Republicans: defiant in surrender

While Democratic castigations of President Trump can be dismissed as partisanship, fanaticism or outright hate, condemnations of a Republican President by Republican Senators get more people's attention. Trump's critics within the GOP can be, and are, dismissed in turn as "the establishment" by would-be insurrectionists like Steve Bannon, but it's still unclear how the Republican majority takes them. What the rank and file think of Sens. Corker and Flake, for instance, is for all intents and purposes a moot point, since both solons have announced that they will not seek reelection next year. In other words, they have declared war on Trump and simultaneously surrendered to him. Unless we learn that either man has been driven from public life solely by Trump's sheer obnoxiousness, the simplest assumption to make is that neither man wanted to contest a primary against a presumed pro-Trump challenger. Presuming such challenges inevitable, the incumbents feared either defeat in the primaries or the sheer ordeal of them. Either way, howevermuch they cast defiance at the President, they seem to be chickening out of contests that would be cast inevitably as referenda on Trump, tests to prove whether his movement has seized control of the party as completely as the Reagan movement did forty years ago. If they confine their fights with the President to Washington, theirs will all be empty gestures. The real fights will be in their home states, and the real question is whether they've surrendered the field to those presumed pro-Trump challengers or are laying the groundwork for successors more like themselves. If they retire only to have Trumpets replace them, they'll only have furthered the cause they claim to oppose. Of course, all either Senator may care about now are book sales, Flake from a volume already published, Corker from one sure to come. But that hardly seems patriotic when they've portrayed Trumpism as a danger to the republic, or at least the Republicans. Ironically, those liberals who see the danger in these moves may find themselves rooting for the familiar GOP sugar-daddies, people like the Koch Bros. who are known to oppose many aspects of Trumpism, to take an interest in these 2018 primaries. For all I know, that might only provoke Trump to threaten to "open up" campaign-finance laws, but in any event, to the extent that the American center-right now has a recognized strategic importance in the struggle with Trump, liberals and progressives may find themselves choosing strange bedfellows next year.