Pat Robertson is moving on from Donald Trump. Republicans think you should too. Especially from holding them complicit.
Greg Sargent calls out the New York Times for aiding and abetting the Republican effort to wash its hands of Trumpism so they can get back to the business of business. He tweeted Monday morning, “Stop saying Trump and his supporters ‘actually believe’ the election was stolen from him. They support overturning *legitimate* election results. They’re angry because democracy *worked,* not because it failed.”
The Times reports that Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is looking forward to not having to respond to Trump tweets. Perhaps the Democrats will face bitter internal divisions? A T-party of their own? Won’t that be nice?
“Our problem is tone, their problem is policy,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). He wants to get back to advocating his party’s failed policies, to trigger-fishing after a new shark, and to enjoying a mint julep on his porch swing.
Meanwhile, Trump is asking advisors about declaring martial law so he can redo elections in enough swing states to undo his reelection loss, for heaven’s sake. Rudy Giuliani wants to seize voting machines and invalidate hundreds of thousands or more votes for him.
Sargent writes:
Those ideas were shot down. But the damage from Trump’s active efforts to overturn the election is ongoing. As Rosie Gray’s reporting demonstrates, Trump is potentially creating a mass of followers behind the idea that election outcomes are only legitimate when they get their way, and that overturning hated results is not just acceptable, but is correct.
Cornyn and his ilk will soon piously insist Trump’s electoral subversion amounted to a few “tweets.” They will pretend they merely wanted to let Trump and his voters down easy, because Trump was “in denial” and his voters “actually believed” Trump won, leaving them in a “difficult” spot.
But once again, Trump and his supporters do not actually believe Joe Biden didn’t win. They want to invalidate a legitimate election, because they lost it. As Tom Nichols says, it’s time to stop treating these “feelings” as vaguely legitimate. These folks are angry not that democracy failed, but that it worked, and they claim the right to reverse this.
Nichols recommends what I have. Do not try to understand Trump’s “completely incoherent” base or win them over. They must be defeated. Not every Republican voter is so far gone, Nichols adds, but people who “buy weird paintings of Trump crossing the Delaware, or who believe that Trump is an agent of Jesus Christ, or who think that Trump is fighting a blood-drinking ring of pedophiles.” To argue with them is to legitimize their beliefs. “I don’t want to treat our fellow citizens with open contempt, or to confront and berate them,” Nichols writes. “Rather, I am arguing for silence.” I argue for making them a footnote to history and Trump a public example.
The Obama Department of Justice looked away and the last Republican administration walked away from war crimes it committed under color of torture memos from the Bush Office of Legal Council. Trump’s enablers hope to walk away from hundreds of thousands of Americans dead as a result of their complicity in Trump’s non-handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans had a chance to remove him from office on February 5 for crimes detailed in articles of impeachment just before 320,000+ Americans started dying. They looked the other way too.
But having found Trump’s base easily suggestible, Republicans will try to “instill mass amnesia about the wreckage unleashed in part by their ideology” and avoid culpability for “one of the biggest governing disasters in modern times.” It worked for the Bushies.
Sargent adds:
We know how they’ll do this. As the Times piece notes, Republicans want to get past Trump, to get back to attacking “the most extreme ideas on the left.” This is a polite way of saying that Republicans want to get back to conventional GOP plutocratic economic orthodoxy, advanced under cover of fictions about Democratic extremism.
Do not let state-level Republicans evade their complicity either, argue two North Carolina Democrats. Nicole Ward Quick and Martha Royal Shafer lost state House races in 2020 and 2018 respectively. They condemn state Sen. Bob Steinburg for urging Trump to suspend habeas corpus and “invoke the Insurrection Act” to detain his enemies and overthrow the results of the November election. Steinburg told WRAL, “for whatever period of time it takes to round them up, then yes.”
Who exactly are the real radicals? the women ask. Because Steinberg is not an outlier:
[T]oday’s Republican leaders in North Carolina are the radicals, a term they often used to unfairly slander us in their campaigns. If you need any more evidence, continue to check the headlines; if the past is any guide, we’ll keep seeing our elected officials pop up there, and not in a good way.
For far too long, American exceptionalism has excepted top leaders for culpability for their actions. For federal crimes. For international war crimes. For crimes against the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his believers know he lost the election. They just believe they are so God-blessed exceptional that they should not have to live with the results. “Fuck Your Feelings” is now “Fuck Your Election.” Their leaders among the GOP believe they should be excepted from complicity in the four years in which Trump reduced the United States to a pitiable international laughing stock. The world watched in horror as the U.S infantilized itself and Republicans watched Americans die.
Nero fiddled. Trump tweeted. Republicans coddled. The world owes them contempt not a makeover.
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