(Dobbs) Trump's Newest Alternative Fact: "Election Day" Was The Insurrection
The sorriest thing is, all those Republicans who enable him.
One disgrace piles on atop another.
Steve Bannon is only the latest. But Bannon, Donald Trump‘s campaign manager and then his senior advisor in the White House and now cited for criminal contempt, is also only a symbol. A symbol of Trump’s own anti-democratic, anti-constitutional, anti-American conduct.
And this leads to a sorry conclusion: every Republican in the House of Representatives who voted yesterday against compelling Bannon to testify about the insurrection on January 6— that would be all but nine of them— is complicit. If they support Bannon, they support Trump. And if they support Trump, they support treason.
It’s not as if the defeated president has given up on his shameless lie and insurgent rhetoric. Yesterday, not just burying but actually justifying his sedition, he took it all to a new low. “The insurrection took place on Nov 3, Election Day,” he wrote. “Jan. 6 was the protest.”
Is he talking about the protest where his hellbent sycophants— prompted by the then-president’s own fighting words— broke into the Capitol, beat up police officers, hunted for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, erected a noose and screamed for the neck of Vice President Mike Pence, and tried (along with their fellow travelers in Congress) to invalidate an election already affirmed by courts and commissions across the land? Is it the protest where, by the end of the day, five people were dead?
Yeah, right, “Jan. 6 was the protest.”
I’m long past hoping that this disgrace of an ex-president will ever put the stability of our nation above the satisfaction of his ego.
What’s more, those 202 Republicans who voted on the side of Trump— and make no mistake, that’s what they did yesterday— are also complicit in abetting not just the venomous lies, but the vulgar trash that comes from this vindictive man. Everyone remembers what he once said about John McCain, a war hero who spent more than five tortured years as a POW in Vietnam: “I like people who weren’t captured. I don’t like losers.”
You can’t get captured, of course, if bone spurs keep you off the battlefield.
Any supposition that this vile man learned anything back then after condemnations from both sides of the aisle was shattered this week when Colin Powell died. The ex-president wasted no time paying tribute, as all his living predecessors did, to Powell’s groundbreaking service to the nation. Trump rushed instead to vengeance against a principled Republican icon who had committed the crime of endorsing both of his Democratic opponents. “Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media.”
I’m long past hoping that this disgrace of an ex-president will ever put manners above malice.
In his world, there is no bottom.
And of course there is no bottom in Trump’s Republican party when it comes to suppressive new state election laws designed to make it harder, not easier, for every eligible citizen to vote. His henchmen in Republican-led legislatures have passed them, his henchmen in Washington have refused to supersede them. They aren’t willing to have a fair fight on election day anymore.
Democracy be damned.
The issue today is bigger than Steve Bannon. The issue is bigger than the insurrection. The issue is the stability of our democracy. The issue is the fate of our democracy. It’s all threatened by Donald Trump and those who, with their votes, embrace him. The copycats, the wannabes, the hypocrites, the true believers bestow blessings on his abominable sins.
Barry Goldwater, the presidential candidate for the Republicans back in 1964, produced a book called Conscience of a Conservative. He cited "laws of God" and "truths of God" as the foundation of the American experiment.
Yesterday only nine courageous Republicans in the House, including a rock-hard right-winger by the name of Liz Cheney, showed that they had the conscience of a conservative. The others, whether loyal to Trump or just scared of him (with the interesting exception of Mike Pence’s brother Greg, the only House Republican to abstain), have the conscience of a coyote.
In the aftermath of the election and especially in the aftermath of the insurrection, I have feared for my country. Yesterday didn’t help.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, 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 has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.