Thread: Trump Laid Out the Republican Party Philosophy While Defending His Mocking of Dr. Chr

Trump Laid Out the Republican Party Philosophy While Defending His Mocking of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford

The ends justify the means, always.

By Jack Holmes
Oct 15, 2018

Donald Trump, American president, does not subscribe to the concept of truth in any conventional sense. He genuinely feels that reality can be molded to his wants and needs, and that the truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. If you want it to be so, just say it—again and again and again, until people stop challenging it or asking you where you got it from. And yet, occasionally, the president's brash approach will generate an honest moment. Take his interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes on Sunday, a customary festival of falsehoods that contained one genuinely revealing look into the attitude of Trump and his allies towards political battle.

"It doesn't matter," he said when pressed on his treatment of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. "We won."

Right off the bat, Trump's essential cruelty when dealing with those who say they are survivors of sexual assault shines through. He shrugged when Stahl drew the parallel between Ford's account of the two teenage boys laughing at her—which seems to be the singularly scarring memory from her alleged encounter—and Trump inciting the thousands of Ralph Steadman figures at his rally to laugh at her. He seems profoundly incapable of digesting the idea that even if he does not believe her story, it is vicious and cruel to mock her—as the president—for political gain. He made it clear that it was for political gain, too: "Had I not made that speech," he declared to Stahl, "we would not have won."

This is, in a number of ways, the essential operating premise of today's Republican Party. The ends justify the means. This ethical philosophy was picked apart by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, though it's still a favorite among people who lack ethics. You could see it in Republican tactics during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, where they shielded themselves with an "independent" female prosecutor during Ford's testimony, then seized back the floor to shout in the nominee's defense when it looked like he was in some trouble. You can see it in Mitch McConnell's schemes in the Senate, where no norm or tradition or rule or fact is above destruction in service of the Will to Power.

You can also see it in the Devil's Bargain the Evangelical Right has made with Donald Trump, whose attempts at religious pandering mostly just mock the intended audience in real time, and whose private life is the exact opposite of the chaste restraint preached by your average megachurch pastor. That's all worth it—along with the baby-snatching at the border, a real testament to Family Values—if he nominates judges who will go their way on issues like abortion and contraception. Like, say, Brett Kavanaugh, whom no serious person has lately claimed will be an impartial adjudicator of the law from the Supreme Court bench. He is a Republican, installed to push the conservative agenda forward—and strengthen the grip of Evangelical leaders and others in the Republican power structure on the levers of power.

Speaking of baby-snatching, the president suggested in the same 60 Minutes interview that he was open to putting the family separation policy back in place. To buttress his point, he repeated the lie that President Obama had the same policy. The Obama administration set up facilities to hold unaccompanied minors who came to the border in a 2014 surge, but they did not separate kids traveling with parents and make them into unaccompanied minors. That was all Trump—and Stephen Miller. No matter, though. Just another lie in service of larger goals. A means to an end.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politic...justify-means/

That is so rich and wrong. Trump make a joke about a woman who all intelligent people believe LIED UNDER OATH FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES. What does such a person deserve? I think they deserve some push-back, and a joke is fine with me, and Trump did it perfectly.

The American People deserve a Supreme Court Justice appointed by their duly elected President of the United States, confirmed by the Senate, without regard to some loonie tune's 36 or whatever "repressed memory" as allegedly confided to a therapist.

She may be a victim of something by someone somewhere at some time, although I don't think so, I think she made the whole thing up, but if she is, there is no evidence that it had anything to do with Brett Kavanaugh. The actions and statements of this 51 year old woman trying to ruin someone's career or more importantly block a US Supreme Court nomination for the people of the United States, deserves far more than mockery, she deserves investigation and prosecution for any violations of law. The fact that all she got was defeat in her mission and a really cute and effective ridicule by the President means at least someone had the balls to push-back and end this travesty, and Donald J Trump is the only one with the pair to do it.

It's time for the air-heads who write stupid articles like this one in Esquire, to grow a pair, to stop creating victims where they don't exist, and instead focus on the millions of actual victims suffering all types of horror throughout our country.

We have far too many victims of real crimes, injustice, betrayal, economic loss and discrimination to create them as a grotesque and nasty means to the end of trying to defeat a political appointment to a court.

Thank God for Donald Trump who decided, not on my watch.