Why Congressional Republicans Will Suffer More Than Anyone Else In A Trump Presidency

Can Congressional Republicans wake up? Donald Trump will be a bigger menace for GOP legislators than he will be for the rest of the country at large simply because average Americans do not have to do any of the actual deal making with him. Republicans in Congress will.

Have Republican representatives and senators not been paying attention throughout this election? Trump’s claim to political fame is the vain self-congratulation that he is the best deal maker, though it is only true if you sociopathically think good deal making is screwing over everyone around you. Republicans on the other end of the negotiating table will personally experience why so many people who have worked with Trump over the years refuse to ever work with him again.

There is literally no shortage of anecdotes floating around Election 2016 pointing to Trump’s complete lack of business honesty or integrity. His company’s business model is based off the reality that most people do not have the time or money to devote years of their lives fighting Trump’s army of lawyers in order to physically force Trump to pay what he owes.

Do Congressional Republicans really believe that this septuagenarian will suddenly give up being a pathological liar simply because he has obtained as much power as Earthly possible? If Trump is actually elected, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will have to work with Trump, and then, perhaps finally, they will fully understand the degree to which America’s premier narcissistic egomaniac should not be president.

First of all, Trump’s word means literally nothing to him. He lies about everything, to the point that such a claim no longer needs a citation. And it truly is pathological. Trump’s narcissistic bluster is oblivious to the reality that modern presidential campaigns are unceasingly recorded on video and visually consumed all across the globe. Trump’s recorded lies have been catalogued and are easily fact-checked in real time according to the conveniences of our digital world. Trump’s struggle with qualitative objectivity is a widely-accepted truth, right? Politico studied Trump’s honesty and found that he averages one lie every three minutes and 15 seconds. I believe a similar analysis of Trump’s recent debate performance would find an even greater aversion to the truth.

This is the man Congressional Republicans will have to work with on a daily basis if elected. There is some comfort for Republicans in that Trump has very few policy ideas with which he regularly campaigns—he wants to build a wall, deport millions of people, bolster America’s police state, bring back torture, and rip up every international agreement the US has signed in Americans’ name since WWII—and what ideas he does have are probably too wildly impractical and/or blatantly illegal to ever be passed into law.

This gives Republicans in Congress a lot of leeway, because they will have disproportionate ideological control of legislation throughout a Trump presidency. Trump would be a rare president in that the executive branch would likely be a rubber-stamp on legislative initiatives rather than vice-versa.

This sounds beneficial for the GOP, but Republicans would be wise to remember that Trump is an egomaniac. Trump’s candidacy could be described as a personification of thin-skinned vengeance. What if Trump sours on the GOP (his alt-right deplorables already describe Ryan, McConnell and other moderate Republicans as “cuckservatives,” a poetic term signifying that moderate Republicans’ wives will be raped by ethnic minorities)? What if Trump doesn’t want to cooperate with the party he only opportunistically feigned political loyalty to in the first place to run for president?

What will Republicans do if Trump uses the Oval Office’s bully pulpit to try and force Republicans to pass legislation that goes against the constitution? For starters, Trump’s biggest pet project seems to be the dismantlement of America’s free press. He regularly describes at length his disdain for journalists and First Amendment protections of free speech, so would Republicans stand against the national head of their party to preserve such a foundational, cornerstone American freedom?

What if Trump impulsively attacks other nations and their leaders on Twitter, spiraling America into an entirely unnecessary war on account of Trump’s fragile ego? Would Republicans refuse to fund a Trumpian war sparked solely by his awful personality?

What if President Trump stays up all night personally smearing the Republican Party’s leadership on Twitter? The Republican primary certainly proved Trump has no aversion to team-killing. He has already severely damage the Republican Party’s brand by dragging its primary process through the mud of racial and religious intolerance, and a President Trump could conceivably become such a toxic political figure that Republicans in Congress have no choice but to politically forsake his administration in order to avert a total, GOP public relations meltdown.

Republicans are weekly embarrassed by Trump’s self-destruction, and this week’s Alicia Machado controversy should be a wakeup call for Republicans. Trump isn’t even president yet…imagine how awful his behavior will become when he has real power and status. Nothing about Trump’s life suggests he will react calmly or rationally against the bipartisan criticism and international disgust likely to be directed toward him on a daily basis. Republicans would be wise to publicly recognize this now, before the election.

Hillary Clinton may be a Democrat, but she lives in reality. Whether Republicans like her liberal politics or not, they have to admit that she will be easier to work with than Trump, whose business career and personal fortune have been built with blowhard sociopathy and axiological fraud. Congressional Republicans who have done nothing to prevent the inevitable constitutional crisis that is a potential Trump presidency have shown a conspicuous lack of foresight. It is debatable whether Trump would truly destroy America as we know it, but Trump already has destroyed the Republican Party as we know it. Forget Trump taking his imaginary, openly racist country back: Republicans need to take their party back.

Donald Trump is a Republican cancer that will not go away by himself. Congressional Republicans should do themselves a favor by doing everything they can to sink Trump’s presidential candidacy. Otherwise they could suffer a four-year-long migraine. Republican politics will certainly be much easier with a President Hillary Clinton.