Many decades ago, when I was a college student convinced I knew everything there was to know, in a conversation with my father I labelled someone a hypocrite.
Dad stopped me in my tracks.
“That is a very loaded word,” he said. “Take care how you use it.”
Ever since, I’ve been wary of rushing to judgment – but the temptation these days is bedeviling when we review the about-faces of former Trump critics who now fawn on him.
What are we to make for instance, of Nikki Haley, who recently threw her strong endorsement to His Donaldship after declaring during the primary campaign that “I feel no need to kiss the ring.”
That made sense at the time, since she was also calling Trump unhinged, a purveyor of national and worldwide chaos, a pal of Vladimir Putin, disrespectful of our military, too old to be President, and in general, a “disaster.”
As for his former presidency, she told an interviewer in 2021, “We can’t ever let that happen again.”
Now she says: Never mind.
One-time adversary Sen. Ted Cruz finally endorsed Trump after the 2016 primaries, in what some called one of the great political flip-flops of all time.
As reported by Politico, Cruz originally hinted that Trump may have had mob connections, and variously referred to him as a sniveling coward; a big, loud New York bully; a small and petty man who is intimidated by strong women; nuts; a pathological liar; and utterly amoral.
All that evaporated when early this year in an interview with Fox News, Cruz declared of Trump, “I look forward to supporting him enthusiastically.”
After trading humiliating insults with the former president in the past, Sen. Marco Rubio repented and was reportedly on Trump’s short list for vice president before hard-right conservative J.D. Vance won that sycophantic sweepstakes.
Vance, who like the others is born-again in now deifying Trump, once wondered whether he was “America’s Hitler” and termed him a reprehensible moral disaster and a “total fraud.”
He wrote in a 2016 Atlantic essay that Trump falsely offers an easy escape from complex problems, while “so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action.”
Trump, he wrote, “is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
Vance said in 2016 he was so disgusted with Trump that he contemplated voting for Hillary Clinton, although he ultimately reported that he would vote for an independent candidate.
The wannabe vice president, whose personal story of hard beginnings is as compelling as his politics are disturbing, now calls Trump America’s “last best hope.”
All these turnabouts recall that long-ago fatherly advice I got on using the “h” word only after considerable thought – so in deference, it will not be bandied about here.
Suffice it to say that lately, the temptation to invoke it is compellingly strong. And this I know for sure: If Dad were still here and watching the incongruent GOP, he would gladly hand me a literary free pass.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
TRUMP 2024! MAGA