Trump’s big lie devoured GOP, threatens democracy
President Joe Biden’s early success in getting Americans vaccinated, pushing out stimulus checks and generally calming the surface of American life has been a blessing for the country. But it’s also lulled many into thinking that Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, which propelled the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, would surely fade away and everything would return to normal. It hasn’t.
We are not OK. America’s democracy is still in real danger. In fact, we are closer to a political civil war — more than at any other time in our modern history.
Today’s seeming political calm is actually resting on a false bottom that we’re at risk of crashing through at any moment.
Because, instead of Trump’s Big Lie fading away, just the opposite is happening — first slowly and now quickly.
Under Trump’s command and control from Mar-a-Lago, and with the complicity of most of his party’s leaders, that Big Lie — that the greatest election in our history, when more Republicans and Democrats voted than ever before, in the midst of a pandemic, must have been rigged because Trump lost — has metastasized.
It’s being embraced by a solid majority of elected Republicans and ordinary party members — local, state and national.
“Denying the legitimacy of our last election is becoming a prerequisite for being elected as a Republican in 2022,” observed Gautam Mukunda, host of Nasdaq’s “World Reimagined” podcast and author of the book “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Mattered.”
“This is creating a filter that over time will block out anyone willing to tell the truth about the election.”
This is not an exaggeration. Here is what Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, told The Hill about the campaign within the party to oust Rep. Liz Cheney from her House GOP leadership position, because of her refusal to go along with the Big Lie:
“If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit. Liz isn’t going to lie to people. … She’s going to stand on principle.”
Think about that for a second.
To be a leader in today’s GOP you either have to play dumb or be dumb on the central issue facing our republic: the integrity of our election.
You have to accept everything that Trump has said about the election — without a shred of evidence — and ignore everything his own attorney general, FBI director and election security director said — based on the evidence — that there was no substantive fraud.
There is simply nothing more dangerous for a two-party democracy than to have one party declare that no election where it loses is legitimate, and, therefore, if it loses it will just lie about the results and change the rules.
On Monday, CNN quoted Cheney as telling Republican donors and scholars at a retreat for the American Enterprise Institute in Sea Island, Georgia: “We can’t embrace the notion the election is stolen. It’s a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. … We can’t whitewash what happened on Jan. 6 or perpetuate Trump’s Big Lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on Jan. 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.” A “peaceful transfer of power must be defended.”
She could not be more right.
And without a war of ideas inside the party, one that is won by principled Republicans, we run the real risk of a political civil war in America over the next election.
Things are not OK. Unless more principled Republicans stand up for the truth about our last election, we’re going to see exactly how a democracy dies.