Over the last week, the unreality of Donald Trump’s continued ability to hold onto seemingly unflinching support from his base felt as if it had escalated to a whole new level. I date the beginning of this new phase to the reports that the president had called World War I veterans “losers” and “suckers” for sacrificing their lives for our country. Then came the excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” that among other things provided proof positive that President Trump knew about the vast dangers of the coronavirus from the start, and still chose not to take appropriate actions to protect American lives. On top of this, a whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security alleged that high-ranking officials in the Trump administration ordered that DHS officials downplay the threat of white supremacist violence and Russia’s attacks on America’s elections. And on Friday, Politico reported how Trump appointees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.”
And alongside these individual stories are ongoing reports of the president’s preemptive efforts to subvert the November election results, including inviting renewed Russian interference and a clear plan to declare victory election night before all votes can be counted.
In a pre-Trump world, any single one of these stories would very possibly have been a death blow to a presidency. Contempt for patriotism, murderous incompetence, treasonous behavior: these should rightly be considered mortal sins in an American president. But all the necessary attention on Donald Trump’s unique brand of malevolence needs to be balanced, both in media coverage and by his Democratic opponents, by an equivalent indictment against the Republican elected officials who have enabled and abetted his misrule. GOP senators and representatives have made themselves party to what can accurately be described, without exaggeration, as an assault on American governance and safety unseen in any of our lifetimes. At Mother Jones, David Corn provides a model of this truth-telling approach as he identifies his candidates for the most serious offenses committed by the contemporary Republic Party:
Not since the Civil War—when leaders responsible for the enslavement and brutalization of millions of Americans sought to destroy the United States and took military action that resulted in the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens—has a group of politicians so profoundly betrayed the republic. And this band—Donald Trump and GOP officials—has done so on two fronts simultaneously. They have failed to respond effectively to a pair of immense threats: a pandemic that has claimed the lives of close to 200,000 Americans, and a foreign attack on the political foundation of the country. What exacerbates this double tragedy is that Trump and his Republican supporters have done so purposefully. This has been no accident or act of unintentional incompetence. In each case, they sacrificed the public interest—including the well-being and the lives of millions of Americans—to serve their own interests. Trump and his crew have forsaken the United States of America.
Now, I understand that Democratic politicians have a great interest in appearing reasonable and measured as a way to contrast themselves with the hysteria of Trump and his Republican enablers; that they have an interest in appealing to persuadable Republicans and independent voters. But there is something perverse in being unwilling to accurately describe both the full extent of the betrayal, and to openly making a case that it discredits both the president and his party from holding political power for the foreseeable future.
This is not to say that opponents of Trump don’t need to embrace and promote a positive, inclusive vision of America: this is necessary both for its own sake and because it’s an antidote to the retrograde, racist, back-to-the-1950’s (or maybe the 1850’s) vision behind Trump’s rhetoric and policies. But in the face of the rage, hatred, and nihilism of Trump, his base, and the contemporary GOP, it is not enough to speak only of love and forgiveness and a better tomorrow, though those are all essential. Democrats need to make it clear that there will be no accommodation with a Republican Party that embraces white supremacism, subversion of elections, and abandonment of a basic belief in science. When our democracy is under attack, it makes no sense not to make that attack as explicit as possible, and define the terms of debate as between those who would turn the United States into something twisted and unrecognizable, and those who are carrying forward the fight for justice and democracy that generations before us have lived and sometimes died for.
If the Democrats are able to illustrate the stakes clearly for American voters, Trump’s authoritarianism and relentless drive to retain power no matter the election results has created a perfect storm of destruction for a GOP that remains silent and complicit before him. The Republican Party must be made to pay now and into the future for its abandonment of the basics of American democracy: free and fair elections, the rejection of violence as a governing or electoral strategy, and adherence to the rule of law.