Republican party disappoints Americans

Tweeter-in-Chief Donald Trump’s presidential executive order banning anyone from seven majority Muslim countries for 90 days and refugees from anywhere in the world for 120 days was signed last Friday. It is the first concrete policy of the new administration’s anti-Muslim stance and a truly horrendous infringement on human rights.

Let’s ignore the fact that it will not stop terrorism, and in fact will do the opposite. Let’s ignore the fact that it is illegal. Let’s ignore the fact that this administration looks about as competent and organized as a basement meth lab and much more explosive. More or less, this is what you should have expected from Donald Trump. He is doing exactly what he said he would do and he’s doing it with the same efficiency with which he ran his “business empire.”

Push all of that out of your mind for the duration of this column.

Let’s focus on the Republican Party as a whole for a second.

Paul Ryan supports the new EO. He was rightly added to a list of invertebrates on a Wikipedia page last weekend.

There are no values in the Republican Party other than taking away healthcare from poor people and restructuring the federal tax policy to favor the rich guys that almost broke the economy playing a game of high stakes poker with someone else’s money. That’s it.

I don’t care if Republican congressmen denounced Trump’s executive order. A lot of them said similar things after “grab them by the pussy”-gate happened during the campaign. Almost all of them backtracked.

Trump called Ted Cruz’s wife ugly and implied that his father may have been involved in the JFK assassination. What did Cruz do? Endorse Donald Trump for president.

Trump criticized Chris Christie for being “weak” and called him “a little boy.” Christie fell in line after dropping out of the race and stood behind Trump like a cheerleader, but three times as fat and a fraction as dignified, for the remainder of the campaign.

The point in all of this is that expecting Republicans to stand up to Trump is like expecting an egg to stand up to a freight train. It won’t happen.

You’ll read the tweet or statement from Republicans condemning Trump’s policies and that’s all you will get for a little while. It’s more PR than substance. They’ll fall back in line after it blows over.

People thought President Trump would be more dignified than Campaigner Trump, that the magnitude and importance of his new role would finally subdue his fundamentally disjointed logic and “12-year-old playing Call of Duty” worldview. That clearly hasn’t happened.

He has shown the office of the President absolutely no respect. In fact, he respects no one, least of all the Republican Party. Why should he? All they’ve ever done is roll over when it became clear that Trump’s ham-handed bigotry superseded their carefully worded version. Paul Ryan still plays the role of big money’s guard dog, spending his day licking where his balls used to be and repeating his well-rehearsed lines about how Obamacare is destroying America and taxing rich people is the work of Satan.

That would be less of a problem if there wasn’t a man in the Oval Office with his finger hovering over a button that launches nuclear weapons when one person makes one too many jokes about how big his genitals are. He must be impeached, but the task has fallen into entirely the wrong hands.

He said he would ban Muslims; he did. He said he wants to build a wall; he’s trying. He said we should use nukes; do you want to wait and find out if he’s serious?

Aleksi Pelkonen, a Sports Editor for the Voice, can be reached for comment at APelkonen17@wooster.edu.