"What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change," said the official. "He went golfing this weekend. It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He's tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he'll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he'll leave."
By Wednesday, the Post alleged "widespread alarm" among congressional Republicans as Trump purged a group of administration officials from top national security posts and installed at least a handful of loyalist lackeys at some of the government's most powerful intelligence posts. At that point, a smattering of Senate Republicans finally came out and admitted that Biden might be president and should at least be getting the intelligence briefings that Presidents-elect have routinely received for decades. But with the exception of a handful of lawmakers, Senate GOP leaders and the rest of the caucus have continued to fuel Trump's faux fraud charges and insist he might still have a path to victory. He. Does. Not. At least, not on planet earth.
Former Republican congressman David Jolly, who has since left the party, summed it perfectly Thursday on MSNBC.
"This is about a political party that is defrauding the American people in real time," Jolly said. "This is about a generation of Republican leaders who are committing a fraud upon American democracy."
Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt provided perhaps the clearest example of a lawmaker knowingly betraying the American people and his oath of office. On Sunday, Blunt, No. 4 on the Senate leadership team, went on ABC's This Week and encouraged Trump's lawyers to get on with their charade and "let the facts speak for themselves," adding, "It seems unlikely that any changes could be big enough to make a difference, but this is a close election, and we need to acknowledge that." The statement was about as close any Senate Republican in a leadership role had come last weekend to acknowledging Trump's defeat.
But then GOP Leader Mitch McConnell went to the Senate floor Monday and, in coordination with Attorney General Bill Barr, threw his full support behind Trump's faux fraud charges and futile legal efforts. The political calculus had changed, most likely because Trump was threatening to throw the two Georgia GOP senators fighting for their seats to the wolves. By Tuesday, Blunt switched from almost-truth telling to fueling Trump's fire.
"You know, the president wasn't defeated by huge numbers -- in fact he may not have been defeated at all, we've gained seats in the House," Blunt said.
That right there is the vision of a man who knew better, said so on national television, and then sold out his country a couple days later for the GOP's political gain. That's a man whose moral compass went haywire and sacrificed his integrity at the altar of political expediency. In his world, protecting the Senate Republican majority is more important than protecting the country and safeguarding the institutional norms that keep our democracy intact.
Frauds and traitors -- that's damn close to all that's left of the Republican party. It's not just one or two fringe players in the House Freedom Caucus anymore, it's the leadership team of Senate Republicans -- a caucus once considered to be more firmly rooted in reality and therefore at least trustworthy enough to perhaps step in when something as critical as national security was on the line. If that was ever true, it's not anymore.
Prior to the election, it was hard to imagine Republican lawmakers could do worse by the country in the instance of a Trump defeat than they had done throughout his tenure. Now, just like with Trump, no low is too low for these miscreants.
Total annihilation of the party is the only solution and, unfortunately, they didn't suffer a convincing enough blow in the election to convince them voters have abandoned them in any real way. So what we have now is an ongoing battle for the soul of the nation, as Biden puts it. It's clearly a long-term project that is going to require commitment and resolve in the face of unrelenting moral rot.
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