To the Editor:
The house will vote soon on whether to strip Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney of an important post because of her posture on Trump.
She recently said, “Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the constitution” or continue to side with Trump’s statements about a stolen election and his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
What astonishes me about this entire issue, is not that Trump encouraged violence by his praising it with faint damnation (as he did with other white extreme Right-Wing groups) but that Republicans would back an ex-president who was never popular. Aside from the constant flow of lies, insults, and boasts he had a dismal record of achievements.
A top of the list of things he promised but scarcely even tried to accomplish would be that he would replace Obamacare with “great health care at a fraction, a fraction of the cost and it’ll be great”. No action whatsoever.
Then there was his plan to heal our many infrastructure problems with a public partner arrangement which didn’t even pass the laugh test by his own party.
Add to that the almost total failure of foreign policy, leading with Iran, North Korea, the alienation of almost all our democratic allies. In fact, his only successes in that area was that he didn’t lead us into war and his role in brokering Israeli agreements with a couple Arab nations.
His insistence on archaic tools in trying to re-arrange relations with other economies did absolutely nothing but anger other nations and demonstrated a complete failure to understand the inherent manufacturing flexibility that is now the norm around the world.
He campaigned with a claim that other nations were picking on the poor defenseless US and vowed “you will see a drop in the trade deficit like never before” by withdrawing from trade agreements which he did.
He slapped sanctions and tariffs on a variety of nations, including allies but utterly failed with all of them to accomplish anything, even with his arch target, China. He turned out to be the tough negotiator that wasn’t.
None of that even mentions his most disastrous failures – his constant attack on science and education, his role in spreading covid and the withdrawal of the US not only from international agreements on climate change and domestic policies to address it, but actually denying it and encouraging industries which promote it. And most recently, his post election loss behavior.
In fact, I can only think of one area in which he clearly succeeded by his own actions- limiting illegal immigration, which I approve of, although I was appalled by his heavy handed way of doing it.
This situation is so bad that the Republican party now stands in diametrical opposition to the consensus agreement of the body of presidential historians which ranks Trump, not in the upper levels, nor even in the middle, but close to the very bottom, in company with the likes of Buchanan and other pre-civil war failures.
So, it will be interesting to see how it turns out. Given Van Drew’s fawning on Trump, I think I know his position – to heck with the constitution, truth and nation; back Trump – but how the rest of the House will behave?
