Published in the Concerned Center City Citizens Review, May 2018

By Joseph Batory

In 2016, Mitt Romney, a former Republican presidential nominee, summarized Donald Trump as a phony and a fraud.  “Trump’s domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe,” Romney said. “He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.”

But now as Romney’s opportunity to become a Senator from Utah gets closer, he has backtracked from his position on Trump to stay on the “good side” of the imperial president.

What a sad lesson of politics: Romney now appears to have lost his sense of principle to accomplish his goal of getting elected to the Senate.

Indeed, far too many Republican elected officials are guilty of “deafening silence” about a president who demonstrates consistent disregard for the truth, and has a record of sexual improprieties, adultery, misogyny, racism, bigotry, rude and inappropriate behaviors, corruption, and questionable business practices.

Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, one of the few in his party to speak out against Trump, has essentially committed political suicide for his career by condemning the GOP’s “seeming amnesia” in the face of Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions.    “It is a measure of how far we have fallen that we must fight for the basic ideas of American liberty and the preservation of basic norms such as: the attorney general is not the president’s personal lawyer …and the FBI director does not owe the president personal loyalty …” Flake said.

One other Republican Senator who has spoken out is Bob Corker of Tennessee. After a series of bizarre middle of the night Trump tweets, Corker concluded: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”

Insanity now rules Washington!  Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is operating against the very purposes for which it was created. The Secretary of Education appointee is someone who knows “nothing” and cares little about public schools.  Immigrant children brought here as endangered refugees now face deportation. And idealistic teenagers asking for gun control sanity have been ridiculed by Republicans.

Coupled with all of this, ethical behavior has disappeared. Trump’s frequent sojourns to Florida have already cost taxpayers many millions of dollars. Misuse of taxpayer money among cabinet members has already occurred by the HUD Secretary, the Treasury Secretary, the former Veterans Affairs Secretary, and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

More than 130 President’s appointees, including the President’s daughter and son-in-law, lack permanent security clearances. And many other anointed lackeys have already resigned or been removed.

Sadly, the “common good” of citizens, the very reason government exists, is no longer an American value.  And the Republican party is asleep at the wheel.

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Joseph Batory is the author of three books has been widely published on “politics and education.”