All of us know the sting of failure.
Maybe we came up short in the big game, or got passed over for that promotion, or just sucked at Trivia Night after too many drinks.
But consider the tenacity of Cha Sa-soon, an elderly woman who failed the South Korean driver’s test 960 times. She spent over $10,000 taking and retaking the test until she finally passed. The woman now holds the world’s record for most failed attempts.
But Cha Sa-soon has nothing on the Republican Party. You see, the GOP is currently facing the latest in a long, almost infinite line of supposed “tests.”
But no matter how many times Republicans fail, the mainstream media insists on giving conservatives another chance to prove that they are not bigoted lunatics with a predilection for fascism.
The latest test is Republicans’ response to their infallible leader, who has made the totally reasonable request that we terminate the Constitution, just to make him happy. Now, expressing an open desire to destroy America’s founding document and system of governance is, at best, a wish for anarchy. More likely, however, it is treason and lust for dictatorship.
It’s not difficult to denounce such a proposal. Talk about an easy test to pass.
Yet Republicans are having more trouble with this task than Cha Sa-soon has with left turns. Once again, “many of those within the GOP leadership remain silent on rebuking Trump for this, just as they remained silent after the January 6, 2021, insurrection and instead used their platforms to defend Trump’s dangerous narrative that the 2020 election was stolen.”
These super-patriots, who never decline an opportunity to exclaim how much they revere the Constitution, are now saying “it’s complicated” when it comes to actually defending it. Even the few Republicans who have mumbled mild rebukes aren’t willing to say that threatening the nation’s foundations should “disqualify Trump from running again for the White House.”
What makes this latest failing more comical is that it comes directly after Trump’s chummy dinner with a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semitic rapper. In that case, Republicans offered tepid criticism and pathetically tried to change the subject. Yet the mainstream media once again lined up to say the fiasco “provides a test of the GOP’s response to extremism.”
But wait a minute.
Trump boasting about grabbing women’s genitals was a test.
Charlottesville was a test.
The botching of the pandemic was a test.
The January 6 attack on the Capitol was a test.
And there were so many more tests that we literally can’t remember them all.
Test after test after test. And Republicans get an F every time.
Never has any group of Americans been given more chances to prove themselves, and wiped out every time, only to be granted yet more opportunities.
It’s not ambiguous.
This is the GOP. This is who Republicans are.
Of course, many people will claim that conservatives are finally beginning to distance themselves from Trump. But in reality, Republicans dissociating themselves from Trump is like the Red Sox distancing themselves from Boston. It’s like ice denying that it’s cold, or lightning and thunder announcing that their break-up.
Trump is still the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024. And even if Republicans nominate someone else, it will only be a younger, more coherent, less obnoxious version of the man.
Trump, or at least the idea of Trump, is the essence of their very soul.
The results are in. We don’t need any more tests to figure it out.
Featured image by Robert Hruzek/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
