Republicans need to think over the ‘Judge a man by the company he keeps’ thing
by Tom Toles
President Trump’s boast that he hires only the best people comes to mind. At this point, there are only two conclusions to draw. One, that he lied about that, as he has been known to do. Or, that he actually thinks his collection of convicts, grifters, backstabbers, opportunists, liars, incompetents, colluders, fixers, hustlers and bootlickers actually ARE the best people. The best that will hang with him, anyway. Separately or together, so to speak.
In any case, and the cases are court cases now, it’s clear what kind of person he is attracted to. It’s possible that Trump has swum in this sea of lowlife actors his whole life and career and kept his tiny hands out of trouble, except no, it isn’t possible. He has bragged out loud about what he has been allowed to grab with them, and it’s pretty much anything within reach. He began his campaign bragging about the putative $10 billion he had accumulated with those hands, but nobody except invisible auditors was allowed to look at his tax returns to assess how he got it.
So while we await the coming downpour of additional shoes of malfeasance and illegalities and wrongdoing of innumerable kinds from the coterie of creepy crawlers he seems congenitally drawn to, there are a couple of things Republicans should stop to ponder — lawmakers and voters both.
Is it just possible that the company Trump keeps is telling us most everything we need to know about who he is? More than the ceaseless stream of blame-shifting that Trump never tires of ladling out into the ever-muddier water?
And perhaps more to the point, is it time for Republicans to reassess what their own support of Trump tells other Americans who they themselves are?
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OCU
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