Georgia Republicans beg Trump to release them from his
prison of lies
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 1, 2020 at 9:12 a.m. CST
By now,
it’s been widely established that President Trump’s nonstop lies about the
election being stolen from him have created a potential problem for
Republicans. If GOP voters believe the system is rigged, why would they turn
out to vote in the two runoffs in Georgia that will decide control of the
Senate?
In a
new turn in this ugly saga, Georgia Republicans are now actively pleading with
Trump to put an end to this problem for them. But what’s even more darkly
absurd is how they’re going about doing this: They apparently
do not believe that they themselves can explain to voters that
the voting was actually legitimate in their own state — until Trump gives them
permission to do so.
Two new
pieces — one
from the New York Times and the other
from The Post — neatly capture all this depravity. The Times reports
that Republicans are “quietly rattled” that Trump’s lies will “depress
turnout,” and it’s gotten so bad that an adviser to one of the GOP senators
running for reelection is speaking out:
“You can’t say the system
is rigged but elect these two senators,” said Eric Johnson, a campaign adviser
to Kelly Loeffler, one of the G.O.P. Senate candidates, and a former Republican
leader of the Georgia Senate. “At some point he either drops it or he says I
want everybody to vote and get their friends to vote so that the margins are so
large that they can’t steal it.”
Tellingly,
this Republican is suggesting that Trump should either quietly let the matter
drop, or keep saying the votes are fraudulent but voters should turn out
anyway, to drive up margins beyond the ability of Democrats to steal the
election.
What
cannot be suggested, of course, is that Trump should simply tell the truth to
voters: The voting in Georgia and his loss in the state were entirely
legitimate, and Republican voters can rest assured that the votes were, and
will be, counted accurately.
Instead,
Trump is being offered a way to keep up his lies about the election being
fraudulent, but one that won’t depress GOP turnout.
This is
also notable because Kelly Loeffler herself — a United States senator, last we
checked — continues to parrot the same lies. Loeffler and fellow GOP Sen. David
Perdue have called for the Republican secretary of state in Georgia to resign
for the crime of doing his official duty and certifying Trump’s loss as
legitimate.
Loeffler
defended this stance on Fox News as
follows:
“The buck stops with the
secretary of state. He is supposed to run a trusted, free, fair, transparent
election. David Perdue and I have called for him to step down because Georgians
have lost faith in our elections.”
To
recap: Loeffler’s own adviser is calling on Trump to stop telling Republican
voters that they can’t have faith in Georgia’s electoral system — even as
Loeffler herself is telling them the same thing. Loeffler apparently can’t stop
telling this lie until Trump stops telling it — even though Republicans fear it
will hurt their chances.
Separately,
The Post reports
on still another tangle of pathologies here. Neither
Loeffler nor Perdue has conceded that Trump lost the election. But this is creating
a problem for them, because they want to sell their candidacies to Republican
voters as a check on a Joe Biden presidency.
The rub
is that they can’t really do this. Why? Because they’re not allowed to so much
as hint that Biden might have won the election, because that angers Trump
voters:
Again,
the ugly dynamic exposed here is that telling the plain truth to Republican
voters — that the voting in Georgia and Trump’s loss there were legitimate — is
simply not permitted.
GOP
strategist Liam Donovan recently
got to the core of the problem: Untold numbers of Trump voters trust him
more than they trust Republicans. When Trump tells them the election was
stolen, they not only believe it; they also think GOP leaders will betray them
on this point as well. Trump has told them for years that all our institutions
are corrupt; that only he is the arbiter of reality, and only he should be the
focal point of their political aspirations.
Now
Republicans believe this is backfiring on them and are pleading with Trump to
release them from this toxic dynamic. But he isn’t in any mood to do that:
Indeed, as
CNN’s Ronald Brownstein aptly notes, all this is comparable
to the 1950s. Just as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s lies about communist subversion
grew more wildly implausible, Trump is now implicating the “deep state” and
more and more GOP governors in his invented conspiracy to steal the election
from him. Now, as then, GOP leaders are largely silent:
As Trump’s charges have
grown more and more untethered and vitriolic, Senate Majority Leader McConnell,
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other top GOP legislators in both
chambers — not to mention the vast majority of Republican governors — have
raised not a peep of dissent.
However,
in this case Republicans themselves have spent years plying GOP voters with
lies about fraud, to justify all manner of voter suppression directed at the
other side, as I recount in my book.
It’s
not clear whether this will end up costing Republicans one or both Senate
races. It probably won’t: The lie that the election was stolen from Trump might
actually juice GOP turnout, which would validate the wholesale delegitimization
of our electoral system as a mobilization tactic, with unsettling future
implications.
But
it’s a temporary form of poetic justice that Republicans themselves fear that
Trump’s much more grotesque version of the voter-suppression lie they’ve told
for years is threatening to discourage their own voters. It would be amusing if
it all weren’t so toxic and destructive to democracy.