Republican politicians, already backed into a corner by the constant need to defend the president’s endless excesses and atrocious behavior, have been placed in an even worse position by the president’s recent boasts.
Donald Trump stunned the nation on Wednesday night when he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would gladly accept dirt on his 2020 election opponents if it was offered to him by a foreign country and said he might not tell the FBI about it.
Essentially promising to collude with a foreign power to swing yet another election in his favor, Trump’s supporters in Congress are now faced with the unenviable task of dealing with the inevitable and extremely vocal fallout from the president’s remarks — and a great many of them are showing their cowardly hands and simply refusing to comment at all.
The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim confronted the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Risch (R-ID) and demanded to know what he had to say about the president promising to help foreign powers sabotage our democracy — and he could not have given a worse answer:
Jim Risch, the Senate Foreign Relations chairman, was not all too interested my Qs about Trump’s ABC interview pic.twitter.com/2lPbyEdLUV
— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) June 13, 2019
Not only did he punt away the question, he managed to work in a sarcastic and suspiciously condescending jab at the reporter’s English, showing just how much contempt and derision he feels for the media and their prying questions.
Ostensibly the party of rah-rah hyperpatriotism obsessed with national security, it appears that there is no hypocrisy too great and nothing too heinous that the president could say or do that would cause them to break ranks and turn again him, even if it goes against everything they’ve claimed to stand for over the past forty years.
