As the Nation Begins Watching Impeachment Proceedings the GOP Rolls Out Its Clown Car Act...

Trump's misguided and dishonest sycophantic supporters in the GOP, as well as his holier than thou hypocritical Evangelical cheerleaders are all about distractions, lies, and conspiracy theory in support of the man they love. All in the belief the narcissistic and immoral man they support is somehow America's savior selected by God. Something all sane folks know instinctively is pure delusional thinking.

THEBULWARK - As the House opened the first public impeachment hearings on Tuesday, we’ve already previewed a key line in Trump’s defense: the attempted character assassination of impeachment witnesses. With the president, it’s always a game of loyalties, and if you’re not with him, you’re tainted. The whistleblower is a “partisan hack”; Ambassador Bill Taylor is a “Never Trumper”; and Never Trumpers are “human scum.” The federal government is saturated with dangerous “Obama holdovers” and “career bureaucrats” loyal to the dangerous “administrative state.”

The attacks on Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman in recent weeks seem to have marked a low point. Vindman is, by all accounts, a man of integrity. He’s a decorated officer, diplomat, and scholar, with a rather incredible immigration story. But for the Trump crowd he’s just another “Never Trumper”—one who, thanks to his having been born elsewhere, they’re also happy to smear as a possible double-agent.

On the whole, these attacks confirm a lot that we already know about Trump and the Republicans who continue to support him—about, for example, their operative paranoia and their cynical reduction of politics to tribal self-interest.

But the smears also reveal and exploit a key vulnerability in our broader political culture: They leverage deep confusions about the very possibility of sound political judgment, and assume that Americans will be unable to form reasonable judgments about different kinds of loyalty. In other words, the attacks demonstrate Republicans’ willingness to kowtow to the same postmodern relativism that they profess to dislike so much.

I’m certainly not the first to point to a connection between Trumpism and postmodernism. (Aaron Hanlon wrote about it in 2018, and Sean Illing does a great job explaining the complicated character of the relationship in this recent piece.) Postmodernism is difficult to define but these days it’s usually deployed to label leftists who question the idea of eternal moral truths and standards. Setting aside the issue of postmodernism’s genuine meaning and value, it’s easy to show how the attacks on the impeachment witnesses are cultivating genuinely nihilistic terrain.

Once conservative and GOP politics and philosophy had vision and integrity. They no longer do. As a result neither conservatism or the GOP has even an once of credibility.Nor does the American arm of  Evangelicalism.

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