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/