Letter to a Republican Friend

Nearly a decade ago, you, and so many of our friends and former colleagues chose silence when Donald Trump captured the Republican Party. You found your unique rationalization about why it was time to join up with his ilk: It was a time for choosing, and once made, your choice defined you – in small things and great.

Power, or money, or proximity, or a belief that you could “manage” this raging bullshit artist, helped you across that river – to the bank that looked back on decency and democracy as quaint, and old, and weak. You are further now from where you started than ever. Tomorrow you’ll be further still. 

Now, as then, there is no going back, no looking back, no reflection on what you’ve done or where you’ve gone. To do so would force you to see what you’ve become in the name of someone you first described as a buffoon, someone you saw as unfit for office from day one and willing to destroy our institutions – even in the face of defeat – for his own (and your own) aggrandizement. You said little three years ago, because you weren’t sure whether his attempts to stay in office would succeed. As always, you want to be, need to be, on the “winning” side. 

I see now, all these years later, that the work we did together meant something different to each of us. I believed that those for whom we worked held good intentions. I believed that what we were doing was for the good of the country and its citizens. The tens of thousands of miles flown, the dozens of towns visited, the innumerable individual Americans we met, and their lightening smiles, meant something different to me than to you.

I saw this as the “rising tide” that would lift all boats, as quaint as that now seems. You saw each of those faces not as the people we served, but as steppingstones to your own advancement. The ignorance and bliss of youth is powerful enough to blind us to what even those closest to us may become.

In 2016, you said you had to support Trump because you’re a Republican. He was the guy the party chose and that’s where your loyalty lay. Perhaps you we were willing to go along with it, because, like so many of us, you didn’t think he’d win. But he did. As soon as he did, you inserted yourself into his “American carnage” administration as quickly as you could.

You scaled heights quickly, given the dearth of both competition and competence. Throughout his four years in office, you said that Trump had the authority to do what he was doing; ignoring that just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should. If by some awful twist of fate, Trump wins again this fall, you’ll again be at the front of the line to join up, excusing his behavior and his acts; some of which you’ve probably helped them concoct.

As he and his cronies marched along, ripping out the circuitry of American democracy, your rationalizations kept pace – imagine how much worse it would be if you weren’t there to keep an eye on things. That rings hollow, of course, because it is.

You weren’t protecting the Republic – you were protecting and promoting yourself, confident that if he did indeed lose, you’d be allowed to re-enter the Beltway Matrix, welcomed with open arms back into the hive of the political bureaucracy. You were right, of course. For someone who claims to hate the government, it’s the host you’ve never been able to quit.

We knew that Trump wouldn’t go quietly into retirement. We knew he would be unable to sit quietly in exile. His actions of four years ago, four months ago, four weeks ago or four days ago were of no surprise to us, and probably not to you, either. And here we find ourselves again at the crossroads of friendship. When I didn’t see a public denunciation of the actions of a defeated president and his congressional compatriots, I wasn’t surprised.

You’ve always known when to keep your head down; whether it was Trump’s lethal bungling of Covid, his blackmail of Ukraine, or inciting a riot at the Capitol, you know that in Washington it’s impolite to ask whether you’d share a table with a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirt. What would you have done had Trump chosen to drive the nation into a state of civil unrest? No one’s ever asked, and you live in comfort knowing that few people with whom you work or socialize, ever will. 

 Because for all of you, the fictional world in which you now inhabit is essential to the belief that you’re not a bad person, that you did your best in a bad situation, and that all of this – all the ugliness, the insanity, and threats of violence will be over soon. Despite your efforts, active or passive, to bring us to where we are today, you still believe that you’ve done nothing wrong, that your actions were for the greater good, and that if called again you’ll be willing to serve. To say you’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid” is an insufficient indictment.

Those whispers in the recesses of your mind still wake you. You know you should have done better, acted differently, and put America before your own desire, but you didn’t. Your conscience will grind on you, but you won’t listen: Self-reflection, like that of your leader, is uncomfortable and unpleasant.

You could, of course, decide that, at long last, Trump has no decency, is bad for the United States, shares no values, conservative or otherwise, and should never return to the White House. But you won’t. Your ambition long ago shattered whatever moral compass you once claimed.

You, like so many other Republican ‘leaders’ prefer to sit in your Northern Virginia backyards or your CityCenter condos and pretend the world in which we live today isn’t, in part, your creation. When the time comes, we will see each other again on opposite sides of the divide. I won’t be surprised by your actions, whatever they are. At this point, I doubt you’re surprised by mine.

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