Trump always presented a
danger to his supporters. Once they signed up for his tales of greatness,
perfection, and winning, winning, winning, they were liable to be sucked
further and further down his rabbit hole of fabrication. Because Trump never
admits that he was wrong and continually embellishes the lies he invents,
supporters are unable to draw a line without repudiating their earlier
endorsement of his dishonesty. Trump employs his inability to admit anything
less than genius to attack everyone who doesn’t buy his whole program. The
silence of Republicans in Congress since the election, which has been
interpreted as tacit approval of his ever crazier claims about fraud,
represents their dilemma: they can’t get off the Trump train as it speeds into
uncharted waters.
Sorry for the mixed
metaphors. But I’m not sorry for Trump’s sycophants, who deserve the very
predictable problem they brought on themselves. The Washington Post surveyed
all 249 Congressional Republicans last week, and only
27 acknowledged Biden’s election.
Brian Kemp, Governor of
Georgia, is a prominent example of what happens to those who can’t take any
more. His support for Trump over many years has been vociferous, and Trump
endorsed him in the Republican primary for Governor in 2018, perhaps after
seeing Kemp’s ad on
FOX News, where he brandished a rifle and threatened to round up illegal
immigrants himself. Kemp then narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams, helped by his
earlier removal
of hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls as Secretary of
State, overseeing his own election. But Kemp and other Georgia Republicans
could not prevent Georgia’s voters from handing the state to Joe Biden, thanks
to Abrams’ massive get-out-the-vote drive since 2018.
When Trump insisted that he
had won Georgia but for massive electoral fraud there, Georgia Secretary of
State Brad Raffensberger, and then Governor Kemp, defended their state. It’s
all or nothing for Trump. On social media, he called Raffensberger “a so-called
Republican (RINO)”. He said on FOX News about Kemp, “I’m
ashamed that I endorsed him”, and placed Raffensberger in a special
category of “electoral officials making deals, like this character in Georgia
who’s a disaster.” On December 1, Trump said Kemp
should “do something”, because he had allowed his state to be “scammed”. An
even better idea: “Then call off the election. It won’t be needed.”
Trump’s demand to follow him
or be thrown out of Trump World hit FOX News after the network called Arizona
for Biden. Since then, the libelous claims by Sidney Powell, a lawyer so
outrageous that even Trump’s campaign had to disavow her, that voting machines
systematically changed Trump votes to Biden across the country, have caught FOX’s
foxes in a trap. Lou Dobbs let her offer this Trumpism on November 30: “It’s
really the
most massive and historical, egregious fraud the world has ever seen.” Sean
Hannity encouraged her to repeat those claims, also without contradiction.
Tucker Carlson, however, demanded that she show some evidence. When she refused
and displayed public outrage at this demand, conservatives began to criticize
him.
Georgia attorney Lin Wood
included Carlson as the new enemy, writing on Nov. 22, “Fox News is now
part of the propaganda arm of the leftists/Communists who think they are going
to overthrow our Constitution.” At a “Stop the Steal” rally in Georgia last
week, Wood shouted at the crowd that they
should not vote for either Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue until the
electoral fraud is fixed, which means never. “Why would you go back and vote in
another rigged election?” I wonder how those 222 non-committal Congressional
Republicans would answer that.
At the state level,
Republican leaders have mostly followed the law, bringing us to “safe harbor” day
tomorrow, when states make final decisions in any controversies over the
appointment of their electors. But handfuls of local representatives have
openly offered to commit whatever political crime it takes to reverse the
election. A group of 64
Republican Pennsylvania state representatives signed a letter to the whole
Pennsylvania Congressional delegation asking them to “to object, and vote to
sustain such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” when Congress meets on January 6 to confirm the
Electoral College results. That’s half of all Republicans in the lower House,
including the Speaker and the Majority Leader, and 7 of 28 in the Senate.
It is not easy to predict how
those who have so closely clung to Trump will react to his escalating attacks
on our constitutional system. Attorney General Bill Barr already transformed
his supposedly non-political Justice Department into Trump’s taxpayer-funded
legal defense team. Then Trump said on November 29 that the Justice Department
and the FBI might
be co-conspirators: “This is total fraud ... maybe they’re involved.” Two
days later, Barr
told the Associated Press, “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could
have effected a different outcome in the election.” Too bad he didn’t tell the
whole truth, that there was no systemic fraud at all. Still Trump is pissed at
the latest traitor. NBC News reported that Trump wouldn’t say any more that he
had confidence in his Attorney General: “Ask
me that in a number of weeks from now.”
The “army” representing
Trump, people he picked and encourages, is led by a small collection of wacko
publicity hounds, who will scream their fabricated claims over and over again,
no matter how unlikely and easily disprovable they are, or what kind of people
they offend by their accusations. The claim by Giuliani & Co. is simple:
the Dems stole the election. But now they are attacking Republicans who won’t
abuse their offices in the cause.
The pattern is in plain
sight. Since he won the Republican primary in 2016, the divide between pro- and
anti-Trump Republican politicians has been their view of the future. Those who
saw themselves searching for Republican votes in the future went along. The
Republican members of Congress who have criticized Trump’s lies about the
election come from the same cohort as those who campaigned against him before
the election: out of office or on their way, “formers”, “ex-’s”,
soon-to-be-formers.
Maybe it’s still true that
the number of Republican Congresspeople who have contracted COVID is larger
than the number who have endorsed the election results as fair and free. The
vast majority are sliding along with Trump on his slippery slope, with no
brakes, no place to get off before crashing. What will that crash look like?
Will anyone pay a price for
this attempt to overthrow our constitutional system? The answer lies not with
those politicians, who will adopt every possible slippery justification for
their actions. We, those who have opposed Trump from the beginning, can’t make
Republicans pay an electoral price, because we don’t vote for them. Only
Republican voters can decide to stop supporting individuals and a Party
leadership that cares much more about winning, than about democracy. Will they
hold any of their “leaders” responsible for their choices? How many will make
any effort to discover truth and to compare it to the lies with which they have
been bombarded? We, however, can urge state prosecutors, state bar
associations, and Democratic legislators to seek penalties within the law for
all those who are subverting our electoral system by telling lies.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
December 8, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment