Wednesday, December 09, 2020

THESE BOZOS NEED GAGS, NOT MASKS

 



FRANK BRUNI COLUMN

In my newsletter last week, I tipped my hat to Lee Chatfield, the Republican speaker of Michigan’s House of Representatives, and Mike Shirkey, the Republican majority leader of Michigan’s Senate, for not granting President Trump’s wish that they dispute and fight President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in their state.

No, no, no, no, some of you said, taking heated issue with any praise for these men. You noted that they’d hardly challenged Trump beforehand and sought to undermine Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in her fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Very fair points. They are not heroes through and through — not even close.

 

Some of you took similar issue with the thanks I gave to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, for bucking right-wing agitators and expressly validating Biden’s victory there, and to Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s Republican voting system implementation manager, for publicly shaming the president and his minions for their provocative and potentially violence-spurring tirades.

You observed what my columnist colleague Michelle Goldberg later did. She wrote that “it’s hard not to notice that their outrage is a bit selective.”

 

 

 

“There is nothing new about Trump inciting harassment against private citizens,” she added, correctly, “or of his lackeys calling for violence against the president’s opponents.” So where was Sterling’s fury before last week, when he spoke out? And why did Raffensperger vote for Trump, as he readily volunteers?

Excellent questions, but there’s a larger one that hovers over all of this: What are we to do with, and how are we supposed to respond to, all of those Republicans who persistently indulged and abetted Trump — and, in most cases, still indulge and abet him, in terms of their averted gazes and zipped lips — once he’s out of the White House? Are they flatly irredeemable and wholly contemptible?

 

However I saw them before, I will always look differently at the Republican officials around the country — and the Republican lawmakers in Washington in particular — who supported Trump for all or nearly all of his presidency, because his singular divisiveness, florid corruption and threat to democracy became clear fairly early on.

We dodged a bullet, no credit to them. They had fingers on the gun.

 

I’ll never forget that, and I’ll never excuse it, but I don’t see the point in routinely flogging them for their perfidy and swearing off any discrete, circumstantial partnership with them forevermore. I want America to address its problems, to improve, to keep moving forward. There will be times when their cooperation is necessary for that.

 

 

Without exonerating them for the stands they didn’t take, I’ll applaud them for the stands they do take, because I want more, not less, of those. I want them to work with Biden — a few of them, at least — so that he can realize some of his legislative goals. Constant harangues about how awful they have been probably aren’t the best way to make that happen.

That’s why Biden’s harangues are so minor, few and far between. He wants to give those lawmakers a chance before he gives up all hope.

 

And as Trump drifts farther from the center of the stage, maybe his hold on them fades, and there are opportunities for levelheaded, practical problem-solving that didn’t exist before. Maybe. Angling for that and celebrating it if it comes to pass aren’t an abandonment of principle. They’re a triumph of opportunism.

About Trump’s drift: Another prominent theme in the emails that I got from you after last week’s newsletter was your plea that the media, including me, stop giving him the oxygen of our attention. I hear you loud and clear.

 

 

I wrote about the importance of this in my column the weekend before Thanksgiving, noting that while Trump may remain a potent magnet for newspaper readers and television viewers, he “won’t be nearly as relevant as he is now, and that compels news organizations to ratchet down his presence in a huge way, potentially turning our backs on easy stories that would have been raptly consumed.”

Trump has reportedly considered skipping Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, holding a rally in Florida that day and even announcing a 2024 presidential campaign then, just to try to steal the spotlight. It would be a quintessentially Trumpian stunt.

 

And it would be the perfect moment for the media to take a new tack.

Should the announcement be noted for the history books? Yes. But that could wait a day, even several days, or be consigned to a mere paragraph, a faint whisper. The world would keep turning. And Trump would start twisting.

 

 


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