On Sunday morning, Ben Sasse took to the airwaves for a matinee performance on what has become his signature issue in Washington: pretending to be mad about Donald Trump. The Nebraska senator revealed to CNN's Jake Tapper that these days, the very first thing he does upon waking up in the morning is think about leaving the Republican Party. "This party used to be for some pretty definable stuff," he said sadly, expressing disdain for "24-hour news cycles" and the "reality TV circus" that is this White House. Hopefully, he concluded, "the party of Lincoln and Reagan" can find a way to "get back to its roots."

Those of you wondering if Sasse would demonstrate actual moral courage needn't be worried: It took fewer than two minutes for him to dissemble. "The president has done a bunch of good things," he said, praising Trump's deregulation agenda, his political appointees, and his selection of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. He expressed some of these same sentiments during last week's confirmation hearings, when he lambasted the rise of the administrative state and praised Kavanaugh as the type of jurist who will shore up this country's eroding tripartite government. In other words, Ben Sasse is getting exactly what he wants from the Trump administration. He just wishes that he felt marginally less embarrassed to associate with it in public.

It is possible for Republican politicians to be critical of their party's leader without adding the DSA rose to their display names on Twitter. But Sasse's critique rings hollow, because despite his professions of disappointment, he has yet to demonstrate a willingness do anything other than deliver these solemn soliloquies on the Senate floor or issue feckless statements of regret, all while voting exactly how the president wants. If Jeff Flake is the king of mournful, inconsequential subtweets, Ben Sasse is their crown prince.

When Tapper raised this point—that people like Sasse are "just talk"—the senator defended himself by asserting the importance to democracy of "talking together about who we are as a people." If we don't do that, he added, "we're going to lose the republic." This is a silly collection of bromides that glosses over the thrust of Tapper's point, which is that as a United States senator, Sasse is uniquely positioned to hold the president accountable in the event that he finds some practice objectionable. He can make a tangible difference in a way that, say, angry tweets cannot. Forgoing substantive opposition for vague threats to leave the party is a grandiose bit of virtue-signaling, a public version of the anonymous resistance hero's Times op-ed: It allows him to distance himself from Trump as soon as he decides that being a Trump-era Republican is no longer politically expedient.

Tapper wrapped by asking Sasse if, given his grave concerns about the state of his party, he'd consider launching a primary challenge to Trump in 2020, or running as an independent conservative candidate. Sasse forced a laugh and replied that he is likelier to seek a seat on the county noxious-wheat-control board. "I don't think a lot about what job I have," he explained, in the grand tradition of non-denial denials of presidential aspirations. "I think about the country's challenges, and what we should be focused on." When Tapper correctly pointed out that those odds, whatever they may be, are greater than zero, the senator again demurred. "We spend way too much time talking about campaigning, and way too little time talking about governing," he said. Maybe he's right. But he isn't doing either one.

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