Let's be clear here: The Republican Party holds the power it does because it is unafraid to lie. From the overhyped fear of Communism to the overhyped fear of crime to the overhyped fear of terrorism, the GOP has jumped from lie to lie to lie in order to maintain power, often pivoting back to ones that work so well, like welfare fraud and, time and again, crime. They recovered from their near dismantling in 2006 and 2008, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 washed away the Bush bullshit, by going big with the lies about Barack Obama and, especially, about the Affordable Care Act. And as Republican leaders in the Senate desperately try to come up with a way to squeeze out one more turd of a Trumpcare bill, they are lying with abandon, and not just about what's in the aforementioned turd.
Obamacare markets aren't "collapsing." They're stabilizing. People on the Medicaid expansion aren't desperate to get rid of it. They are satisfied with the care they are getting. Over two-thirds of the country, including a majority of Republicans, support the birth control mandate in Obamacare, the subject of another fake controversy just to appeal to yahoo religious nutzoids.
And the reason that they've gotten away with lying is that they are so fucking good at it. They are so fucking good at playing the media, playing their constituents, playing the Democrats, playing everyone. They are master bullshitters. They get away with it because conservative ideas in a political context are so fucking simple to understand. What's easier on the brain? "We should provide decent education, housing, job-training, and anti-poverty programs to help combat crime"? Or "Lock 'em up"? Democrats can't compete until they come up with a better story than the lies that have worked so well for so long.
It was going along so well for the GOP until the Trumps, this family of outsiders, came along and fucked it all up. Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and Junior have lived on a privileged plane of existence, where having a cadre of brutish dickhead attorneys on retainer is enough of a deterrent for anyone who would dare question them or try to get paid fairly. They could intimidate people into silence or, if that fails, settle any lawsuits with the handy provisions that they admit no guilt and the plaintiffs can't talk about it. They could be bumblefuck corrupt business shitheels and get away with it.
The biggest problem in getting into the public arena is that, all of a sudden, the Trumps have to deal with the federal government, an entity that doesn't just have lawyers but entire goddamned bureaus devoted to investigating just the kind of fuckery that the Trumps have regularly been involved in. Throw in a media that realizes it had better make itself relevant again or just fucking give up, and a group of people as boisterously, unashamedly moronic as the Trumps don't stand a chance. You don't want to be probed and pilloried? Then either don't be corrupt (except in the usual way of sucking up to Wall Street and other rich fucks - that's just sadly acceptable now), like Obama, who could take all the shit and toss it back, or don't fucking run for office.
We'll never know what toxic combination of hubris, narcissism, and lickspittlism got Donald Trump to run for president to win. But we do know that another toxic combination got him elected, and one of the primary ingredients in that poison was the interference of the Russian government. We also know that we are learning all this because the Trump family was too fucking dumb to cover it up well. They're shitty liars as well as being shitty human beings.
You can imagine Karl Rove slapping his bloated forehead when he saw the emails between cartoon louche Richie Gallstone or whatever the fuck that guy's name is and Donald Trump, Jr. You can imagine Rove getting on the phone with John Boehner and the two of them, liars of the first order, screaming with laughter, "The subject line...the subject line is 'Russia-Clinton.'" You can imagine them both calling Mitch McConnell and taunting him about having to deal with this shit. You can imagine McConnell slowly cursing the fact that he worked so hard to get all these lies working, all the cocksucking and ratfucking that went into them, and now they're being brought down by these Trump assholes.
You can be corrupt. You can be stupid. You can't be stupid and corrupt. Otherwise, you don't know when to shut the fuck up. You don't know when to keep your head down. You don't know when to not fucking tweet out the evidence that, at the very least, reveals the very thing everyone has been trying to pin on you.
So now it falls to the professional liars, the liars with experience, to try to unfuck this fucked up situation. You are going to see a hard-press from the right-wing attack dogs about how this is nothing, how the Democrats are more corrupt and destructive, how it was just a Washington naif's error. It's happening already, and they're saying that it's essentially treasonous to not support the president, a hypocrisy that they have no problem with. They'll say it's about bringing down the great man Trump, it's about sour grapes over the failure in the election, and it's about the mighty flag-waving patriots who don't want to see the country dragged down by what they don't even see as a scandal.
Which brings us back to the top of this here post. The Trump lies and power-at-any-cost actions are part and parcel of what the Republican Party does. The GOP is filthy with masterful sleaze merchants. They can fuck your ears and tell you it was God's blessing. It's going to be up to the Democrats to come up with a simple, straightforward narrative here that can slap the Republicans down until they scurry back to the gutter.
How this turns out will reveal who gives a shit about the nation. Who is enraged that this has happened. Who the real patriots are.
(Note: Sure, Democrats went along some of the time with GOP lies because they can get swept up in a lie as much as anyone, but they rarely have been the originators of a big lie in the last 50 years. And, yeah, the country ain't perfect. No shit. Patriots work to make it better.)
