The president is growing more erratic and dangerous by the day. Donald Trump’s sometimes subtle and often bellicose threats against Iran are on the upswing. He foments hostility at home, using civil war dog whistles that rile militia groups and rogue agents, while forecasting mob “violence” if the Republicans lose the House. Trump doubles down in his embrace of tyrants who actively spurn the free press, before creating his own fake news about hazards at the border. He secretly prepares for the potential of a new attorney general, complete with a Mueller-proof ethics-waiver, while capriciously flirting between firing or pushing AG Jeff Sessions to resign. We discussed this type of psychological unraveling in our NBC Think op-ed regarding the 25th Amendment, predicting that the president’s deterioration would hasten in response to the advancing Mueller probe. While neither of us know the president, we can confidently assert that people like Trump, with well-documented and long-standing behavior patterns consistent with narcissistic and anti-social personality disorders, are prone to becoming more paranoid, unpredictable, impulsive and dangerous when they are under extreme levels of distress.
But another danger, lurking beneath the Donald Trump horror show, is the Republican-led Congress and its failure to place appropriate checks on our nation’s executive branch. Even if the Cabinet did its job and invoked the 25th Amendment, the current Republican members of Congress would not lend their required support to relieve the president from his duties under this nation-saving measure. In addition, the GOP-led House will not impeach the president, and the Republicans in the Senate would not convict an impeached president.
Is it simply the Republican agenda that keeps Congress in lockstep with Donald Trump? Certainly, this most commonly cited interpretation of their behavior is one possibility. Could it also be that the GOP-led members of Congress are afraid of Trump’s power? The president’s deranged rants and uncanny ability to whip his base into a hypnotic frenzy of hatred towards Trump’s political enemies may also contribute to their hamstrung performance. The religious right’s war-oriented, authoritarian agenda, detailed in our chapter in Rocket Man, also provides some insight into GOP compliance with Trump. But while the Republicans’ autocratic values, fear of Trump’s sway, and prominent desire to enact their policy vision may be contributing to their duty-shirking behavior, we believe there is more to the story.
In this piece, we logically explore many of the available data points that surround selected members in Congress and their passive, servile response to Trump’s irrational and dangerous behavior. Rather than looking at each action or inaction as an independent event, we string them together as a collective whole, in search of an organizing principle that unites the sum of these Congressional missteps. Drawing upon political and psychological insights, as well as Occam’s razor — the reasoning principle used by scientists and academics that states that the most obvious explanation is usually the correct one — we lay out an evidence-based case that many behaviors executed by key GOP Congress members are unreasonable, from a Republican and conservative point of view, possibly indicative of deeper, non-policy-oriented entanglements.