President Donald Trump’s wanton demolition of the White House symbolizes everything wrong with American politics—But there’s a “much, much, much bigger” problem lurking beneath the surface, an ex-GOP lawmaker has warned.
Republicans who enable Trump and refuse to criticize his blatantly corrupt and illegal behavior represent a much larger threat to democracy than the president himself, former Tea Party congressman turned Democrat Joe Walsh wrote on Thursday.
Using the destruction of the White House’s East Wing as an example, Walsh asked, “If Donald Trump next week began demolishing the Washington Monument—because he wanted to change the structure of the Washington Monument and make it look more like Mar-a-Lago or the shape of a T for Trump or whatever—would any Republican say anything?”
“I mean that,” he added. “Would any Republican object? Would anybody on Fox News say, ‘Stop. That’s too far?’ Would any of Trump’s voters, any of his MAGA supporters say anything?”
Trump is “everything our Founders feared,” Walsh continued. “He’s an utterly corrupt, dishonest, cruel, ignorant, psychopathic, lawless fascist. That’s a big, big problem to have that in the White House.
“But the much, much, much, much, much bigger problem is all the fascist enablers—every enabler and appeaser over the years, these past 10 years, who have allowed Trump to do what he does,” he said. “Trump could not be demolishing the White House as we speak if his enablers didn’t let him.
Construction began on the White House ballroom this week, which saw the entire East Wing of the building unceremoniously demolished to make room for Trump’s 1000-person ballroom, which is expected to dwarf the main building in size.
The first lady’s office, the presidential theater, and the building’s historic hallway are among the casualties of the new development, whose costs have already ballooned from around $100 million to $300 million, despite Trump previously promising that construction of the ballroom “would not interfere with the current building.”
“The entire process that one must go through to restructure, to change the structure of the White House—Trump ignored all of it,” Walsh wrote on his Substack. “Didn’t involve Congress at all. No vetting at all. No approval by any of the historic groups, the committees, the commissions, the National Park Service. No approval. No permits. Trump ignored it all.”
“Donald Trump is demolishing the White House right now as we speak, and no Republican has said anything. No Trump supporter has said anything. Nobody on Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, or right-wing talk radio, my former home, has said anything. Donald Trump has basically torn the East Wing of the White House down all by himself, and Republicans haven’t said s–t.”
Walsh also highlighted Trump’s attempted shakedown of the Department of Justice for $230 million in compensation for federal investigations into him, and said the president would not feel empowered to behave in this manner if the Republican establishment did not enable him to ignore all rules and precedents.
“Trump could not have tried to overthrow an American election if his enablers didn’t let him. Trump couldn’t have dismantled USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children around the world, if his enablers had not let him. Trump couldn’t be going after and trying to imprison his political opponents if his enablers did not let him,” he concluded.
Initially pitching himself as a mainstream Republican, Joe Walsh embraced the Tea Party movement in the late 2000s and was elected to serve as the congressman for Illinois’s 8th district before losing his seat two years later.
He later went on to host a radio show and became increasingly critical of the Trump administration during the president’s first term, briefly mounting a presidential campaign against him in 2020 before later endorsing the Democrats and Joe Biden.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for further comment.
The post Ex-GOP Lawmaker Tears Into ‘Pathetic ’Republicans Letting Trump Wreck the White House appeared first on The Daily Beast.
