This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "Any Republican Will Do"
Republican leaders have lost their moral compass. When Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was a young politician, he called the Watergate affair "totally repugnant" and denounced the conduct of President Richard Nixon. (Rucker, 2019)
However, his most recent campaign ad shows him stoutly supporting President Trump, saying, "The way that impeachment stops is a Senate majority with me as majority leader." (Kaplan, 2019) How could a Republican leader who watched the corruption of Watergate unfurl, stand idly by as the President flaunts the fact that he invited a foreign government to interfere with our election process?
When candidate Donald Trump was caught on tape speaking of grabbing a woman by the genitals, I knew he was done politically, but to my amazement, he wasn't. When candidate Trump referred to Mexicans in the vilest terms that I had ever heard from any political leader, I thought surely he was done.
I remember as a Republican teacher, in a primarily Hispanic community, being surrounded by Hispanic students, shortly following candidate Trump's remarks. They asked me, "Mr. T, are you voting for Trump?" I remember assuring them that I would never vote for Trump. In the back of my mind, I just knew that he would never make it that far. There was no scenario that I could imagine that candidate Trump would receive the Republican Party’s nomination.
Then the unthinkable started to happen. The candidate with the least demonstrated moral character, no military service, no record of success in public office, no identification with the religious right, the one whose success as a "businessman" had been derided and ridiculed—this candidate began to emerge as the front runner.
It was clear that candidate Trump's white nationalism, anti-immigration, cut taxes for the wealthy and villainize all things Obama, were making him the candidate with the best chance to beat former first-lady, Secretary of State and Senator, Hillary Clinton. Political affiliation aside, on paper, candidate Trump's political resume did not deserve to be compared to Hillary Clinton's. However, under the "any Republican will do" banner, candidate Trump was amply qualified. We know the rest of the story.
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