{"id":3552,"date":"2026-07-18T17:06:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T17:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3552"},"modified":"2026-07-18T17:06:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T17:06:12","slug":"trump-crammed-a-devils-deal-down-republicans-throats-conservative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3552","title":{"rendered":"Trump crammed a ‘devil\u2019s deal’ down Republicans\u2019 throats: conservative"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens says he dreads the bind that President Donald Trump has put the GOP in as Republicans stagger off into their uncertain future.<\/p>\n

Read more Republicans in control of Congress are quietly sabotaging Trump\u2019s signature bill<\/a><\/p>\n

Stephens was speaking with the New York Times “Opinions\u201d politics round table on Saturday when the panel landed on the self-dealing involved in Trump\u2019s derailed slush fund settlement and the gobs of cash the Trump family raked in as a result of their occupation of the White House \u2014 within the span of little more than a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cTalking to Republicans or Republican-leaning figures who occasionally speak to the president himself \u2014 not politicians, but well-off people. The two things that have really hurt Trump in their eyes are the slush fund and the reporting by The Times that Trump or his family enriched themselves by $2.2 billion last year. That sits very ill, even among people who are his voters, and in some ways, his peers, because it reeks of a form of corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cKleptocracy,\u201d offered retired broadcast host Robert Siegel.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that reminds me a little bit of my youth in Mexico, when Jos\u00e9 L\u00f3pez Portillo was president, and the corruption was so very much nakedly on display,\u201d said Stephens \u2026 Because the rule of law [was] something that even most Republicans value. And I don\u2019t think that they objected so much during election years, when they could tell themselves the alternative is that much worse. But what you have with Trump is really putting into the shade whatever might have been said against Hunter Biden and his own dealings \u2014 which, remember, were Topic A of discussion on some of the Fox News shows just three years ago \u2026 but this is something else.<\/p>\n

Political pundit and author Molly Jong-Fast pointed out that the slush deal was particularly egregious with interim AG (And Trump\u2019s former personal attorney) Todd Blanche scheming to give the Trump family immunity from audits. Still, she said this is the corruption that now defines the new Republican Party, and Stephens said party members now have no choice but to embrace the dirt or walk into the horizon. He used former South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former GOP US Rep. Liz Cheney as examples.<\/p>\n

Read more Republican pundit\u2019s hypocrisy lands with a thud on CNN panel<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Graham flipped [to Trump] \u2026 I took it really bitterly. Maybe because I sort of set my teeth, as a conservative, against Trump, and that he had betrayed everything that I thought were his principles to curry favor with power,\u201d Stephens told the panel. \u201cAfter he died, it actually hit me harder than I thought it would. And in part because \u2014 say what you will about Graham\u2019s choices \u2014 in the last week of his life, he accomplished consequential things \u2014 like a sanctions bill on Russia that the president is willing to sign \u2026 and probably saving NATO from Trump\u2019s de facto destruction of the organization. And I remember asking myself, after he died: Well, if that\u2019s what he was able to do by sucking up to the president as nakedly as he did, maybe I shouldn\u2019t scorn him or hold him in such contempt, as I had for years, after he had, as I thought, gone over to the dark side.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, I know everyone says \u2018well, it was a devil\u2019s bargain.\u2019 But some devil\u2019s bargains, you might say, are worth the price,\u201d Stephens insisted. \u201cWould Ukraine be safer today if Lindsey had gone up against Trump, gotten himself primaried six years ago and were blabbing from a seat on a CNN panel today? I\u2019m not sure that\u2019d be the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lindsey, he argued, didn\u2019t do what Liz Cheney did \u2014 which is essentially get himself evicted from the party.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have great respect for Liz Cheney, but she\u2019s not an influential person anymore,\u201d said Stephens. \u201cShe\u2019s a person who sacrificed herself on an altar of truth. And that\u2019s great, but the world, sadly, moves on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s endless obsessions have reduced him to a \u2018pathetic\u2019 state<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens says he dreads the bind that President Donald Trump has put the GOP in as Republicans stagger off into their uncertain future.Stephens was speaking with the New York Times “Opinions\u201d politics round table on Saturday when the panel landed on the self-dealing invol…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump crammed a 'devil\u2019s deal' down Republicans\u2019 throats: conservative - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=3552\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump crammed a 'devil\u2019s deal' down Republicans\u2019 throats: conservative - 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