(Dobbs) Trump's Message: Better To Betray Your Country Than Betray Your President

Who’s going to be left to speak out against Donald Trump?

North Carolina Republican senator Thom Tillis has just announced that he will not run next year for a third term. Why not? He got on the wrong side of Donald Trump. He had voted Saturday against Trump’s “big beautiful budget bill.” Only hours later, Trump said he would back a more faithful candidate to challenge Tillis. The next day, yesterday, Tillis said he won’t run.

When I read about this, the words of a German Lutheran pastor from World War II rang in my ears. He was Martin Niemöller, who once supported Adolf Hitler but eventually became a moral conscience for Germany. He grieved in a famous essay that when the Nazis came to power, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist…. Then they came for the trade unionists…. Then they came for the Jews.” And finally he lamented, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Niemöller’s quote is on permanent display, his words are called an indictment of indifference.

It is a danger we’re looking at again today. Who’s going to be left to speak out against Donald Trump? Who in his party with a will to survive is going to go up against the venomous and vindictive man who this weekend labeled opposition to his bill “the ultimate betrayal?”

People who cross this president don’t often last long. Of the seven Republican senators who voted in 2021 to convict Trump after he was impeached for his part of the insurrection on January 6th, only three are still around. In 2022, fifteen Republicans joined the Democrats to pass a landmark federal gun safety law. Some of them are gone now too.

Jason Miller, who was spokesperson for Trump’s first campaign in 2016 and served on his two subsequent campaigns, said all we need to know in three simple words on a menacing social media post Saturday night: “Don’t cross Trump.” It’s yet another reminder that what matters most to this president isn’t the regressive policies he pushes. It’s the unfaltering loyalty he demands.

Thom Tillis didn’t deliver. He had the effrontery to vote against Trump’s budget bill, and issued a statement explaining why: “It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities. This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population, and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population.”

Credit to Senator Tillis. That’s worth falling on your sword for. But it underscores Trump’s malevolent message to other Republicans: better to betray your country than betray your president.

The other Republican “no” vote in the bill’s first round in the Senate Saturday night came from Kentucky’s Rand Paul. His objection is to what he calculates to be the five trillion dollars it will add to the national debt. Although Trump lobbied Senator Paul over a game of golf, Paul didn’t budge, he didn’t compromise his principle. However, principle isn’t anything Donald Trump understands. The word simply isn’t in his vocabulary. So when Rand Paul stood on principle, Trump angrily asked on X, “What's wrong with this guy?”

Paul has less to worry about than Tillis though. He’s not up for reelection until 2028.

Then there’s five-term Republican congressman Don Bacon. He represents a rare swing district in the red state of Nebraska, and on a few issues he also has had the guts to go up against the president. The vote that probably got under Donald Trump’s skin the most was just last month when Bacon— alone amongst his GOP colleagues— gave thumbs down to the president’s puerile bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Bacon didn’t mince words. He said it was “stupid.” Candor like that in the age of Trump is a political death sentence. Today, Don Bacon is expected to announce his retirement.

In Tillis’s retirement message, he said, “It has become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” The other side of that coin is, leaders in the president’s party who aren’t so willing, leaders who will say and do almost anything to stay in the president’s good graces, are almost all the GOP has left.

Trump has passionate supporters who praise him for “getting things done.” They’re missing two things. One is, almost everything he’s “getting done” isn’t good. The other is, any of us could “get things done” if we held a gun to other people’s heads.

It comes back to Martin Niemöller’s indictment of indifference. As Donald Trump turns even more dismissive, even more authoritarian, even more ruthless, who will be left to speak out against him?

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net