Michael Gerson, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a Washington Post Op-Ed writer, wrote an article in today’s Post titled The GOP’s hard, messy options for destroying Trumpism.  It’s honest and clear-eyed at first, but then veers sharply into the exact same morass Gerson excoriates.

Gerson describes Trump’s disastrous ‘leadership’ of the Republican brand.  I have to say that he lays out his opinions clearly and without compromise:

Trump has been ruled by compulsions, obsessions and vindictiveness, expressed nearly daily on Twitter. He has demonstrated an egotism that borders on solipsism. His political skills as president have been close to nonexistent. His White House is divided, incompetent and chaotic, and key administration jobs remain unfilled. His legislative agenda has gone nowhere. He has told constant, childish, refuted, uncorrected lies, and demanded and habituated deception among his underlings. He has humiliated and undercut his staff while requiring and rewarding flattery. He has promoted self-serving conspiracy theories. He has displayed pathetic, even frightening, ignorance on policy matters foreign and domestic. He has inflicted his ethically challenged associates on the nation. He is dead to the poetry of language and to the nobility of the political enterprise, viewing politics as conquest rather than as service.

It’s hard to know where to stop.  Gerson goes on longer — and yes, I love reading it — but you’ve probably already gotten the gist of his opinion.

So he says Trump has been terrible for Republicans, especially with younger voters.  Got that.  Gerson wonders how his GOP can recover and become influential.  He describes how “many Republicans and conservatives” feel that every Trump inadequacy, incompetence,  or outright corruption — up to and including treason, for god’s sake! — still leave Trump a better choice, since any Democrat would cause unspecified ‘apocalyptic harm.’  There is no alternative that Gerson’s conservatives will accept.

Gerson then disagrees with his straw-man argument:

This is the recommendation of sycophancy based on hysteria. At some point, hope for a new and improved Trump deteriorates into unreason. The idea that an alliance with Trump will end anywhere but disaster is a delusion.

Again, I think Michael is pretty clear.  His article then lists how he thinks the GOP can get untangled from ‘Trumpism’.  Which is when Gerson promptly and politely runs off the rails.

Here’s Gerson’s exhaustive list of options for conservatives:

• The creation of a new and uncorrupted conservative party.  Gerson says that’s a bad idea because Democrats might win.
• Challenge Trump in the 2020 Republican primary.  Unlikely, he feels.
• If or when we get to impeachment, the GOP might support the hearings, a la Watergate, and re-establish the GOP as the ‘not completely immoral’ party.  Gerson feels we’re not close enough yet, so it’s only theoretical.
• A Democratic victory in 2020 might force Republicans to reform, but Gerson worries that “…Democrats seem to be viewing Trump’s troubles as an opportunity to plunge leftward with a more frankly socialistic and culturally liberal message. That is hardly attractive to Republican reformers. A heretical idea.”  So, he manages to conclude that ‘Democrats are bad’.

How do Republicans do thinks like that with a straight face?  Do they get immunizations against irony?  Anyway, going on:

• Conservatives could simply hunker down and hope that when the next crop of Republicans grow old enough to run for office, then might push Trump aside.  That, or Trump finishes two terms and goes home.  At the worst, that’s ‘only’ eight years of Trump.  “A complacent idea,” he says.

And that’s all the possible options in the list, according to Gerson.  He’s unhappy with all of them.

Me, too, but for different reasons.

Honestly, Gerson is not a stupid guy.  For all of Paul Ryan’s fake intellectual posturing, Gerson is a real Thinking Republican.  And yet even Gerson can’t so much as envision conservatives actually working with Democrats to achieve goals together.  It is such a heretical idea that Gerson’s eyes cannot even see its existence as an option.

Working together to find answers that are acceptable to both sides is the core job of every politician we elect.  In theory, it is their first priority.  And Gerson is so blinded he can’t even discuss it as he struggles to squeeze past that elephant filling his room.

Politically, it wouldn’t be hard.  The Democratic party has never been as monolithic as the Republicans before now, and despite all the conservative sniveling I hear, Democrats are no more in lockstep now.  It shouldn’t require much compromise to peel off, say, the five most conservative Democrats.

But Republicans completely rejected any possible cooperation.  McConnell explicitly refused any cooperation with Obama, and enforced it with an iron fist.  And the current crop of Republicans — and even older pols like Gerson — won’t even entertain the concept.

I can’t see how giving them anything more would help.  By hook or by crook, they’ve wrenched out a Republican majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, and the Presidency!  They have it all!  Why can’t they still can’t get anything passed?

Everyone can see why.  It’s easy: Republicans decided to refuse any compromise with Democrats, and insist they’ll do it all without any Democratic votes.  That means that to pass anything, they have to keep  almost every Republican vote.  Lose even a couple of votes, and your agenda dies.

And with that idiot decision, the new Republican party gave complete veto power to every zealot in the Republican catalogue.  And you can bet that each brain-challenged wingnut understands those new rules.  Besides, with their elaborately gerrymandered districts, they can’t compromise to anything.  The only threat to them would come from people more extreme.  They have no reason to play nice.

That leaves Republicans completely tangled up in their incompetence.  Much as I enjoy watching them lying on the legislative carpet, yanking, grunting and drooling as bill, after bitter bill fails, it’s bad for all of us in the end.

The Republican party has proven they can’t govern.  It’s Sam Brownback’s decimation of Kansas, writ large.  And they’re not going to work it out anytime soon.

Gerson worries whether the GOP can survive.  Me, I don’t think they can, but I don’t know if Democrats can survive, either.  They’re almost as hapless, albeit in different ways.  (Outside of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, can anyone tell me what Democrats are for?)

I’d hate to think it’s true, but maybe Gerson is right, if only in a horrible, reductionist sense.  Given our hapless, pathetic parties, maybe there is no escape from Trumpism.