Story that’s not being told is radicalisation of Republican party

AT DONALD Trump’s impeachment trial yesterday, several Democrats highlighted a tweet that the former president sent the day before the attack on the Capitol, blasting GOP senators as too feckless to help him overturn the election. “I hope the Democrats, and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party, are looking at the thousands of people pouring into DC,” Trump wrote, referring to supporters already arriving to disrupt Congress’s counting of electoral votes.

As the Democrats noted, Trump regularly pressured the GOP “Surrender Caucus” to help steal the election. Yet, in so doing, they portrayed Republicans largely as passive targets of his rage – without mentioning the extensive work Republicans actually did do to help him overturn the outcome.

Similarly, at another point, Democrats hammered Trump for cheering on Texas supporters who menacingly surrounded then-candidate Joe Biden’s campaign vehicles on a highway. Left unsaid was that some Republicans listening as jurors – such as Florida Senator Marco Rubio – also cheered them on.

The moments captured an important tension at the heart of Trump’s impeachment trial. Democrats have made a strategic decision that if they refrain from implicating the GOP in Trump’s misdeeds, then some might be more gettable as votes to convict Trump. But the result is this: a large part of the story simply isn’t being told. The role in this whole saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalisation, and its increasing comfort with anti-democratic tactics, openly authoritarian conduct and even political violence, is largely going unmentioned.

Whether they are saying so or not, the case the Democrats are making most definitely does implicate much of the GOP. At every stage in all the corruption and misconduct they’re documenting, Trump enjoyed support and even active enabling from the majority of influential figures in his party.

An essential component of the case against Trump is that his assault on democracy began months before January 6. As Democrats graphically detailed yesterday, through much of the 2020 campaign Trump lied that Democrats were in the process of stealing the election, and that if he lost, it would be an inherently illegitimate outcome.

This effort accelerated after the election, as Democrats also detailed. He filed frivolous lawsuits, spread bizarre conspiracy theories, and even pressured election officials to corruptly change results in his favour. For weeks, he told his supporters the election had been stolen from them, and urged them to descend on the Capitol to set things right.

Democrats are now making a powerful case that all this added up to perhaps the most grave betrayal of the Constitution ever perpetrated by an American president. But if that’s so, you must also conclude that the Republican Party amounted to a mass of co-conspirators in that betrayal.

It doesn’t matter that Trump castigated them for not doing enough. They did do an extraordinary amount, both through sins of commission and omission alike.

Even as Trump spent months throughout the summer and autumn clearly telegraphing his plot to use mail delays to try to invalidate millions of legal votes, very few Republicans criticised this or said it was unacceptable.

Then, when Biden did win, most of them wouldn’t even say explicitly that Biden won for many weeks. It wasn’t until six weeks after the election that Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell finally admitted Biden was the victor. He and other Republicans delayed for the cynical purpose of keeping GOP voters energised in the Georgia run-offs.

Then on top of that, large swathes of the GOP supported a lawsuit designed to invalidate millions of votes based on fictions to pave the way for state legislators to send separate electors, swinging the election to Trump. And then, even after the attack, more than 100 House Republicans voted to invalidate Biden electors, carrying forward Trump’s effort to overturn the election and keep himself in power illegitimately. Democrats may or may not be making the strategically correct decision in refraining from telling this tale. But either way, a reckoning with the arguably bigger and potentially more consequential story – ongoing GOP radicalisation – has been postponed. And it isn’t going away. (© Washington Post)