Joe Scarborough denounces Trump while still pretending Trump is not a Real Republican

Here is a classic Nevertrumper moment, from Thursday's Morning Zoo, Worst-Case Scenarios Come True In Syria:

Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are talking to former GOP chair Michael Brown. And at just after 8:00, Scarborough says something that's genuinely impressive:

Think about this, the President talked about, I beat ISIS in a month.

The same President who said, when I took over the United States. The same President who said, when I took over the military. The same President who said, Article II of the Constitution allows me to do whatever I want.

Republicans, Michael, they are our friends in that party, They know he's not well emotionally. They know he's not well mentally. They know that.

But put that aside, they also know that this is a man with illiberal instincts, with antidemocratic impulses who really does believe that his power is unlimited.

It is an anathema to everything we stand for. And he undermines Madisonian safeguards every single day.

That's all true, and impressively put, and I'm glad he's saying it. I give him credit for saying what everyone else in the world can also see, that the President is barking mad.

But he's also saying that their "friends" in the Republicans Party all know this and haven't yet made a move to remove him from office.

Plus, Scarborough, a former Gingrich Revolution foot soldier in the House in the 1990s, pitches this as Trump betraying the noble ideals of the Republican Party he served back then. But somehow he didn't and apparently still doesn't recognize that "this is a man with illiberal instincts, with antidemocratic impulses" also describes Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House, and Dick Cheney, and Shrub Bush? And the Republicans who have focused for the last two decades or so on disenfranchising black and Latino voters in good Southern segregationist style?

As Charlie Pierce sometimes says: Honky, please!

There is a lot more wrong with the Republican Party than having an unstable three-year-old at its head. And getting rid of its "illiberal instincts" and "antidemocratic impulses" will take a lot more than just sending the three-year-old to a children's psychiatric facility.

Joe Conason wrote about that fine Republican statesman Newt Gingrich in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003):

A central theme of his propaganda lexicon was the "breakdown in public manners and morals" he blamed on liberalism. He recommended that when Republicans discussed themselves and their party's values, they should use words such as moral, crusade, and family. When they talked about Democrats, he urged them to emphasize terms like decay, sick, liberal, permissive attitude, antifamily, and bizarre.

As he drove the Republicans toward their takeover of Congress, the portly firebrand plugged his movement's morality with evangelistic fervor. "You have absolutely, in the abstract, a cultural civil war going on," he told US News 6 World Report in 1992. "A nihilistic hedonism and secular belief pattern is by definition involved in a religious war with a spiritual system."

While he blathered on about the culture war, Gingrich's close associates waged a private jihad on Bill Clinton. In the closing months of the 1992 election, Chicago financier Peter Smith, a top contributor to Gingrich's GOPAC fund, hired the Georgian's consultant and confidant Eddie Mahe and two Gingrich lawyers to dredge up dirt about the Democratic nominee's sex life. They focused on a far-fetched tale about an affair with a black prostitute in Little Rock that had produced a male "love child." Their objective was an old-fashioned sexual smear, tinted with race. [my emphasis in bold]

The fanaticism and assymetical polarization in which the Republican Party was actively engaged during the "Gingrich Revolution" era is what made a Trump Presidency possible.

There's a famous phrase from Max Horkheimer in 1939, "whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism." In other words, to understabd fascism, you have to understand the role that capitalism plays in its development.

We can borrow his wording to say also: whoever is not prepared to talk about Newt Gingrich (and Dick Cheney, and Shrub Bush, and Oliver North, and Rush Limbaugh) should have some humility about talking about Trumpism.