McConnell must refute Trump’s lies
Former President Donald Trump’s continued lies about 2020 create a huge headache for Republican leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The more Trump prattles on, the harder it is to look the other way from his bizarre and false claims. The time will soon come when McConnell will have to do what he has long avoided: directly, publicly and forcefully rebut Trump’s lies about election fraud.
Trump’s all-over-the-place political messaging complicates matters. On one hand, Trump endorses numerous candidates and argues that his fans should put his friends in office. That helps the GOP when it is deployed on behalf of Republican nominees, as was the case on Wednesday in Virginia’s gubernatorial race. GOP leaders could live with Trump’s rants if this were primarily what he was up to.
But it’s not. He is also increasingly focusing on his false allegations that Democrats fraudulently stole the 2020 election. Trump upped the ante Wednesday by sending a message warning that Republican voters will not turn out in 2022 unless GOP leaders “solved” the purported fraud. That’s a shot across Republican leaders’ bow that Trump clearly hopes will lead to them to embark as willing sailors on his suicide cruise into the rocks of fact and public opinion.
Most Republicans will ignore Trump’s suggestion not to vote even as they hold him in high esteem. They fear the Democratic agenda too much to do otherwise. But Republicans could be torpedoed if even a small portion stays home.
McConnell would be wise to start preparing to fight back. He knows Trump’s allegations are figments of his fevered imagination. It takes time to demolish each of the specific allegations that too many Republicans believe to be true. But without that exertion, those Republicans will continue to believe the election was stolen. And if they believe that, some might not vote at all. McConnell should not take that risk.
He can start with the bully pulpit he commands, the Senate floor. He can give a speech — or better yet, a series of speeches‚ specifically demolishing each of Trump’s lies. He can explain why Dominion’s voting machines couldn’t have flipped votes as many Republicans believe they did, and why post-election hand checks of paper ballots would have caught them if they did. He can painstakingly show how election officials in large, Democrat-run cities may have been sloppy, but they did not stuff the ballot box after the fact to push Biden over the top. And he can conclusively prove that demographically similar communities behaved in the same way whether they were in swing states or safe states, and whether mail-in balloting was a feature or a bug of each state’s voting.
McConnell is one of the savviest political strategists of the past half-century. He probably already knows this is a Rubicon he must cross, even if that risks an open fight with Trump.
But he also knows that the facts are on his side, and fear of Democratic victory in the midterms will incline even ardent Trumpians to hear him out. That should give him the courage to fuel his cunning and do what he does best: win.
Henry Olsen is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.