First, it was the Nazis.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump reluctantly distanced himself from America's Nazi poster boy, David Duke, pretending he didn't know who he was or what he represented. That, of course, was a lie, since Trump had appeared on Larry King on CNN back in 1990 with plenty to say about Duke.
As Adam Serwer recalled this week in The Atlantic, Duke came shockingly close to winning a senate seat in Louisiana in 1990.
"It's anger," Trump told King a few days after the Louisiana vote. "I mean, that's an anger vote. People are angry about what's happened. People are angry about the jobs. If you look at Louisiana, they're really in deep trouble."
Trump then went on to predict that if Duke ran for president, "he's going to get a lot of votes."
Earlier this year, now starring as the Oval Office Oaf, Trump defended the good people who flocked into Charlottesville, Virginia, marching with their Tiki torches held aloft, chanting racist slogans and brandishing guns.
Since he supports white supremacists, is it really surprising Trump now also supports white perverts?
And here lies the once great Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan, the party once that stood for social conservative values about the sanctity of family and the protection of children, is now divided over its support for Trump and his proxy running in Alabama for the U.S. Senate, Roy Moore.
The 70-year-old judge clearly had a thing for teenaged girls back in his 30s, based on the numerous Alabama women who have stepped forward with their stories about him from 40 years ago.
But Trump is standing by his man, insisting that Moore's denial is good enough for him. Sure, because it's entirely normal for single district attorneys in their thirties to sign the high school yearbooks of girls, praising their beauty. Or offer to a single mother he's just met to babysit her 14-year-old daughter.
Trump isn't saying the women are lying, of course. He's just saying he believes Moore.
Similarly, other Moore apologists in Alabama aren't even denying the accusations.
One pastor explained it as normal for an Alabama man to seek out a younger woman, because "there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that's true, that's straight and he looked for that."
Another pastor said there are 14-year-old girls who look like they could be 20.
The Alabama state auditor pointed to all of the lecherous old men hooking up with young girls in the Bible, including Joseph and Mary.
Why don't they just break out in Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man?
"And he'll have good times, doin' things that you don't understand, but if you love him, you'll forgive him, even though he's hard to understand, and if you love him, oh be proud of him, 'cause after all he's just a man."
Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway gave the most brutally honest and morally bankrupt reason to stick with Moore. His vote is needed in the Senate to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (Republicans prefer to call it Obamacare) and to pass a tax bill that will raise the national deficit by nearly $2 trillion, reduce taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations and raise taxes for anyone who makes less than $75,000 a year. Put another way, his politics are right so it doesn't matter if he's a pedophile or not.
Trump and Moore defenders can be found outside of Alabama and even outside of America. In a letter to the editor last week, a Prince George man took up the cause. Although he admitted that his "impression is that the accusations are true," he then parroted the Sean Hannity-Fox News defence of Moore, listing the many wrongs of the .liberal elite media and demanding more investigative journalism about Moore's Democrat opponent, Bob Jones, or Hillary Clinton.
In other words, they say they believe the accusers but don't believe the publication which reported their allegations, which makes no logical sense. Furthermore, they fall back to that excuse every child has used when caught with their hand in the cookie jar: "yeah, I stole one cookie but when you weren't looking, my brother stole two." In this case, it amounts to "if the Washington Post looked into Jones, they'd find he preyed on young girls, too."
Right.
Meanwhile, what Fox News calls journalism in Alabama was their story Wednesday that Jones had the audacity to once legally defend a client who was a Holocaust denier and had ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Here's a news flash: it's the job of lawyers to not only prosecute but also defend bad people, ensuring everyone gets a fair trial. Defending an accused serial killer doesn't mean a lawyer condones murder, it means he or she wants the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person charged is guilty.
But facts and history are just fake news in the age of Trump.
The American president defends Nazis and now he defends sexual predators.
What a peach.
