In her guest opinion on Nov. 30, Michelle Loftus provides a textbook example of the blinkered accommodation going on within the GOP to an awful political reality. The President-elect is a man whom former Secretary of Defense — under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — Robert Gates, a principled Republican (and part-time Orcas Island resident), recently called “stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unfit to lead our men and women in uniform.”

Yet many of his fellow party members who once belittled and derided his candidacy, most notably Mitt Romney, are now trooping hat in hand to his New York doorstep seeking administration jobs. To his credit, Secretary Gates has not joined the stampede.

What is perhaps more worrisome is the political amnesia now affecting less principled party members like Ms. Loftus, a local party leader, who admits she initially supported the mercurial Ted Cruz — another GOP penitent.

In critical, discerning circles, this is called hypocrisy.

Most troubling, given her position within the party, is her attempt to rationalize the President-elect’s attitudes and behavior toward women. Some of the men that she’s worked with “have had salty language and implied very inappropriate things to me,” Ms. Loftus cavils, implying that he is little different from “the best doctors, surgeons, businessmen and engineers I have known.”

Who has she been associating with? Texas Republicans?

Those of us of a different political persuasion cannot recall any instances of such misogynistic behavior coming even close to what we have heard from and about the Republican nominee during his sulfuric 2016 campaign. And this dangerous narcissist will soon step into the nation’s highest office.

Republicans like Ms. Loftus are about to learn how they got played for suckers by a master showman and self-promoter who cares little about other people. He gives new meaning to the shopworn phrase “trumped up.”

As members of the principled opposition, we will never forget the bald-faced lies he and his henchmen have hatched online and in the media to gain the most powerful position in the world.

Michael Riordan, Eastsound

David Turnoy, Orcas Island

Chom Greacen, Lopez Island