Two Republicans

 The Atlantic has a first person account of a CIA briefer to the White House. She's transgender, and yet she agreed to be Mike Pence's briefer during the first Trump Administration. Obviously, Pence represents the evangelical beliefs of the party, even if Trump seems perversely to be the one who the evangelicals love.

There is this passage:

When my tour finally ended, Pence invited my family to the White House. In his office, he took my mother’s hand and smiled: “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
Years before, my mother had told me that in her grief, she’d felt that—­somehow—I’d killed her son. Now I’d done the impossible: lived both dreams, becoming an intelligence officer and a woman. Now the vice president was holding my mother’s hand.
No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence. On my last day, I gave him a letter. I wrote: “I’m a trans­gender CIA officer, a wife and mother—­and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.” I told him many people at the CIA hadn’t believed that a trans officer like me could serve someone like him.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad I passed the test.”
In that moment, it felt like the battle had been won.

Now, Mike Pence believes some appalling things. Mike Pence worked to put some appalling things into policy. Mike Pence is not, I believe, a terribly smart guy.

Mike Pence, however, is someone who really does try to be a good person. A good person accepts the people who come into their lives as people, and recognizes their innate dignity as human beings. Yes, his retrograde beliefs are bad for America in the broadest of senses, but he seems like someone who "gets" that certain things are bigger than him and his beliefs. That was proven most on January 6th.

The second Republican is, of course, Donald Trump. A man of no known convictions - besides the felony convictions - beyond "What is good for me is what is good." 

There's a big kerfuffle because Jon Ossoff implied in a stump speech that Donald Trump is having an affair with Natalie Karp - the latest in a string of blonde aides who look eerily like his daughter Ivanka. Of course, we know that Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. We know he had sex with Stormy Daniels while Melania was at home with newborn Barron. Melania herself is his third wife. 

It's odd to me that Republicans are freaking out about this - perhaps they understand that Ossoff is a real threat to win the White House in 2028 and want to damage him. We KNOW Trump is a sexual degenerate, and that's even without the Epstein stuff. 

I do think that in 2028, character might just matter again. After the orgy of corruption we are seeing right now, personal probity might just matter again. That's mostly what Biden offered in 2020: he's just a fundamentally decent guy. 

Hopefully that matters again. Hopefully, Republicans who embrace the nastiness of Donald Trump go down like dry grass in a brushfire this November and we go back to disagreeing on policy, rather than fundamental morality.