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A question for republicans;
At what point do you jump ship or do go all the way down with it?
Okay, I am UK and have no or little dog in this fight but I have watched US politics for many years.
I can see why so many US voters chose Trump over Hillary. But that was then and this is now. In the meantime, a succession of unprecedented indictments, convictions, scandals, and incompetence has followed. Till we get to the present situation where he has been impeached and the only thing that is keeping him in the office is the partisan nature of the senate.
Can we please first dispense with all the fake news, elite swamp conspiracy rubbish. I get that this is the party line but come on. Does it not all sound like the guy you avoid. You know how everything is all someone else's fault. You would not take it from the left and would not blame you. So let us credit each other with some intelligence here.
Trump famously said that he could shoot someone in Times Square and still get elected. Alright, that was relatively true about his popularity at the time but what does that say about his followers? Can such a level of support be healthy in any situation?
Okay, let us go back to 1972. Nixon was totally backed up by the GOP until the evidence showed that he was guilty. The facts are that they were open to a change of heart. Let us also remember that he had just won the recent election by the biggest margin ever. So popularity was not the big question. What swayed them was it was the right thing to do. Let us also look at how things turned out. Nixon had to resign. Ford took over and you had to suffer the ignominy of an unelected president. Then Carter got in, to be fair to both sides, nice but incompetent. But that left the way open for Regan. The undoubted poster boy of the GOP for decades. The fact is you were still trusted enough for him to stand a chance. Can you imagine if the GOP had supported Nixon the way that it is now supporting Trump?
I work in construction and everyone at some point that does this kind of work will at some time have to deal with a cock-up. Someone had misread the plans, had a hangover or was just plain stupid. The difference is how you deal with these occasions. If you deafly insist that bathrooms are a suitable place for the electric cupboard? You are not going to get much repeat work. If you take the hit and sort it out then you might?
The impeachment trial will, of course, go in Trump's favor. That is not in question. The question is how much will the rep senators chauvinistic sycophancy destroy their credibility.

273kelvin 8 Jan 29
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If you haven’t been paying attention, the GOP’s troubles started when the Birchers took over in the late 1950s and called the moderate Pres. Eisenhower a commie sympathizer. They expelled moderates and in 1964 nominated Goldwater. He lost to Johnson. To recoup its numbers the GOP recruited the racist Dixiecrats. See Southern Strategy in Wikipedia.
At Reagan’s invitation, uncounted numbers of evangelical xians joined the GOP. Trump came along and they got the idea that his actions will bring their End Times, in which they will be carried to their heaven. They will support Trump no matter what he does and GOP senators fear losing to them.

But as I posted, they still had enough integrity to ditch Nixon. In the end, it comes down to the classic Ford Pinto vs Tylenol scenario. Ford did not do the right thing and it cost them big. Tylenol did and people trusted them more.

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In modern times, the Dems are not nearly as partisan and disciplined as the Repubs. What has changed since Nixon is that the Repubs now have no shame and are so partisan and disciplined that it doesn't matter how guilty Trump is or how much evidence there is against him, his party members in congress will never admit Trump is wrong or guilty of anything. The last Repubs that would be honest about those things were Jeff Flake, who left congress, and John McCain, who died several years ago. Nobody else in the Repub party has that kind of courage or integrity.

It is a dangerous and self-destructive road to walk down. Towards the end of the Thatcher/Major administration in the UK. Some Tory MPs including the author Jeffrey Archer were convicted for corruption. The resulting stink led to 3 lost elections for the Tories. Not only that but whenever any accusations were leveled at Labour. They could rightly wag their fingers and point to all the Tories in jail

@273kelvin I hate the American version of the Tories, which is the Repubs, for they have no shame and will never admit their hypocrisy. I hate most of the Dems just as much for their phoniness when it comes to pretending like they care about the common people and equality and then turning around and serving only the rich and corporate America once elected and no longer needing to appeal to the peasants who vote.

@TomMcGiverin Your problem is letting big money into the elections. It is always election time there, whether it be POTUS, congress or senate and the amounts are astronomical. Ours are capped but online adverts are pushing the amounts up. If I were a US voter, I might be tempted to vote for the candidate that had the least amount of funding irrespective of party.

@273kelvin I agree with you that the legalized bribery of big money in elections is the root problem, but right now both major parties are totally bought off and corrupt, so no reform will happen because the American election system also makes it almost impossible for other parties to challenge the two major parties in elections. Besides that, Americans are almost all brainwashed into only voting for the two major parties.

Finally, our legal system has now given campaign donations equal status to protected free speech, so limits on campaign financing is impossible without a constitutional amendment.

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