The donkeys who cried, "Wolf!"

 We need more of this. pic.twitter.com/gWMvXiLPmn

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 7, 2020

(Video of Mitt Romney marching "to end violence and brutality, and to make sure that people understand that black lives matter").

Mitt Romney marched in the Black Lives Matter parade. George W. Bush has spoken out in sympathy for the cause and has previously spoken out against President Trump's divisive politics, though without naming names. While a Bush spokesman has poured cold water on a New York Times report that the former president will refuse to vote for President Trump in November (while stopping far short of saying that he will), Mr. Bush- along with his father, President George H.W. Bush, Romney, and other prominent Republicans often vilified by the Democrats in the past are reputed to have declined to vote for Mr. Trump in 2016. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has publicly stated that he will vote for Joe Biden. House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner won't commit to supporting Mr. Trump.

Both Romney and Dubya were lied about by Democrats on an almost unbelievable scale when they ran for president. Neither was perfect, but the character assassination to which they were subjected by the opposition was shameful. I and many others have had policy differences with some of the people I've listed above, but they do not deserve to be put in the same category as our most obviously unfit president.

Yet they have been, over and over again.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Democrats have cried "Wolf!" about Republicans for decades. I do not deny that all too many Republicans have, in fact, been wolves. But not all. And often not those about whom the Democrats have cried the most loudly. Well, now the wolf has come. Some of the more stubbornly malicious still refuse to say anything good about Dubya or Romney or the others no matter what they do or say. Many are still repeating the same falsehoods about how Mr. Bush (and by extension, Powell) lied about, rather than being mistaken based on convincing evidence about, Saddam Hussein's retention of the weapons of mass destruction everyone knew he recently had when the Second Gulf War broke out.  But it's become fashionable for Democrats like Sen. Harris to speak approvingly of people like Mr. Bush and Romney when they openly side with the sheep now that the real wolf has finally come.

Nor is this a question of Democrats being alone in their malice and hypocrisy. Republicans did it, too, even before Mr. Trump (who is now lying over and over on Twitter about Joe Biden's alleged support of the idiotic Minneapolis proposal to abolish the police support, which Biden, in fact, has consistently rejected) elevated lying about the other guy to an art form.  But it's a sad commentary on the state of our juvenile politics that we are so bent on demonizing each other that we have run out of things to say when a Donald Trump comes around because we've exhausted them all on hyperbole about decent people with whom we simply happen to disagree, however strongly, about lesser things.

I expect decent people from both parties and from all over the political spectrum to unite in support of Joe Biden and against Donald Trump in the coming twenty or so weeks before the election. I do not expect that we Republicans and former Republicans will have much "pull" in the Biden administration which I expect to take office in January. Although there is debate about this point, I continue to believe that following even the massive Trump defeat which seems to be becoming more likely either the Republican Party or its members who have sold out to Donald Trump will be able to redeem themselves.

They own Trump now, and the rest of us will remember and know that they are unreliable allies in the fight for values we once thought we shared.

No, the Democratic Party will not suddenly become diverse enough to accommodate people like me- or like Mitt Romney. While individuals may continue to work within the Republican Party, for many of us it is simply no longer a tenable vehicle. The stink of Trumpism will not wash off, and Trumpism itself will not go away. No matter how hard the Republican Party may try to distance itself from Mr. Trump following a hypothetical defeat in November,  the darker corners of the conservative movement will remain and will be unlikely to completely divorce themselves even from a Republican Party in which it is no longer welcome.

And while every effort may be made to forget Trump, how many who have supported him will admit to having been wrong or even admit to what it is which, for whatever reason, they have been willing to support?  In many ways, Donald Trump is an aberration in American history and in the history of the Republican Party. He was nominated because his rivals- nearly all far better qualified than he- were so numerous, and the marginal groups which formed his base emerged as the largest single undissolved lump. He was elected because even though (contrary to legend) the polls predicting his defeat were pretty much on target, they measured the popular rather than the electoral vote, and a freakish combination of narrow victories in exactly the right places gave him a majority in the Electoral College.

That combination of events will likely not repeat themselves. But the drift of the Republican Party from reasoned conservatism of Reagan and Bob Dole and the Bushes and John McCain and Mitt Romney to the extremism and crudeness and ugliness of Donald Trump was not a sudden accident, even if Mr. Trump's personal embodiment of it was. It was not only underway but obvious long before the Iowa Caucuses back in 2016. Those who make up Mr. Trump's base will not forget that no matter how much various seemingly random events and coincidence may have helped them, they were once able to elect one of their own as president and that the Republican Party was not only a viable instrument for making it happen but was willing to become their accomplice. Things have been legitimized by the last four years that Americans have never seen as legitimate before. Donald Trump's influence not only on the American political scene but on the Republican Party, in particular, will be with us for a very long time and will not prove something easy to shed even after he has left the scene.

I don't know what the future may bring. Perhaps a centrist third party to compete with the two increasingly polarizing and extreme alternatives. Maybe a new and more traditionally conservative alternative to the Republicans. Or maybe the Republicans will just try to pretend that Donald Trump never happened without truly repudiating him.

But sadly, I expect both parties to continue to cry "Wolf!," and that the next time a real wolf comes along, the nation will be as slow to realize it as they were this time.

After all, they've heard the cry of "Wolf!" so many times before, and in unmeasured and unnuanced tones, and from every conceivable direction that even now that the wolf has finally come, depressingly many Americans still don't realize it.