Since the 2016 inauguration, most Republicans — if they didn’t step up to defend and support him — have dodged and weaved, made excuses, changed the subject, ducked reporters and declined to comment, when confronted with norm-busting outrages by Donald Trump. Throughout four years of aberrant presidential behavior, there have been a handful of GOP critics who objected forthrightly to one discrete thing or another, but then retreated into silence (and acquiescence); other Republicans have (at most) tut-tutted about tweets, overlooking every other crash through the guardrails of democracy. Virtually all Republicans serving in the Senate and the House — whether voicing occasional murmurs of disapproval or not — hardly ever strayed from the Trump-GOP party line. They were willfully blind to Trump’s off-the-rails conduct.
The Republican Party has never been willing to hold the President accountable for his actions. Not even when national security was as stake — from choosing Putin over the Intelligence Community in Helsinki, to betraying American allies in Syria, to extorting the Ukrainian president, to refusing to utter a word of criticism regarding Russian bounties on American soldiers or cyberattacks on government agencies and corporations — the pattern has been to let it slide. Trump made implementing tax cuts and packing the courts possible. Republicans kept their heads down, celebrated their partisan victories, and endeavored to preserve their careers.
At this stage — four days after Trump instigated the crowd that assaulted the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election — the pattern hasn’t changed one whit. There are a handful of GOP critics who have taken their leader to task, while the vast majority of Republicans have stayed silent, sought to deflect Trump’s sedition by changing the subject, and absolutely refused to hold him accountable.
(The pattern looks different but only because of a handful of names, including four Senators: Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse. Yes, their voices have our attention, but this is still a small number of Republicans. Turning to the House, few Republicans — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger stand out — have objected to Trump’s anti-democratic rampaging.)
Look no further than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. On Friday, he issued a statement that condemned “the violence, destruction, and chaos that unfolded at the Capitol on Wednesday” as “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American.” He said he had spoken with Trump (after the rioting had unfolded) to advise him that “he had a great responsibility to intervene to quell the mob and start the healing process.”
There is no further reference to Donald Trump in McCarthy’s statement, no suggestion that Trump paused to consider McCarthy’s advice, and not a hint that the President bears any responsibility for the violence he encouraged. McCarthy (with most Republicans) has let Donald Trump off the hook.
The Minority Leader hasn’t acknowledged that the rioters were Trump supporters of all stripes, from (what passes for) mainstream Republicans to fringe groups and true believers who revere the President.
Donald Trump has waged a months-long campaign to challenge the integrity of the election; to hurl baseless charges of fraud; to press, through established legal channels as well as through rogue, illegal, and corrupt efforts without precedent in American history, to overturn a democratic election. After Georgia officials refused to bend to Trump’s will, he turned to the ceremonial certification of the Electoral College vote in Congress. While Vice President Pence declined to play along with the Trump script, and a violent mob could only delay the count, Senate and House Republicans got on board to challenge the results in several battleground states that Trump lost.
McCarthy’s January 8 statement acknowledges none of this, though I submit that Trump’s campaign has been “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American,” the tactics of a wannabe strongman, not the elected leader of a free country. McCarthy doesn’t acknowledge that Donald Trump bears the least responsibility for any of this.
McCarthy’s statement appeals to President-elect Joe Biden to “work together to lower the temperature and unite the country to solve America’s challenges.” And he doesn’t spare high-flown rhetoric in his statement:
The coronavirus is still coursing through our communities, businesses and workers are facing unprecedented stress, and children are falling behind. Threats from adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran are increasing. As leaders, we must call on our better angels and refocus our efforts on working directly for the American people. United we can deliver peace, strength, and prosperity our country needs. Divided, we will fail.
In a statement a day earlier, the Majority Leader acknowledged his role in casting doubt on the integrity of the election. He noted that “millions of Americans” questioned that integrity, without referencing the role of the President, Congressional Republicans, and conservative media in spreading lies. He further proclaimed the challenges served “to ensure that our country follows an accurate and accountable process.” He doesn’t note that after the Trump mob trashed the Capitol, McCarthy (and 139 of his House colleagues, plus 8 Senators, Republicans all) returned to the chamber to challenge the integrity — without any factual basis — of the election results in Pennsylvania.
Never mind McCarthy’s role in the campaign to delegitimize the election; never mind doubts about the sincerity of his appeal to unity. What is indisputable is that McCarthy declines to ascribe responsibility to Donald Trump for either the welter of lies regarding the election or the full-court press to overturn the results.
In the Senate, Marco Rubio’s stance is instructive. While Rubio, a perennial weathervane in the Republican caucus, stood with the majority of his colleagues in rejecting the challenges, he is not prepared to hold Donald Trump responsible for his anti-democratic crusade. Instead, Rubio has decided to change the subject. He has gone on a tear, first criticizing Biden’s comments — which “makes everybody blow up and go back in their corner” — and which equally characterized Rubio, who never left his corner. Then the next day he turned his attention to a perennial Republican grievance: Rubio tweeted that Twitter, in banning Trump, would “only stoke new grievances that will end up fueling the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent,” another charge that applies equally to Rubio and his tweets.
Senator Rubio, like Kevin McCarthy, is loath to even nod to the possibility of holding Donald Trump accountable.
We shall see, if and when the Democratic House moves to impeach Donald Trump, what fraction of Republicans acknowledge Trump’s role in delegitimizing and seeking to overturn a free and fair election, which culminated in the attack on the Capitol. I suggest — based on recent history — that there will be no more than a handful.
January 11 updates: David Frum called out Rubio for a hedged and contorted statement on the violence in the senator’s 4-minute “blame-everybody-but-me video” (which I hadn’t seen) that “joined 20 seconds of forthright condemnation to nearly four full minutes of blame shifting and excuse making.” The video consists of shameless grievance-mongering. There are two passing references to Donald Trump, but the principal blame for the attack on the Capitol falls on Trump’s and Rubio’s political opponents.
Jonathan Bernstein weighed in on Republicans’ retreat “to the flimsiest of defenses against impeachment and removal,” defenses that “say nothing about whether the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and nothing about whether his offenses are so grave that they demand the extraordinary action of impeachment and removal in the last days of his term. Surely that’s what matters, not whether standing up for the republic is divisive or hurts the feelings of those who oppose it.”
(Image: Sky News.)