Opinion
Never Forget the Names of These Republicans
Attempting a Coup
This time they’ll fail. But their disloyalty to
America is clear.
Thomas L.
Friedman
By Thomas
L. Friedman
Opinion
Columnist
Jan. 5,
2021
The New Testament asks us in Mark 8:36: “For what
shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?”
Senators
Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and all their fellow G.O.P. coup plotters
clearly have forgotten that verse — if they ever knew it — for they are ready
to sacrifice their souls, the soul of their party and the soul of America — our
tradition of free and fair elections as the means for peacefully transferring power
— so that Donald Trump can remain president and one of these sleazebags can
eventually replace him.
The
governing “philosophy” of these unprincipled Trump-cult Republicans is
unmistakably clear: “Democracy is fine for us as long as it is a mechanism for
us to be in control. If we can’t hold power, then to hell with rules and to
hell with the system. Power doesn’t flow from the will of the people — it flows
from our will and our leader’s will.”
For America
to be healthy again, decent Republicans — in office and in business — need to break
away from this unprincipled Trump-cult G.O.P. and start their own principled
conservative party. It is urgent.
Even if
only a small group of principled, center-right lawmakers — and the business
leaders who fund them — broke away and formed their own conservative coalition,
they would become hugely influential in today’s closely divided Senate. They
could be a critical swing faction helping to decide which Biden legislation
passes, is moderated or fails.
Meanwhile,
the Trump-rump G.O.P. cult would become what it needs to become for America to
grow together again — a discredited, powerless minority of crackpots waiting
around for Trump’s latest tweet to tell them what to do, say and believe.
I know that
fracturing an established party is not easy (or likely). But the principled
Republicans, those who have courageously and dutifully defended Joe Biden’s
electoral victory, have to ask themselves: “In a few days, when all of this is
over, are we going to just go back to business as usual with people who are, in
effect, attempting the first legislative coup d’état in American history?”
Because
when this episode is over, Trump will be doing or saying something else
outrageous to undermine Biden and to make collaboration impossible, and the
Trump lap dogs, like Cruz, Hawley, Johnson and House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy, will be demanding the party go along to serve their political
interests, putting the principled Republicans in a daily bind. Every week there
will be a new loyalty test.
There is
simply no equivalence now between our two major parties. In the primaries, an
overwhelming majority of Democrats, led by moderate African-Americans, chose to
go with the center-left Biden, not the far-left
defund-the-police-democratic-socialist wing.
Across the
aisle, Trump’s G.O.P. became such a cult that it decided at its convention that
it would offer no party platform. Its platform would be whatever its Dear
Leader wanted on any given day. When any party stops thinking — and stops
drawing any redlines around a leader as unethical as Trump — he’ll keep taking
it deeper and deeper into the abyss, right up to the gates of Hell.
Where it’s
now arrived.
We saw that
this weekend with Trump’s Mafia-like effort to squeeze Georgia’s secretary of
state to just “find” him 11,780 votes and declare him the state’s winner by one
vote over Biden.
And we will
see it in an even uglier version in Wednesday’s session in Congress. The Trump
cultists will try to transform a ceremony designed exclusively to confirm the
Electoral College votes submitted by each state — Biden 306 and Trump 232 —
into an attempt to get Congress to nullify the electoral votes of swing states
that Trump lost.
If I were
the editor of this newspaper, I’d print all of their pictures on a full page,
under the headline: “Never Forget These Faces: These Lawmakers Had a Choice Between
Loyalty to Our Constitution and to Trump, and They Chose Trump.”
If you have
any doubts that these people are engaged in seditious behavior, their more
principled Republican colleagues do not. Speaking of Hawley’s plan to challenge
the vote count, Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska, said: “I am
going to support my oath to the Constitution. That’s the loyalty test here.”
Added Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, “Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the
heart of legitimate self-government.” Said Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, “I
cannot support allowing Congress to thwart the will of the voters.”
So, the
coup-plotter caucus will fail. But ask yourself this: What if Trump’s allies
controlled the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court and got their way —
actually used some 11th-hour legislative maneuver and nullified Biden’s
victory?
I know
exactly what would have happened. Many of the 81,283,485 Americans who voted
for Biden would have taken to the streets — I would have been one of them — and
probably stormed the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court. Trump
would have called out the military; the National Guard, directed by governors,
would have split over this, and we would be plunged into civil war.
That is the
sort of fire these people are playing with. Of course, they know it — which
makes the efforts of Hawley, Cruz, Johnson and their ilk even more despicable.
They have so little self-respect that they’re ready to lick the shine off of
Donald Trump’s boots down to his last second in office, in hopes of inheriting
his followers — should he not run again in 2024. And they are counting on a
majority of their more principled colleagues voting to certify Biden’s election
— to make sure their effort fails.
That way,
they’ll get the best of all worlds — credit with Trump voters for pursuing his
Big Lie — his fraudulent allegation that the elections were a fraud — without
plunging us into civil war. But the long-term price will still be profound —
diminishing the confidence of many Americans in the integrity of our free and
fair elections as the basis for peacefully transferring power.
Can you
imagine anything more cynical?
How do
decent Americans fight back, besides urging principled Republicans to form
their own party? Make sure we exact a tangible price from every lawmaker who
votes with Trump and against the Constitution.
Shareholders
of every major U.S. corporation should make sure that these companies’
political action committees are barred from making campaign contributions to
anyone who participates in Wednesday’s coup attempt.
At the same
time, “we the people” need fight the Trump cult’s Big Lie with the Big Truth. I
hope every news organization, and every citizen, refers to Hawley, Cruz,
Johnson and their friends now and forever more as “coup plotters.”
Make all
those who have propagated this Big Lie about election fraud to justify voting
with Trump and against our Constitution carry the title — “coup plotter” —
forever. If you see them on the street, in a restaurant on your college campus,
politely ask them: “You were one of the coup plotters, weren’t you? Shame on
you.”
Adopt
Trump’s method: Repeat this Big Truth over and over and over until these people
can never get rid of it.
It won’t be
sufficient to fix what ails us — we still need a new conservative party for
that — but it sure is necessary to give others pause about trying this again.
The Times
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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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