opinion

Republicans are selling out everything to protect Trump. Even America.

What would you give up for Donald Trump?

Ronna McDaniel seems to have offered her middle name as a sacrifice to Dear Leader.

The president reportedly asked the current chair of the Republican National Committee to stop using her maiden name “Romney” earlier this year, “in a lighthearted way,” after his supporters booed any reference to McDaniel’s uncle Mitt Romney, the GOP nominee for president in 2012 and an occasional Trump critic.

Apparently, McDaniel took the “joke” to heart and immediately had her Romney removed. Just try find the name she once trumpeted during her rise to the top of Michigan’s Republican Party mentioned on her Twitter profile or the GOP’s website.

You can always start using your middle name again. But some things don’t just slide back into place — like your reputation, the norms of liberal democracy or the checks and balances claimed as the foundation of American governance for centuries.

Unless you’ve flipped on Fox News or pay attention to the collusions of the House Intelligence Committee and the Department of Justice, you may have not noticed something that should alarm anyone who believes that the law applies to everyone — even your favorite president.

More: Trump’s successes have been underreported

Since the moment Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guiltyto lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with the investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election, the coordinated campaign to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller has shifted into a screeching overdrive.

It’s not clear if the goal of this campaign is to goad Trump into firing Mueller, a Bronze star-decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, or to prepare for a firing Trump has planned, or to simply discredit the findings of an investigation that has already resulted in two felony guilty pleas and the indictment of Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates.

What is clear that conservatives have learned the lessons of Watergate, the lessons that would have helped them save Nixon’s presidency.

You could look at Fox News and the vast right-wing media/donor infrastructure developed since the early 1970s as insulation that protects against any scandal or failure. And it’s insulation that could possibly even last a nuclear winter. Less than two decades after leading America into two disastrous wars and the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, Republicans now hold more political power than at any time since the 1920s — and they just delivered to their billionaire backers more than a trillion dollars in unfunded tax cuts.

Any hope that Republicans might abandon Trump after their tax windfall became law should have evaporated after seeing Vice President Pence fawn over his Dear Leader every 12 seconds. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s switch from one-time champion of the Russia investigation to volunteer Trump golf course spokesman has Sarah Kendzior, an expert on authoritarian regimes, wondering what the president has on him.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions answered Trump’s call to investigate Hillary Clinton by directing prosecutors to look into a bogus uranium controversy — violating his promise under oath to stay out of any issue relating to Clinton.

Rep. Devin Nunes, Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has run interference for Trump for a year and now is reportedly planning to shut down his committee’s Russia investigation soon in order to focus his efforts on exposing the FBIand, of course, Robert Mueller.

It’s clear Republicans want this investigation crushed not because Mueller isn’t finding any connections between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime, but because he is. And those connections now seem to involve Trump’s inner circle and vast amounts of money.

Even if Republicans don’t believe Trump committed any crimes, you’d still expect them to wonder why the president of the United States is refusing to even acknowledge interference into our elections through hacking and misinformation campaigns that are likely to recur. And even if that doesn’t bug them, they might wonder why he is still either lying about or covering up his campaign’s more than 50 contacts with the Russian government.

But apparently not.

Democrats now find themselves in the ridiculous position of having to defend both the FBI (which helped Clinton lose by announcing less than two weeks before the election that it wasreopening an investigation of her emails, even as it failed to disclose it was investigating the Trump campaign’s Russia ties), and Robert Mueller, the man Republican George W. Bush picked to lead the FBI in 2001.

Democrats must do this not because they have some sudden faith in the bureau and its record of abusing its power, but because the investigation appears to be by the book —and the GOP seems far less interested in investigating Trump’s obstruction of justice than participating in it.

After spending years investigating Benghazi and the Clintons’ money-losing Whitewater land deal, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress seem willing to close or nullify what could be the most consequential investigation into a president in American history — after less than a year.

The only question is whether there's anything, including their country, that they won't give up for Trump.

If the possible answers to that question don’t terrify you, you’re not paying attention.

Jason Sattler, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a columnist for The National Memo.