OPINION
THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN
Trump’s Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes
Our Democracy
May 4, 2021
Thomas L.
Friedman
By Thomas
L. Friedman
Opinion
Columnist
President
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-Largo, 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.” It will leave us with “a Republican Party where you
cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in the East, a Republican Party
where being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement.”
This is not
an exaggeration. Here is what Representative Anthony Gonzalez, one of the few
Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, told The Hill about the campaign within
the party to oust Representative Liz Cheney from her House G.O.P. 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 G.O.P. 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,
F.B.I. director and election security director said — based on the evidence —
that there was no substantive fraud.
What kind
of deformed party will such a dynamic produce? A party so willing to be
marinated in such a baldfaced lie will lie about anything, including who wins
the next election and every one after that.
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.
That’s
exactly what’s playing out now. And the more one G.O.P. lawmaker after another
signs on to Trump’s Big Lie, the more it gives the party license at the state
level to promote voter suppression laws that ensure that it cannot lose ever
again.
Kimberly
Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and author of
the book “How to Read the Constitution — and Why,” writing in The Hill on
Monday, noted that “as of late March, state legislators have introduced 361
bills in 47 states this year that contain limitations around voting, a 43
percent increase from just a month earlier.
“The
measures include things like enhanced power for poll ‘monitors,’ fewer voting
drop-boxes, restrictions on voting by mail, penalties for election officials
who fail to purge voters from the rolls, and enhanced power in politicians over
election procedures.”
Although
G.O.P. supporters of these bills insist that they are about election integrity
and security, Wehle added, “the lack of actual evidence of fraud and
mismanagement in the American electoral system totally belies those cynical
claims.”
This is the
equivalent of lighting a fuse to a bomb planted beneath the foundations of our
democracy.
Imagine if
all or many of these measures are passed — and in 2022 and 2024 Republicans
manage to retake the House, Senate and White House with, say, only 42 percent
of the popular vote, effectively establishing minority rule. Do you know what
will happen? Let me tell you what will happen. Disenfranchised Democratic
voters will not sit idly by. They may refuse to pay their taxes. Many will take
to the streets. Some might become violent, and our whole political system could
become paralyzed and start to unravel.
Yet, this
is precisely the path that Trump’s G.O.P. is setting us on.
Personally,
I have reservations about where the left of the Democratic Party is pulling
Biden on some economic, immigration, foreign policy and education issues. But
Biden and his party are putting forth real ideas to try to address the real
challenges that an increasingly diverse 21st-century America needs to address
to become a more perfect union. The best tool for keeping the Democratic Party
close to the center-left on more issues is a healthy Republican Party that hews
to the center-right.
We don’t
have that. We have, instead, a G.O.P. trying to cling to power by leveraging a
Big Lie into voter suppression laws that leverage the party back to power by
appealing solely to a largely white 20th-century America. Trump’s G.O.P. is
making no effort to offer conservative alternatives to the issues of the day.
Its whole focus is on how to win without doing that.
Which is
why it is incumbent on every American to support in every way possible the few
principled Republican legislators fighting this trend from the inside — like
Liz Cheney, Representative Adam Kinzinger and Senator Mitt Romney.
What I
learned covering the struggle for the future of the Arab-Muslim world post-9/11
is that the war of ideas inside is everything. Sure, it is important for outsiders
to condemn bad behavior, but their voices have limited impact. Real change
happens only when the war of ideas is won by insiders, working from the roots
upward.
On Monday,
CNN quoted Cheney as telling Republican donors and scholars at a retreat for
the American Enterprise Institute in Sea Island, Ga.: “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.
Follow The
New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and
Instagram.
Thomas L.
Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981,
and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including
“From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman
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