Put a stop to this, GOP
Come Dec. 14, the Electoral College is set to affirm what most Americans already know: Joe Biden won the presidency, and Donald Trump lost.
Yet the more inevitable that becomes — the more Mr. Trump loses case after case challenging the results, the more states validate Mr. Biden’s decisive victory — the more Mr. Trump digs in on his false narrative that it was he who won, or would have but for all the voter fraud out there. Not even the admission of his own sycophantic attorney general, William Barr, that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” is enough to get Mr. Trump to concede.
It would be bad enough if this were just the president lying or deluding himself in the bubble of the bizarre that has been his presidency, as evidenced by the 46-minute political dis-infomercial he staged in the White House last week. But Mr. Trump and his campaign have been all too successful in spinning this fiction and persuading most Republicans that somehow Mr. Trump could yet prevail — if people keep sending him money.
And quite a windfall he’s raised — more than $200 million since the election in response to pleas for money to support the election challenge. In reality, though, most of the money is going to his political action committee, not so much to his campaign, the Republican Party, or the hopeless legal fights.
Pressed by reporters, Mr. Trump said just before Thanksgiving he would leave the White House on Inauguration Day if Mr. Biden is officially determined to be the winner. But in the same breath, he continued to falsely assert that the election was fraudulent. He vaguely suggested shocking new evidence was yet to be revealed, as if he’s been keeping it up his sleeve all this time while his lawyers, having none, keep losing in court.
This has taken on a life of its own in right-wing circles, with all sorts of scenarios befitting a president and a cult of personality that thrives on conspiracy theories: Republican state legislatures would spurn voters and pick electors willing to hijack the election. Democratic electors would turn on Mr. Biden. Congress won’t validate the results of the Electoral College.
Or this, from Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump convicted for lying about his communications with Russians during the 2016 election but pardoned Nov. 25 by the president: Invoke martial law, cancel the election and have the military conduct a new one. In the Cult of Trump, this passes for patriotism.
All this noxious and incendiary talk of a stolen election has metastasized into threats of violence against even Republican officials just trying to do their jobs honestly — those like Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting implementation manager, who last week pleaded publicly for Mr. Trump to stop. “Someone is going to get hurt. Someone is going to get shot. Someone is going to get killed,” he said.
Mr. Trump long ago demonstrated he has no care for the damage he is doing to our democracy, and that he relishes causing his perceived enemies personal misery. Now he’s tearing the country apart, yet still many Republican leaders will not speak out. Where is their courage? They hem and haw on whether they trust the election results, as Rep. Elise Stefanik of Schuylerville did last week in saying she supports “the continued effort by the Trump campaign to make sure every legal ballot and only legal ballots and legal votes are counted,” as if that issue isn’t already settled.
Gobbledygook. This is not some principled legal fight. It’s a con job that’s threatening to erupt into violence. Ms. Stefanik, other Republicans in Congress, and party leaders like New York Republican Chairman Nick Langworthy aren’t dumb. They see the truth, surely, yet still kowtow to the flimflam.
It’s time they heed the warnings of those like Mr. Sterling and put the pressure on Mr. Trump to stop this.