As the ancient proverb goes, the fish rots from the head.
The expression’s been used by countless leaders in business to describe the way a bad CEO can hamper productivity downstream, or to explain how corruption can infect an organization. Of course, it’s also been used by law enforcement to describe its approach to taking down mob bosses.
And yet, unimaginably, here we are.
For the past six years, since Donald Trump took over the Republican party and remade it in his unseemly image, scholars and analysts, Democrats and Never-Trumpers, journalists and media personalities have asserted fairly consistently that he is responsible for taking the GOP where it is today.
It’s hard not to agree. While Trump didn’t invent all of the far-right’s historical and problematic impulses, he certainly exploited and exploded them. The racism and bigotry, xenophobia and homophobia that many conservatives had tried to rid the party of over the past couple of decades found new comfort in Trump’s GOP.
While conservative leaders before him had pushed for austerity, fiscal responsibility, free trade and the economic optimism of rising tides, Trump favored reckless spending, exploding the debt and deficit, trade protectionism and the economic pessimism of grievance politics.
He took the party away from its conservative principles and steered it toward whatever he needed at the moment. That included a shift away from policy and toward divisive culture wars, an abuse of the executive branch and attempts at corrupting the separation of powers.
Finally, he ushered in a rogue wave of new conspiracy theories, denialism, junk science, and cultism, all of which still threaten to undermine the very foundation of democracy upon which America is built.
If the GOP is a rotting fish, Trump certainly is the head.
But another old adage is just as instructive, maybe even more so now that Trump is no longer president (for now): One rotten apple can spoil the bunch.
We all know how infectious diseases can spread. We know how an entire body of water can be contaminated by a single drop of a powerful toxin. Likewise, we know that if one apple begins to rot, its release of ethylene will trigger the same reaction in the other apples stored with it.
That one rotten apple doesn’t have to be the biggest or most important, the head or leader of the bunch, to have a disastrous impact on the whole.
As much as Trump is the head of a rotting GOP, the party’s also been contaminated by rotten apples. It would be easy to dismiss one or two as rogue, fringe, insignificant, and unrepresentative. But as rotten apples are wont to do, they’ve contaminated the bunch. And now, there are too many rotten apples in the party to count, many of whom are in positions of considerable power.
This week the House GOP Steering Committee put the queen of conspiracies, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, on the Homeland Security Committee and the House Oversight Committee. The controversy-ridden Congressman from Arizona, Paul Gosar was also appointed to the Oversight Committee, as well as the House Committee on Natural Resources.
Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who’s been accused more than once of inciting violence against groups and individuals, was also put on the Oversight Committee.
As for everyone’s favorite fabulist, Rep. George Santos (or is it Anthony Devolder?) was rewarded for his sudden rise to infamy with appointments to two House panels, the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
A serial, sociopathic liar, known conspiracy theorists, bigots, and election deniers — all now household names and in positions of power inside the GOP.
Instead of definitively denouncing these bad apples long before they could spread their rot, GOP leaders like Trump and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy protected and promoted them. Now, they are as responsible as Trump is for infecting the right, ushering in new conspiracy theory candidates for office, creating countless more election deniers, fomenting more bigotry and hate among their constituents, and soldering the whole of the Republican Party to their bad ideas and bad behavior.
The relative silence of once principled conservatives like former Vice President Mike Pence, the exodus of idea-centered conservatives like former Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. Jeff Flake, and Rep. Charlie Dent, and the ousting of country-over-party conservatives like Rep. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger has meant the bunch is now represented by more bad apples than good.
These bad apples are as responsible for polluting the GOP as Trump was, and they seem more determined than ever to drive the party into oblivion and irrelevance.
When we look back on the self-destruction of the Republican Party, remember it wasn’t just the one guy at the top, but a death by a thousand cuts.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
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