Jackie Silver, of Great Neck, said she had voted for Mr. Santos and would do so again. Ms. Silver said that those calling for him to face further investigation, or even relinquish his seat, were only targeting him because he is a Republican. ...
“He has to ask for forgiveness, and he’ll be forgiven,” Mr. Mallett, a registered Republican, said. He added: “He’s just making it way too complicated. It’s really simple.” ...
Barbara Vissichelli of Glen Cove, N.Y., said that she had met Mr. Santos while helping to register voters and had bonded with him over their shared love of animals. Ms. Vissichelli contributed $2,900 to his campaign and said she would continue to support him.
“He was never untruthful with me,” she said.
In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.
As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both roads led to disaster. Both Jackson and Reagan were popular, larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Ailes were given the space to emerge into the mainstream to do their destructively polarizing thing in the 90s. I'd argue there are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis as from Reagan to Donald Trump. ...
So since Reagan and the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal New Democrats, have not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but have led us to a condition where it's not enough for the worst tendencies in American society to be tolerated, but rather for those worst tendencies to become the norm. The Reagan-promoted fantasy of America created the space for the most regressive and shameful elements in the American psyche to emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult to understand how it created the shame-denying, resentment-driven, reality-averse habits of mind that inevitably led so many conservatives to embrace Trump.
See also "Elon Musk's Text Messages Explain Everything". The good news, I suppose, is that Reality always breaks through sooner or later. The bad news is how extraordinary and destructive the effort people make to keep it at bay.
Maybe Republicans are right when they say they represent the 'real America'. If so, you'll forgive the rest of us when we tell you that we'd prefer to live somewhere else.