A prominent anti-Trump conservative admitted to still being surprised at the Republican Party, saying in a recent podcast that the recent midterm convention showed a shocking willingness to “degrade and debase and humiliate themselves” for the president.
The GOP this past week held an unprecedented party convention for the upcoming midterm elections, which are widely predicted to see it take bruising losses from Democrats. As the two-night event played out, the worst predictions from many critics appeared to come true, as the proceedings devolved into an unabashed celebration of President Donald Trump, even as it becomes clear that voters are steaming mad at him and ready to vent their frustrations at the ballot box.
One particularly galling portion of Trump’s speech as he closed out the event, in which he asked attendees to raise their hands and repeat a pledge for the midterms.
“I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do,” Trump asked them to repeat, further attacking Democrats and alleging without evidence that “there has never been bigger cheaters.”
Charlie Sykes is a long-tenured conservative political commentator and former editor-in-chief for The Bulwark, known in recent years as an outspoken critic of Trump, his MAGA agenda and the changes he has wrought on the Republican Party. In the latest episode of his podcast, To the Contrary, Sykes told his guest, author and former John Fetterman chief of staff Adam Jentleson, that the depths to which the GOP continues to sink for Trump have exceeded his own expectations, specifically responding to the pledge he made attendees recite.
“The self-humiliation, just as a slight footnote, this has really been kind of a marker of the Trump age, the willingness of people to humiliate themselves,” Sykes said. “This is something I hadn’t calculated on. I had assumed — I think like the Founding Fathers [also assumed] — that people in power would not want to degrade and debase and humiliate themselves on a regular basis.”
He continued: “But one of the things that Donald Trump has tapped into is, apparently, there is a vast reservoir of the desire to, like Lindsey Graham, you know, may he rest in peace, to humiliate themselves and you saw that again [this week].”
“It’s dark, you know,” Jentleson responded. “I mean, it’s it’s it’s surfaced a very dark element of the American public and how they’re willing to go along with sort of the strongman-type leader that we really thought was a feature of other countries but not ours, and and it’s pretty chilling.”