Trump Time Capsule #141: 'Selling Their Souls'
Seven days ago, back in the innocent times of early October, I began installment #132 with this paragraph, in its entirety: “Good God.”
That was a few hours after the release (by the Washington Post) of Donald Trump’s now-historic “You can do anything you want” tape. It was one day before some of his GOP supporters began peeling off. It was two days before Trump flatly denied, at the town hall-style second presidential debate, that he had ever “kissed women without consent or groped women without consent.” And it was before the stream of subsequent-day events in which more and more women have come forward to say that in fact he had kissed or groped them; before Trump essentially declared war on the GOP establishment (along with the press and most other institutions); before members of that same GOP establishment retracted their criticism of Trump and crawled back to support him; and before Trump responded to sexual-assault allegations by saying, in effect, that these losers (including Hillary Clinton) aren’t hot enough for him to have bothered with.
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I have been offline for three days, for work and family events in in Erie, Pennsylvania, and San Francisco, and now I see that several dozen items’ worth of Time Capsule material has piled up! So I’ve already used the “Good God” chit and am left just to say: only 24 days to go.
And to mention these reactions or analyses that deserve notice:
1. “Why we shouldn’t forgive the Republicans who sold their souls.” That’s the title of a WaPo essay this week by Robert Kagan. He’s someone I’ve disagreed with for years, mainly on foreign policy, and expect to disagree with again. But I have to respect his courage and clarity in laying out the case that Donald Trump’s defects transcend any routine disagreement over policy or values. (Similarly I’ve come to respect the principle-above-party anti-Trump stands of others with whom I’ve differed on nearly everything else, including Max Boot, Bret Stephens, Jennifer Rubin, and Michael Gerson.)
Read more from The Atlantic:
This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
