Republican silence risks condoning President’s actions

For most of the time US President Donald Trump has been in office, Republican elected officials have chosen to look away or down during difficult moments. They have preferred silence over speaking out, whether out of a fear of political retaliation or a calculation that the value of policies he and they are pursuing outweigh any damage brought about by his behaviour.

The revelations of the past two weeks put Republicans in new and far more uncomfortable territory, but little has changed so far in their posture toward the president. They are doing all they can to keep their heads down, showing once again the degree to which the president has cowed the Grand Old Party.

When the first news reports surfaced more than a week ago, Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, tweeted that, if the accounts were accurate, it “would be deeply troubling in the extreme. Critical for the facts to come out.”

He was the exception among Republican elected officials. Since the release of the whistleblower complaint and the memorandum of Trump’s phone call, Romney has kept his views to himself.

As more information has become public, Republicans have generally ducked questions or defended the president. Now the general silence from Republican elected officials has become impossible to ignore.

On the basis of what is known — from the memorandum of the July 25 phone call, from what the president has said about what he said in that phone call and from the allegations contained in the whistleblower’s complaint — Republican elected officials will be fairly asked to say whether the president has met the accepted standards of the office, not whether he should be impeached but whether they find his conduct acceptable.

This is not a question of whether the president should stop tweeting or refrain from nasty attacks on his rivals. Trump’s decision to pressure a foreign leader to help undermine a potential 2020 challenger is in an entirely different category.

That is why executive branch officials who listened to the phone call or were later privy to its contents found it so disquieting — and why some took steps to hide it, according to the whistleblower’s complaint.

Right now, through their collective silence, Republicans are telling the American people they either tolerate or condone the president’s actions. The longer they remain silent, the more they contribute to normalising behaviour by the president that is far beyond past standards.