The MAGA Republican candidates for president of the United States are a collective grotesquerie from the addled Donald Trump to the book-banning Ron DeSantis to the soulless Nikki Haley.
Haley’s candidacy is preposterous. She lacks judgement and character, and is clearly best suited for a lifestyle where pretend can be real. She prefers to live with the accountability of a child, while seeking great power. For what exactly?
What does it mean to speak truth to power? President Kennedy had a fiercely loyal aide named Kenneth O’Donnell, who reportedly thrived on being the first person in the Oval Office every morning to tell the President of the United States that he was “full of shit.” There are truths that must be spoken, and more often than not, those truths need to be said in small rooms with profoundly powerful people who don’t want to hear them. The ability to listen, learn, adapt, adjust and command is at the core of the skill set that is necessary to lead the nation. A leader who will not listen can become arrogant and detached. A detached and arrogant leader can turn angry, and that is when their ego can become ruinous.
During my years on television I said often that “the most fragile flower in the world is the male ego, and the most fragile flower of them all is Donald Trump.” The truth is that he stands tall in a forest of giant sequoias with a luminescent entitlement sprung from his narcissism and disordered spirit. Yet, his shame is not lonely. While it is unique, unprecedented and transgressive, it is easily equaled by the cowardice and appeasement that ringed him in a circle of sycophancy that turned a Queens con man, ripoff artist, tax cheat, serial scammer and deviant into the undisputed leader of a cult of personality that demands that what is true is what the scumbag from Mar-a-Lago says is true.
The snivelling nature of Trump’s toadies is exceptional by any measure, but collectively, it is Olympian. There is no person who is more preening in his piousness and moral elasticity than the man Trump tried to have hanged: Vice President Mike Pence. Former radio talk show host and tobacco spokesperson Pence served the most loathsome man to ever become the nominee of a major political party in America. Pence did it for ambition and power. He got what he wanted, and like Haley in getting it, they will be denied what they truly covet, which is the most powerful office in the world.
The combined unfitness of Mike Pence, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley for the American presidency is something more suited to a '“Saturday Night Live” skit where the cast on acid communes with the ghosts of Belushi and Lincoln on a campaign against Cookie Monster. It is an absurdity, while simultaneously being a grave threat to the future peace, prosperity and domestic tranquility of the United States.
Haley and Pence are two among a flock of cowards who betrayed their oaths and positions of public trust by refusing to speak truth to power. They wouldn’t tell the truth at a moment of growing crisis. They lacked the judgement to see what was inevitably coming, while possessing none of the integrity, grit, moral fiber and common sense to look Donald Trump dead in the eye and say, “YOU LOST THE ELECTION.”
No one would do it. NO ONE in the Republican MAGA Party would do it. Not a single person. There were a handful of unequivocal voices who resisted the call to power. Mostly, they have left their elected offices having been turned out by a motivated extremist faction that demands victory in every election or else.
The greatest test of Mike Pence’s and Nikki Haley’s lives is what took place during the Trump years and they failed like “Ishtar” on steroids. They put Trump first. They put themselves first, and they put the United States last. When the time came to talk straight they refused to do it. Pence’s appeasements and mealy-mouthed equivocations concerning Trump’s claims were heard by Trump and taken as license for greater outrages and calumnies. While Pence conducted himself lawfully on January 6 and did his constitutional duty, he does not deserve praise. His tenure demonstrated his untrustworthiness — as does Haley’s. Only a nation of imbeciles would turn over command of America’s military to these spineless people. We are many things in the United States, but we are not that — or are we?
Nikki Haley believes that since Trump believed that he won, his claims about winning were honest and well-intentioned. Come again? Anyone who would ever say something so idiotic out loud should never sit in the Oval Office. Ever. She actually believed that her answer to Tim Alberta in his Politico profile was clever.
All of these people were in the room where it happened, and none of them spoke truth to power. There is something elemental about American democracy that applies to all democracies, everywhere. Every person and organization that participates in an election is bound by the solemn obligation of accepting the judgement of the people. The vote of the people is what gives legitimacy to power in the United States.
Our greatest inheritance and obligation is the perpetuity of the legal transfer of peaceful power under the constitution of the United States. The quest for justice, freedom, opportunity, security and peace is the foundation for a moral society. Foundational to the basic generational ethic that has never been broken in this country is to make certain the America of tomorrow is a bit better than today. There is no sundering, no dishonor, no conduct that could conceivably be more despicable, treacherous and disgusting than high government officials unwilling to speak truth to power about a deranged villain who wanted to burn everything down because he lost. He didn’t do it alone though. He did it with the appeasements, cowardice, lies and delusions of the assembled louses around him, including his “friends,” Mike and Nikki.
There was a famous moment durning the John McCain campaign in 2008 when he took the microphone back from an angry, elderly white woman who began denouncing Senator Obama as an “Arab.” McCain took the microphone back from her and said, “No, ma’am.”
Where are the leaders who will say “NO?” They are necessary.