Thrown from the Trump train
To the editor:
Congressperson Liz Cheney voted with former President Trump more than 90% of the time. She took a stand only after he lost his second election. Illegal and dishonest attempts to overturn the results of the second lost public election were and are despicable. But so was the “good people on both sides” endorsement of racism, his assertion that he as a celebrity he was entitled to “grab ’em…” reference to pawing women, etc.
It should not be a Big Fat Deal for an elected official to stand for democracy. That Cheney is being lauded for clearing such a low bar is a frightening mark of how far we have slid from normality. The GOP primaries support for Trump’s surrogates is a sad commentary on the core party’s slide to delusional fealty to the “lost cause.” But we lose democracy just that way, by ever warming incremental lies; until we are surprised to be boiled alive.
Women who claim they support, “not the personality but the policies” of Trump, should not expect his loyalty in return. Like religious folks who kid themselves that they buy pornography “to read the articles” their inconsistency is unsettling. Refusing to join the misogynist clown cult in rubber stamping the appointment of Kavanaugh for Supreme Court did not cost Lisa Murkowski her Senate seat. But Murkowski’s voters had witnessed a longstanding pattern of her rectitude. But Liz Cheney rode the Trump clown car path, strewn with bottle-blond divorcees kicked to the curb, and didn’t see it coming. While the tiny handful of voters in Wyoming may be Lincoln’s “some of the people all of the time” Republicans, maybe they also find Cheney’s sudden righteousness unsettling in it’s abruptness. Perhaps she had groomed them too long to tolerate an absence of character as acceptable public behavior in the highest office.
Ellen Starbird
Cape Coral