How has the Very Stable Genius politically jeopardized the Republican Party? Let us count the ways

It's pretty clear to anyone outside the cult that Donald Trump did himself and the party which let him become its standard-bearer no favors this week. His original remarks the other day about disinfectant and light immediately left even close aides aghast. When he tried to spin them as sarcasm the next day, it was seen as beyond lame.  And now a queasiness is spreading throughout Republican ranks. 

Well, on the level on which things get done politically, the throne-sniffers are still in charge. There is no room for actual conservatives in the policy-making and strategizing ranks. A longtime party activist was kicked off a Georgia state committee Zoom call last night for daring to criticize Trump.

Ms. Moscato, the ostracized activist, now vows to actively support Biden. I've had social-media conversations with a number of actual conservatives who are going to go this route. Personally, it's a bridge too far. I'm closely monitoring Justin Amash's thought processes this week.

But the fact that a number of conservatives really see getting behind Biden as the most viable option in this grim moment speaks to how strongly conservatives feel about Trump's ruinous effect on what we hold dear and have defended as long as we've been culturally and politically engaged. The way it's mainly put when they are pressed to come up with a succinct defense of their position is that the most urgent order of business is the removal of Trump.

There has even been some punditry put forth specifically knocking the consideration of supporting Amash. I've respectfully considered it, but ultimately it boils down to the binary-choice argument that prevailed in 2016 (and which I resisted with my vote on the first Tuesday that November).

No, the fact is that Justin Amash embodies so much - north of 80 percent - of what I'm looking for in a Republican presidential candidate. He'd be someone worth considering even if the VSG were not a factor. And if we keep going down this binary-choice path, when neither of the choices has the slightest appeal to actual conservatives, the principles we stand for and the worldview we embrace recedes to the point of being a quaint footnote in our civilization's history. 

I am not here tossing my support behind Amash. There's a decent chance that I will go that way.

My main point, though, is that we have let, as Rick Perry put it in the last election cycle, a "cancer on conservatism" metastasize into the pathetic mess we're seeing at the nightly pandemic press briefings.  (And, no, you won't get me to digress into a back-and-forth on the fact that Perry took the Energy Secretary gig anyway. That's a conversation for another day.)

Donald Trump is unfit to be president. He has turned the Republican Party into something grotesque, not to mention useless. And, most importantly to me, he has tossed a cluster bomb into the conservative movement, and cleaning up the damage and carnage is a task we ought not to have to be occupying ourselves with in a moment of national crisis.

It didn't have to be this way.