When Republicans Bash Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/opinion/congressional-republicans-criticize-trump.html

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As President Trump has been defying the rule of law and attempting to undermine democracy, his fellow Republicans in Congress have often been profiles in cowardice. They have meekly assented to the damage he is doing, afraid that confronting him might alienate Republican voters. They have put career over country.

But there has been one small way that congressional Republicans have been willing to break with Trump. Even as they have refused to hold him accountable via votes, hearings or investigations, they have occasionally spoken or tweeted some critical words about the president’s behavior. And while those words have been wholly insufficient to the moment, they have not been meaningless.

Perry Bacon Jr. and Julia Azari explain why in a FiveThirtyEight piece called, “GOP Criticism Of Trump Is All Talk — But It Still Matters.”

“I know a lot of people don’t put much stock into words,” the political scientist Matt Glassman says in the article. But words “are more constraining of presidents than most people think, given how they shape public opinion and shape potential public reactions to future presidential actions.”

Mere words from Congress appear to have stopped Trump from interfering in the investigation into his presidential campaign even more than he has (he hasn’t fired Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, or Robert Mueller, the special counsel, for example). In the past week, congressional criticism has forced the White House to retreat on a couple of other Russia-related issues (like whether to allow Russia to interrogate a former United States ambassador). And criticism from Congress has influenced Trump’s nominations, even if that dynamic remains mostly private.

The article doesn’t overstate the importance of words. They aren’t preventing the vast majority of the damage Trump is inflicting on the country and the world. But they’re not irrelevant, either. And so when congressional Republicans break their normal complicit silence, the rest of us should cheer — and keep demanding much more.

If you’re interested in more, Glassman — a congressional expert at Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute — wrote a Times op-ed and a helpful tweetstorm earlier this year on the subject.

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