They resisted Trump, but illogically would still vote for him

It’s astonishing, and ominous, that any patriotic American could still support Donald Trump after his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Yet many do.

Among them are members of Congress, bound by oath to defend the Constitution he would have destroyed. More than 100 outright election deniers have won Republican primaries so far.

Through five public hearings, with more to come, the House Select Committee has already made a compelling case that the former president personally instigated and fanatically pursued a coup to overturn the election and the Constitution. He persisted despite repeated sound advice from his own Justice Department and others that his pretenses were baseless. He embraced and regurgitated every lunacy that came along.

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” he told his acting attorney general.

“We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence,” his lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted to Arizona legislators.

His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wanted the Defense Department to pursue a ludicrous tip that Italian satellites had changed votes in the United States.

It was sedition — legally and morally the domestic counterpart of treason.

‘The lie hasn’t gone away’

The danger hasn’t gone away, as Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson pointed out, because “The lie hasn’t gone away.”

Harkening to Trump, millions of Americans now believe that our elections can’t be trusted and that President Biden is illegitimately in office. They are fodder for another coup.

How Trump came close to pulling off that one, and the threat he still poses, have been made clear largely through the heroic resistance and subsequent testimony of other Republicans who had voted for him. They include Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and former Acting U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Rosen and his colleagues.

Bowers, who personified religious conviction and moral rectitude as one of the committee’s star witnesses, had written in his diary, “I do not want to be a winner by cheating.”

Yet he said he would be willing to vote for Trump again despite how Trump had pressured him and lied about him, despite all the Trump-loving hoodlums who harassed his home and family while his daughter was dying.

“I’d vote for him again,” Bowers told the Associated Press, “simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”

That was like people once rationalizing that the Italian tyrant Benito Mussolini “at least made the trains run on time.” (Actually, he didn’t.)

Even if Trump had been a good president, it would not compensate for his unprecedented sedition. Although Richard Nixon was a competent president who did many good things before the crimes of Watergate, Republican leaders at the time put duty and country before politics and persuaded him to resign.

Watergate at its worst was modest in comparison to Trump’s insurrection, which culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol.

Rewarding Trump’s mob

In Congress, 147 Republicans rewarded Trump and the mob by voting to reject one or both of Joe Biden’s fairly won electoral slates from Arizona and Pennsylvania. None deserves re-election. According to testimony, at least five of them, including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, sought presidential pardons after the insurrection. So did lawyer John Eastman, who had concocted much of Trump’s strategy. Gaetz reportedly wanted one broad enough to moot a federal investigation of alleged sex trafficking that was not public knowledge at the time.

Even Gov. Ron DeSantis, who saw firsthand how cleanly and efficiently our state voted, refuses to say whether he considers Biden a legitimate president. That makes him a denier, too.

Bowers is far from unique in rationalizing Trump’s behavior. William Barr, Trump’s last Senate-confirmed attorney general, resigned rather than involve the Justice Department in Trump’s conspiracy. And yet Barr said he too would vote for Trump again over any Democrat.

Millions of Republican voters remain enthralled by the American Mussolini. It’s as if there were no conventional Republicans who could govern conservatively. His personality cult works to the detriment of conventional Republicans who could govern responsibly.

Democracy remains on a knife’s edge. The Jan. 6 committee is not “beating a dead horse,” as DeSantis has said.

It’s informing the American people how far and deep the conspiracy ranged and how dangerous some of the conspirators remain. It’s showing the necessity for a federal law to protect election workers from abuse and threats to their lives.

It’s documenting the necessity for reforms to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to state firmly that the vice president’s role is ministerial, not discretionary, and to stop rogue members of Congress from trying to create a constitutional crisis whenever they don’t like the election results. The leading proposal would require 20% in each chamber of Congress to initiate a challenge to any state’s slate. It now takes only one senator and one House member.

Not least in importance, it paves the way for the Justice Department to indict Trump and his collaborators. Failure to do so would minimize the worst crimes in American political history and encourage another coup.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.