‘Don’t focus on Trump,’ you say. This is why you’re wrong

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and 2021 is the deadliest year on record for transgender people. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.

Allow me to make something clear right off the bat: I wish the ex-president would gracefully fade into political retirement as his predecessors did, letting us all focus on the current president’s ambitious economic agenda and the Republicans’ cogent, intellectually honest, wonkish objections (sarcasm alert). But he isn’t doing that. This isn’t to say he’s in the spotlight — after all, he’s off Facebook and Twitter, and his attempts to assert an internet presence turned out to be bluffs more than actual efforts to assemble the right-wing Silicon Valley that some of his followers wanted.

But as columnist Nicholas Goldberg warns, the 45th president indeed presents the biggest threat to this nation’s small-d democratic government, if not the best target for Democratic candidates right now. And his stranglehold over the GOP remains indisputable, as evidenced by House Republicans rallying around Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, arguably their most paranoid, white nationalist, Trumpist colleague (which is really saying something).

As you probably know by now, Gosar was officially censured by the House this week not for anything explicitly having to do with the ex-president, but his offense was in many ways quintessentially Trumpist: a death threat on Twitter directed at a progressive woman of color that was really just a joke, because the real threat is immigrants at the border, and take the man seriously but not literally and so on and so forth. Columnist Jean Guerrero has the sordid details and implications of Gosar’s tweet here, including the chilling observation that it “embodies the ugliness at the heart of the radicalized Republican Party, which cannot bring itself to condemn white male violence, but rather condones and even cultivates it.”

So we’re shocked at Gosar’s tweet and at the inability of almost every House Republican to condemn posting death threats online — and that’s a good thing. We should be shocked, and we should abandon our reflexive political cynicism and use our moral sense to declare that one side is right, and the other is dangerously wrong. But with this Trumpist Party, surely there are only graver offenses to come, ones that put the GOP beyond the bounds of what any decent person would find acceptable.

As when they quietly closed ranks behind a presidential nominee who bragged on tape about assaulting women. As when they barely winced after their leader couldn’t bring himself to say without qualification that neo-Nazis are bad. As when they maintained cult-like allegiance as the pandemic laid bare the lethality of the ex-president’s vanity and incompetence. As when they stymied a bipartisan effort to get to the bottom of the Jan. 6 insurrection. And now, as they circle their…