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The Post's Ruth Marcus explains why Donald Trump Jr. is in legal jeopardy. Hint: stupidity is not a legal defense. (Adriana Usero,Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)

The key insight from a week of gobsmacking revelations is not that the Russia scandal may finally have an underlying crime but that, asDavid Brookssuggests, over the past few generations the Trump family built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil. (Remember when the media collectively oohed and ahhed that, Say what you will about Donald Trump, but his kids are great!? Add that to the heap of inane media narratives that helped normalize Trump to the voters.) We now see that, sure enough, the Trump legal team (the fastest-growing segment of the economy) has trouble restraining its clients, explaining away initial, false explanations and preventing self-incriminating statements. (The biggest trouble, of course, is that the president lied that this is all fake news and arguably committed obstruction of justice to hide his campaign teams misdeeds.)

Let me suggest the real problem is not the Trump family, but the GOP. To paraphrase Brooks, It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a [partys] mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing. Again, to borrow from Brooks, beyond partisanship the GOP evidences no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code.

Lets dispense with the Democrats are just as bad defense. First, I dont much care; we collectively face a party in charge of virtually the entire federal government and the vast majority of statehouses and governorships. Its that partys inner moral rot that must concern us for now. Second, its simply not true, and saying so reveals the origin of the problem a woe is me sense of victimhood that grossly exaggerates the oppositions ills and in turn justifies its own egregious political judgments and rhetoric. If the GOP had not become unhinged about the Clintons, would it have rationalized Trump as the lesser of two evils? Only in the crazed bubble of right-wing hysteria does an ethically challenged, moderate Democrat become a threat to Western civilization and Trump the salvation of America.

Indeed, for decades now, demonization of gays, immigrants, Democrats, the media, feminists, etc. has been the animating spirit behind much of the right. It has distorted its assessment of reality, giving us anti-immigrant hysteria, promulgating disrespect for the law (how many respectable conservatives suggested disregarding the Supreme Courts decision on gay marriage?), elevating Fox News hosts blatantly false propaganda as the counterweight to liberal media bias and preventing serious policy debate. For seven years, the party vilified Obamacare without an accurate assessment of its faults and feasible alternative plans. Obama bad or Clinton bad became the only credo leaving the party, as Brooks said of the Trump clan, with no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code and no coherent policies for governing.

We have always had in our political culture narcissists, ideologues and flimflammers, but it took the 21st-century GOP to put one in the White House. It took elected leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican National Committee (not to mention its donors and activists) to wave off Trumps racists attacks on a federal judge, blatant lies about everything from 9/11 to his own involvement in birtherism, replete evidence of disloyalty to America (i.e. Trumps Russia first policies), misogyny, Islamophobia, ongoing potential violations of the Constitutions emoluments clause (along with a mass of conflicts of interests), firing of an FBI director, and now, evidence that the campaign was willing to enlist a foreign power to defeat Clinton in the presidential election.

Out of its collective sense of victimhood came the GOPs disdain for not just intellectuals but also intellectualism, science, Economics 101, history and constitutional fidelity. If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their fathers unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave because that is what conservatives must believe, since liberals do not is a party that will deny Trumps complicity in gross misconduct. Its a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. Its not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any external moral truth or ethical code.

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The GOP's moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr. - Washington Post