Frank Bruni: "They're Not Drinking Bleach, But They Are Drinking The Kool-Aid"

Lindsey Graham epitomizes the way Republicans in Congress have enabled President Trump.Alex Wong/Getty Images

They’re not drinking bleach, but they are drinking the Kool-Aid

By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist

One of the most widely read articles in The Times last weekend was a report by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman that Republican leaders are dreading the potential consequences of President Trump’s “erratic handling” of the coronavirus crisis.

Consequences like a higher death toll and more fitful recovery than America might otherwise experience? No. Trump’s re-election is party leaders’ focus. They fear that if he rants, rages and stumbles around too outrageously and too much, he won’t get the chance to rant, rage and stumble around for four more years. If his madness is too naked, there’s a ticking clock on how long he can inflict it on the rest of us.

Forget about his damage to the country. They’re concerned about his damage to the party — and about not having one of their own in the White House, no matter how ill suited for it he is. Republican officials confessed additional anxiety that Trump might hurt the re-election prospects of Republican senators, who have abetted his worst behavior by excusing and even laundering it. God forbid they too don’t get an encore, so that they can perpetuate their shameful performances.

In a political ecosystem as partisan as ours, Republicans protect fellow Republicans and Democrats do likewise with their own. Those are the rules. That’s the game.

But the degree to which this impulse is indulged makes all the difference, as does the nature of the offenses and inadequacies being forgiven. For the sake of decency and of our increasingly fragile democracy, there must be a limit. And when it comes to Trump, Republicans don’t seem to have one.

From the start of his presidency, a cycle has repeated itself: Trump does something deeply offensive and spectacularly inappropriate. Republican lawmakers mutter off the record to journalists that they’re aghast at it. Those same Republicans gag themselves publicly. Then they work furiously to make sure that Trump and the party suffer the least political fallout possible.

And from the start of his presidency, I have waited, in all my optimism and innocence, for a pause in the cycle — for the moment when Republican lawmakers realize that to prop up Trump is to take down America.

Mitt Romney’s vote and bold words at Trump’s impeachment trial weren’t rebellion enough. Nor were the flickering protests of Jeff Flake and Bob Corker before they exited the Senate.

Exceptions like those just bring the dangerous sycophancy of an overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress — the sellouts like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy — into bolder relief. And that sycophancy apparently has no end.

My colleague Michelle Goldberg noted in a column last weekend that Trump’s contempt for expertise and incompetence meant one thing pre-pandemic and means quite another now. The same goes for Republican lawmakers’ enabling of the president.

I don’t expect those lawmakers to root loudly for his defeat in November and campaign actively for Joe Biden (though some disgusted Republicans outside of Congress, God bless them, are doing just that). But in the wake of Trump’s nutty outbursts and stunning lack of leadership over the past four months, I did expect that at least a few Republican leaders would downgrade the importance of his continued grip on power and give patriotism as much consideration as tribal loyalty. Joe Biden may not be their cup of tea, but that’s no excuse to keep drinking Trump’s Kool-Aid.

They should spend their energy on nudging, even muscling, him toward better decisions in real time. They shouldn’t spend it on dressing up his failures so that he gets to rack up more of them in the future.

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Hocus POTUS

Victoria Gray/The Strong, via Associated Press

Science is a badge of our sophistication, while superstition is a reminder of our primitivism. You’re thinking that I’m about to pivot to President Trump, the bleach and the sunlight.

No. I’m looking at many of the rest of us.

We have been saying — at least a boatload of my acquaintances have — that he’s probably going to get re-elected. That after all the lying, crassness and cluelessness, he’ll get a second term.

But there’s scant proof of this in polls, as I explained in my column last weekend. Republican leaders aren’t confident of it, as the Martin-Haberman story I mentioned earlier demonstrates.

And the idea that voters will extend Trump’s White House lease defies the impression that he has left with the worst of his behavior at the coronavirus task force briefings. The endless bragging, the ceaseless blaming: If narcissism were a physical disorder, these antics would be the prolonged seizures that came with it.

So why the refrain that he’ll win again regardless? In my column I theorized that we’re performing a kind of spiritual prophylaxis and girding for despair, lest it incapacitate us when it arrives. I wrote that we’ve also learned to see Trump as someone above the laws of nature, an escape artist who keeps wriggling out of circumstances that would damn any other politician.

I left out two other reasons.

One is the polls. Not the surveys I just mentioned, which show that Americans fault him for his lateness in recognizing and responding to the coronavirus and that if the presidential election were held today, he’d lose to Joe Biden in crucial battleground states.

I’m talking about the surveys last time around. As a reader recently wrote to me, “I can’t forget all the polls and predictions from all the smart pundits in 2016 — even up to Election Day.” He recalled that the night before, one venerated political handicapper predicted such a great night for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats that they’d reclaim the Senate majority.

Polls were wrong then. Why should they be right now?

But there’s something additional at work in the declaration that Trump will triumph anew. It’s a kind of magical thinking.

Not just pollsters and pundits but most Democratic voters were certain Trump wouldn’t make it to the White House — and then he did. So maybe if we’re certain that he’ll stay there, he won’t? Invert the mind-set, invert the result.

There’s some strategic sense to this. Hillary Clinton may have been hurt by the complacency of voters opposed to Trump, some of whom surely didn’t cast ballots because they expected him to be easily defeated.

But there’s also an element of superstition. The Trump-will-win foreboding belongs not to the realm of charts but to the realm of charms. It’s like carrying a rabbit’s foot or wearing an amulet.

And that’s fine by me if it does the trick.