The Republican Party Are Trump’s Towel Boys

The Donald hasn’t stopped making (or, perhaps more accurately, allowing) Chris Christie to debase himself:

In an effort to contrast Paul Ryan’s own hesitancy in supporting Trump, The New Yorker offers the following aside:

Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, another of Trump’s opponents early in the campaign, has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events. (One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order.)

 

Either Donald Trump has some genuinely monstrous intel on him, or Chris Christie really is just glad to get his foot in the door with some valuable, on-the-job experience. Either way, I’m sorry you had to start your day like this.

Like Shakezula, I strongly recommend the NYT’s brilliantly reported piece on Trump’s Atlantic City Casino racket. The most outrageous parts of the story are the ordinary small businesses and shareholders that Trump stiffed and bilked. But another telling series of details is that even after it should have been obvious that the AC casinos were just a massive scam, after multiple bankruptcies even when other casinos in the city were thriving — Trump was looting under-and-junk-bond-financed businesses that were designed to fail — he was still able to attract sophisticated investors to come and take their haircut. And it’s this skill at bullying and manipulating that he’s bringing to the Republican Party:

What has been revealed since Trump’s nomination became inevitable is the nature of the power relation between Trump and other figures in his party. In late February — to take one time-capsule moment of mainstream conservative thought — the columnist Ross Douthat predicted, “If Trump is the nominee, neither Rubio nor Cruz will endorse him.” By spring, Rubio had indeed endorsed Trump, and it is just a matter of time before Cruz follows suit. Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist who had tried to organize a super-PAC to stop Trump during the primaries, has since declared that he is organizing one to help elect him. Trump’s Republican opponents had once vowed to wage a vigorous independent right-wing campaign against him, becoming a kind of Republican Party in exile, perhaps led by Nebraska senator Ben Sasse or even Mitt Romney. By the end of May, a leader was identified: David French, a blogger for National Review with no experience in elected office and who withdrew from consideration shortly thereafter. Officials who had once called Trump “a madman who must be stopped” (Bobby Jindal), less qualified to be president than “a speck of dirt” (Rand Paul), and “our Mussolini” (Congressman Chris Stewart) have since endorsed him.

Christie is just an extreme example of what the party is going through. Admittedly, these Republicans are acting more rationally than investors who continued to approve financing for Trump’s casino scam — he will sign the legislation Ryan and McConnell put on his desk and mostly outsource his staffing of the executive and judicial branches to conservative think tanks, after all. But the Republicans thinking that the party can constrain Trump’s worst impulses are kidding themselves. A Trump presidency would marry awful Republican policy with an authoritarian id that respects no norms at all. But, you know, not a dime’s worth of difference with the neoliberal Hillary Clinton.