Welcome Back to the Republican “Splunge” Campaign of 2016

All Hands On Dreck. 

 From The New York Times, August 24, 2023:

What a Few Seconds of Hand Raising Said About Trump’s G.O.P.

With a halting series of raised hands, candidates on the Republican debate stage illustrated the former president’s hold on the party.

It was a moment the eight Republican candidates on the stage in Milwaukee should have known was coming. Though the question took an hour to arrive, they still seemed unsteady in their response:

If Donald Trump is the party’s nominee for president as well as a convicted criminal, will they still support him?...

The answers — and the way they were given — provided one of the most memorable tableaus of the first debate of the Republican primary season. The 17-second exchange showed how completely Mr. Trump’s shadow lingers over the Republican Party and its electorate, which has been unwilling to abandon the former president and has turned hostile to anyone who does.

The former president stands accused criminally in four cases, including on charges of trying to subvert the will of the American people to steal an election that he lost.

As grave as those accusations are, many members of the audience who gathered in Milwaukee, the largest city in one of the country’s most politically contested states, cheered loudly as, one by one, hands rose in fealty to their quadruply indicted champion, a day before he was to turn himself in at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta for fingerprinting and a mug shot...

From The Hill, seven year ago, on August 16, 2016:

GOP senator: I’ll vote for Trump, but I won’t endorse him

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R) says that while she can “work with anyone,” she will vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump for president.

“While he has my vote, he doesn’t have my endorsement,” Ayotte told CNN’s Manu Raju Monday. “There’s actually a big distinction. An endorsement is one where I’m out campaigning with someone. I’m going to continue to focus, really, on my race.”

Yes we are now fully back to the Republican "Splunge" campaign of 2016.  

From me back then:

Support-But-Not-Endorse is the new Splunge

From Brother Charlie Pierce:

...

[Republican leaders] know that He, Trump has exposed the dark and beating heart of both modern conservatism and the electoral success of the modern Republican Party. They can no more distance themselves from it totally as they can distance themselves from their own hearts. So they support, but don't endorse, and assume people are too dim to notice that the proposition is absurd on its face.

Splunge (h/t Monty Python) is one of the greatest and least used words of all time. It is a nonsense syllable used by yes-men, toadies and other species of spineless careerist who desperately want to both look decisive and suck up to a boss whose incoherently oscillating opinions and wild mood swings they cannot predict or control.

Continue Burning The Lifeboats