Donald Trump never wants anything "fixed." He wants it remade in his image. It doesn't matter if what he's doing to something helps it or not. What matters is he can slap his shitty name on it and pretend it's his. It's even better when he can take something someone else built or had dedicated to them and take credit after doing nothing or very little or just fucking it up completely. I think a lot about the time in 1996 that Trump just showed up at the ribbon-cutting for a nursery school for kids with HIV. He hadn't given a goddamn nickel, but he bullied his way in and sat in the front row so he could be in all the photos and pretend he was a decent human being when he was just 250 pounds of shit in an ill-fitting suit. (Lower weight because he was thinner in the 90s.) Does nothing, takes credit.
Of course, that was when Trump was a loser CEO of a constantly bankrupt or near-bankrupt company with no shareholders, no one to be responsible to except the greed of himself, his shitty children, and the few employees he actually gave enough of a shit about to pay off for being accomplices to all his crimes. And no one to hold him to account unless they got through his layers of lawyers and goons and frivolous lawsuits and threats.
That's not the case with the presidency. The way shit is supposed to work is that the Congress is supposed to step in and say, "No, fuck you, you can't do that and we won't fund it." Congressional committees are supposed to dig into it when the White House just wantonly does crimes. Yeah, it wouldn't matter if they made referrals to the Justice Department for prosecution because the DOJ now exists as Trump's spooge cloth, but that's not the point. When the next funding bill comes up, you specify that you're not spending money on it. Power of the pursestrings, motherfuckers. If Congress does nothing about disastrous shit when it could do something, then it owns the disasters.
And under current Republican leadership in the House and, for the most part, in the Senate, the position of the Congress has been prone, supine, or recumbent, just fucking laying there to be stepped over, stomped on, ignored, or, if necessary, fucked by Trump and his Executive Branch minions. As Trump is justifiably blamed for debacle after debacle, for fuck-up after fuck-up, we cannot lose sight of the fact that every single Republican (save the occasional Massie or Murkowski vote) needs to be blamed, too.
Take, for instance, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Sure, it needed updates because that's how shit works when you've gotta take care of a pool. Equipment fails, conditions change, and other things happen where you gotta do repairs to keep it pretty. But Trump had to fuck with it and pretend like he knew anything at all about what he was doing. You know he wanted it painted "American Flag Blue," which is dumb and embarrassing and grotesque like this entire era we're damned to live through. You know he gave the no-bid contract to whatever corrupt cartoon character most recently greased the skids. He broke at least three laws by barreling ahead without required bidding on the project and without required environmental and historic preservation reviews, and, without congressional action to halt it, an outside group has sued. But Trump now argues that suit is moot because the project is "complete" (even though it is far from complete). So crimes be damned, right?
Congress owns the green algae and the peeling paint because Republicans let Trump get away with it. However, none of the articles I've read about this incredibly symbolic failure mention that the House and Senate abdicated their responsibility and thus are accessories to the crimes here. They are covered in toxic slime and paint sludge as much as Trump is.
The same goes for every law, big and small, cavalierly broken by Trump and his mobster administration. Republicans in Congress let Trump take over the power of the purse; they said nothing as he ignored laws on bidding for contracts and more for his concentration camps; they let him tear down a third of the White House without even a head shake; they do nothing about the constant execution of people who have been charged with no crimes, let alone convicted; they let all of the human rights abuses, all of the civil rights abuses, all of the war crimes, all of the reaming of the rule of law happen; they let all his plainly illegal executive orders stand without a word; a few barely squeaked out a protest about the Iran war, but that was primarily Democrats voting for it. Congress has a goddamn job, and it's not to be Trump's penis koozie.
And here's the thing: Mike Johnson or John Thune could have said, "Hey, we're gonna agree to all this shit. But just follow the law." It sucks, but at least a fig leaf is better than standing naked for the world to laugh at your little dong. But they didn't. So it's all on them, too, and campaigns and coverage need to make their inaction as important as Trump's actions. Because, see, he thinks he's making everything in his image, but every single thing he's done also reflects back on them, too. Every failure, every disgrace, every nightmare, every death, every crime is theirs, too. Hang it all on them until it breaks their political necks.