Jon Meacham: ‘Republicans Have To Keep Losing’ in Order To Save the Constitutional Order

EXCERPT:

MEACHAM: “But one of the things that we have to figure out, it seems to me, is how to convince people that Donald Trump is not good for the constitutional order? The only thing I’ve come up with, and you talk about this a lot, is the Republicans just have to keep losing. And I don’t say that as some nutty Democrat. This is a Lincoln insight, Lincoln said, 'All men act on incentive.' And as uncomfortable as it is, we have to speak truth as we see it. That’s what, you know, the Constitution guarantees as the right. And I think part of the reason Senator Graham is weeping is, like most politicians, his currency is votes and the appearance of affection from the public. And so, he doesn’t want to be contradicted. He doesn’t want people to think that he’s not for them all together. And in that complicated dynamic, somehow or another, the Republican professional political class, establishment, whatever you want to call it, has decided that they’re going to suspend their devotion to a constitutional order in order to grab power. It’s not the — you can get 35% of Americans to do almost anything, right? I mean, that’s the number of folks who still approved of Joe McCarthy after McCarthy was censured, right? It’s that 14 to 16% that in 2016 made Donald Trump president. That’s the delta here. Those are the folks that the case has to be made consistently that, if you side with someone who is entirely about themselves and not about anything else, then you’re going to lose. And the only way to break this is to keep voting against him."