The second is that elected Republicans won’t challenge him. And that’s the biggie—this takes us back to the famous Access Hollywood crossroads; the moment GOP elected officials weighed what they were signing up for and plunged ahead. This is their original sin. If elected Republicans had had the courage to say “no,” this whole train would have been derailed at some point. But they are almost to a person moral cowards, beyond the known exceptions who’ve paid for their principles with excommunication from the Republican Party.
A handful of electeds have raised their voice about Trump’s newest pal. Lindsey Graham, one of the few who occasionally gravitate back to the planet to which John McCain usually kept him tethered, criticized the Trump-Loomer association last week. Bully for him. Senator Thom Tillis joined him. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, objected as well. Politico reported Sunday morning that the relationship has become “a source of deep worry for mainstream Republicans and Trump allies concerned about the far-right activist’s influence on the former president.” But no one new was quoted on the record (well, some very tepid comments from J.D. Vance, whose Indian American wife, I hope, wasn’t impressed by Loomer’s statement that if Harris won, the White House would “smell like curry”). This leaves us in the same place as always: ninny Republicans ninnying away to reporters off the record but petrified of doing anything that might resemble standing for something.
And as for the phrase “the far-right activist’s influence on the former president” … well, the question here is who is influencing whom. A presumption that this influence river is flowing in just one direction implies that if not for Loomer, Trump wouldn’t be entertaining extremist and racist ideas.