For many years the two political parties gave voters a choice at each election, but nothing lasts forever. It is not a good sign for democracy that one of those parties now seems intent on self-destruction. 

The Republicans entrusted a notorious grifter with zero political experience with the presidency once and is poised to do so again even though Trump faces one criminal prosecution after another and polls show that many Republican voters would abandon the GOP ship rather than vote for a convicted felon.

As if that weren’t enough, the party has made slavish fealty to their leader the price of admission. A failure to bow down to Trump is regarded as heresy as is any willingness to cooperate with Democrats to pass a bipartisan bill. As a result, not since the “do-nothing Congress” that Harry Truman complained of has there been a Congress with a worse record of legislation. 

They should have known better since the previous Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, was voted out of the leadership by Trumpian extremists for the sin of cooperating with Democrats. Another of his bomb-throwing acolytes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has recently proposed impeaching McCarthy’s replacement as speaker, Mike Johnson, for the same transgression — proposing to pass bipartisan legislation.

As David Kirkpatrick said in “Maga Mike,” a recent “Atlantic” article about the new Speaker of the House, “Trump is  both the dominant figure in the Republican Party and its greatest liability. Nobody else so commands the conservative base, and nobody else so effectively turns out Democrats.” 

Trump beat Hilary Clinton in 2016 by close to three million votes, but after four years as an unruly president the scales had fallen from many voters’ eyes and he lost to Biden by seven million votes and lost the electoral college by 306 to 232. He has recently begun to attack President Biden by asking voters if they are better off now than four years ago, but given his record he may not like the answer.

During his tenure Trump proposed buying Greenland, mismanaged the Covid crisis which he called kung flu though there was nothing funny about the death of a million Americans, a market selloff, and the tripling of the unemployment rate. He refused to heed the advice of medical experts, falsely claimed a malaria drug would cure the disease, and proposed penalizing news outlets if they had the audacity to report that he was misleading the public and endangering their health.

He has encouraged his MAGA party followers to ignore enemies foreign and domestic, has sided with extremists and insurrectionists at Charlottesville and at the U.S. Capitol when he encouraged them to help steal an election he had lost. He has also notoriously praised and pandered to malign tyrants whose unfettered power he clearly envies including Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, and Victor Orban.

He has also appointed judges of dubious probity and qualifications to the Supreme Court and lesser venues including Florida’s Cannon who panders to Trump and whose rulings have  repeatedly been rejected by appellate courts.

Trump also exploited his presidency to profit from public service including his latest ludicrous grifts, promoting the sale of gaudy Trump sneakers he would never wear and peddling a Trump Bible for $60 each that he would never read. This is fairly rich from a man who is not known to have ever attended services and when asked to name his favorite Bible verse or book was clueless. 

Of course, Trump’s feigning of faith is in keeping with his long history of peddling any lie that helps him make a buck, mislead his customers, or persuade followers to cast a vote in his favor. Despite his alleged wealth he is relying on suckers to send him campaign contributions which he uses to pay the many lawyers trying to keep him out of prison. 

But his magnum opus is having sold the big lie that he won the 2020 election which he falsely claims was stolen by Biden. Two-thirds of Republicans have fallen for this nonsense and can probably be counted on to vote for Trump again. Why not? He has already persuaded them his conviction of sexual assault and defamation against E. Jean Carroll, his payment of hush money to a porn star, and the other crimes for which he is being prosecuted are just disinformation spread by his enemies. Apparently P.T.Barnum was right. There’s a sucker born every minute.