Only the Never Trumpers can say this out loud. Tim Miller on Nicolle Wallace’s show earlier today:
Miller: I think that people who watch this network and don’t watch Newsmax and OAN and Fox and read right wing media outlets, I don’t think realize how nuts this is. They’re talking about dump trucks with millions of votes being dropped off. I was watching Newsmax earlier today and every hour, 3 or 4 or 5 times, they are pressuring state legislators to not respect the vote and to try to overturn the vote in the electoral college.
Now this isn’t going to happen but there are tens of millions of viewers who are watching this that think this election is being stolen. The long term consequences of that are great. And the entire Republican Senate and House caucus is silent…
Wallace: … And let me tell you something, if the shoe were on the other foot, if Donald Trump had won with 6,7, 8 million votes in the popular vote, a decisive 300 plus electoral vote win, and Joe Biden had refused to concede, you know exactly what Republicans would have been doing. They would be trying to criminalize speech as slander.
I mean I cannot overstate the asymmetry of how each party fights. And this is a fight that needs to be fought on the Democrats part because letting this lie stand from Donald Trump and from the Republicans in congress means that Joe Biden will inherit a country in which millions of people will not think he is a legitimate president.
Miller: Yes, the asymmetry is real. People forget this but President Obama greeted Donald Trump two days I think after the election was called? Very quickly. And he tried to help with his transition.
The reason for this asymmetry, though Nicolle, is bottom up. I hate to say it but this is what Republican voters want. And Democratic voters just didn’t demand these sort of insane lies out of their candidates. And that’s what’s happening. These Republican officials are responding to what their voters want, that’s why Newsmax’s ratings are going up, that’s why Rand Paul gets 35, 000 retweets when he spreads absolutely crazy lies.
Democrats have to say they care about the Trump voters and just want to give them job security and health care and it’s ok, really, if they spit in our faces and call us names because they are salt of the earth working people who deserve respect and understanding. It’s very dicey to point out that the Trump voters are well … not very fine people who demand that they be told what they want to hear. These Never Trumpers can say it and I’m glad they do.
Speaking of asymmetry, I’m hearing quite a few people other than Donald Trump try to make the case that the Russia investigation was the Democrats’ version of Trump’s denial of the election results today. That is absurd. First of all, the Russia investigation was initiated by a bunch of Republican G-men, one of whom actually sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s election. In fact, if you asked most Democrats if they blamed James Comey or Vladimir Putin for Clinton’s loss, Comey would win by a mile. After all, he not only sabotaged Clinton he kept the Russia investigation secret during the election!
Virtually no one believed that the votes were changed or that Trump’s election was stolen. We were all very careful to use words like “interference” which is not the same thing at all. The concern was that Trump welcoming interference by a foreign power to help him win was just a teensy bit unethical and it was fair to wonder if some deal had been made to do it. Considering how he is trying to do end runs around the electoral college and use partisan legislators to usurp the will of the voters, I’d say that suspicion was well-founded. The man is a cheater — he’s doing it right now in front of our eyes. The fact that his loss was too big to pull it off doesn’t make him any less of a shameless, conniving fraudster.
So no, there is no symmetry on that either. It’s ridiculous. Democrats accepted the results of the election. They just wanted to know if the man who won owed a big favor to a foreign leader who doesn’t have the country’s best interests at heart. We’d have been fools not to follow that up.