What now for the Republican Party? For four years, the Trump Administration piled up an incredible record of lying; according to the Washington Post fact-checkers, Donald Trump exceeded 30,000 lies and misstatements as president, one-half of them coming during 2020. For the most part, Republicans in Congress addressed this torrent of lies with silence. It is not that they are unable to distinguish fact from fiction; they understood the political risk in going against the president.
In his book, “Commander in Cheat,” sportswriter Rick Reilly discusses the many lies Trump told his golf buddies, mostly lies about golf and the quality of his golf courses. They mostly greeted his statements with eye-rolling — after all, these were harmless lies. During the first three years of his administration, Trump’s lies, while not harmless, seemed to provide the Trump base with what they wanted to hear. During 2020, however, his lies proved deadly, both in regard to the coronavirus — “just like the flu” and “don’t wear a mask.” — and the result of the November election.
If you are inclined to believe that the election was stolen and that Donald Trump really won, try this exercise. Pretend that you were hired by President Joe Biden to rig the election in his favor. How would you accomplish this task?
A presidential election is actually 51 separate elections, one in each state plus the District of Columbia. The good news is that you could focus on six battleground states and their 412 counties. The bad news is that none of these six states runs all-electronic elections which could be hacked; they all have paper ballots, so attempting to corrupt the machines that count the ballots could be easily revealed in a paper recount as occurred in Georgia. This would leave you with the problem of convincing Republicans on county election commissions to falsify their results. Given that they would be acting counter to the interests of their own party and subjecting themselves to future prosecution, it seems to me that it would take sizeable bribes to make this happen. This, of course, would be very difficult to accomplish without leaving a money trail, plus hundreds of people who might later decide to come forward with evidence that would lead to your indictment. Do you really think that this is remotely possible? If you had been hired to get this done, could you possibly have accomplished this task without getting caught?
Now consider that over 60 court challenges to the election have been thrown out for lack of evidence. Trump appointees Chris Kreb (“the most secure election in American history”) and William Barr have disputed claims of a rigged election. Trump, however, would not let it go, and few congressional Republicans stood up to defend the integrity of the election, even after the Electoral College vote. I have no doubt that congressional Republicans understood the validity of the election; their refusal to acknowledge the truth was one more indication of Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP.
What followed from mid-December until Jan. 6 was nothing more than an attempted coup. Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state was not about locating fraud; Trump simply wanted him to fabricate, or “find,” 11,780 votes. The attack on the Capitol was the final step as Trump attempted to have his followers prevent Congress from counting and accepting the Electoral College results. Yet even after the attack, over 100 Republican representatives (including our congressman) continued to dispute results they knew were valid. Without question, Donald Trump is maintaining his hold on congressional Republicans.
There remain a handful of ethical and moral Republicans in Congress, people such as Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen. Mitt Romney and Sen. Ben Sasse. Yet a majority appear willing to align themselves with Trump and the very people who invaded the Capitol and threatened their lives, leaving the Republican Party in tatters and our democracy at risk.
Rich Belzer lives in Bend.
