Results: The Rot Within

Say this for South Carolina Senator Tim Scott: At least he understands it's all-in or nothing at all. There can have been few sadder displays of human abasement than Mr. Scott's performance last week. The South Carolina senator rightly likes to make much of his family's ascent from sharecropper to Congress in a couple of generations. I couldn't help but wonder what his grandfather would have made of his stepping awkwardly forward at Mr. Trump's New Hampshire victory party to say the reason he endorsed the former president rather than the former South Carolina governor who appointed him to his seat was that "I just love you." Would you allow yourself to be publicly debased like Senator Scott and the other aforementioned Republican politicians have by Donald Trump?

The saddest thing is that we all know this Faustian bargain is no such thing. At least Dr. Faustus got 24 years of magic and mischief for his soul. These guys get what? A year or two of not being insulted by the master? A brief respite from the venom of Trump cult members before they get discarded along with everyone else? To be fair, we all at times face choices between preserving our opportunities and preserving our dignity. It's the rare human who never accepts some degree of self-erasure to achieve a larger objective. In the tangled conscience of these men, I am sure there's a skein of moral logic that leads from their unsightly compromise to some ultimate good. Have you ever compromised your dignity in exchange for future personal opportunities like these ambitious Republican politicians have with Donald Trump?

But the dismaying reality for people who care about the promotion of conservative ideals is that this has gone way beyond the accommodations that ambitious and unprincipled men feel they must make for their careers and their political objectives. It represents a hollowing out of the Republican Party as a vehicle for those ideals. You can believe in the importance of party loyalty; you can even believe that Trumpian populism is the right course for the party and the country. You can't be a democratic Republican and believe that this course requires the purging of all alternatives, the rededication of the party to its purification through loyalty to one man. Has the Republican Party sold their soul to Donald Trump?

The ultimate irony is that in the end, through their self-degradation, the Republican enablers of Trump prove themselves in at least one critical way far worse than the man who makes them do it. They demonstrate that they are what he and large numbers of voters have long suspected them to be—desperate hacks who put their own advancement ahead of any other principle or consideration in life. Is the Republican Party allowing itself to be destroyed from the rot within as the conservative paper, The Wall Street Journal, opines it has?