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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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.” |
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“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? |
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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? |
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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. |
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We dodged a bullet, no
credit to them. They had fingers on the gun. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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.” |
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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. |
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And it would be the perfect
moment for the media to take a new tack. |
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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. |