).
Republicans Can’t Abandon Trump Now Because They’re All Guilty – Joel Mathis (The Week, November 14, 2019).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Something to Think About – January 20, 2017
• A Profoundly Troubling and Tragic Indictment
• Michael Sean Winters: “The Entire Republican Establishment Has Caved to Trumpism”
• Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson: “We’re Living at a Critical Moment in Our Democracy”
• Marianne Williamson on What It Will Take to Defeat Donald Trump

Image: Kristen Solberg.