THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Big Liar and His Losing Little Liars
Nov. 15, 2022
Opinion
Columnist
I got a little emotional voting this
year.
First, I went to the wrong neighborhood
school, where a poll worker carefully searched for my name and then explained
that I was registered at the Bethesda elementary school down the road. When I
got there, a team of volunteers — my neighbors, from eager twentysomethings to
gray-haired retirees — patiently explained how to mark the paper ballot. When
my cellphone suddenly rang, they practically strangled me: “Shut that off!!!”
This was the best of America — these people,
this process, carried out with integrity and solemnity. What a privilege to be
able to vote this way.
And what an absurdity that it was these
very same people and this very same process that Donald Trump spent the past
two years smearing and undermining, managing to bring a majority of his party
along with him in his giant, fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen
from him.
But wait — where was Trump last week?
Did you hear
allegations by him or his lackeys that these midterm elections were stolen from
his handpicked candidates? Other than some baseless claims by Trump
here and there, including that the failed Arizona candidate for governor Kari
Lake (a clownish Trump impersonator) was being cheated, there wasn’t much.
Trump instead spent most of his energy denigrating some
of his anointed candidates and blaming his wife and others for persuading him to
endorse the bizarre collection of election-denying sycophants who became Team
Trump in this election and lost almost every big race.
The fact that Trump is not today
mounting lawsuits on all their behalf to prove election fraud speaks volumes.
It’s Trump basically telling them all:
“Sorry, this lie about stolen elections
only pertains to me. There is only room for one martyr in this party. You don’t
get to use my lie in your state elections. I only backed unprincipled,
ambitious people — like you, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano and
Adam Laxalt — to amplify my lie in order to prove I’m not a loser. I can never
be seen as a loser. If you’re losers, it’s your fault.”
That also explains why most of the
election deniers who lost, like Oz, simply conceded and did not claim fraud.
Why not raise a ruckus, Mehmet? Hey, J.D., why aren’t you alleging that your
Republican colleagues lost because their elections were “rigged,” the way you
did for Trump? What about you, Doug? What was it you said on Sunday when
you conceded losing the governor’s race in Pennsylvania: “Difficult to accept
as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do.”
What? Why is that the right course
today, but it wasn’t the right course for Trump two years ago?
Because none of you ever believed Trump’s lie
to begin with, so you never dared deploy it in your own elections!
You were just renting Trump’s lie on
the belief that it was your golden ticket, your easy shortcut, to victory. You
thought you could echo Trump’s lie, get elected with the votes of his
supporters and then just drop it. Now that most of you have failed to get
elected on election denialism, you want us to forget how you shamefully tried
to exploit that lie to gain power, while you slink away.
No, no, a thousand times no.
We must never, ever
forget the damage that Donald Trump and his cynical imitators, cult followers
and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for
its institutions and the unity of our society by perpetrating this Big Lie.
Alone it was a shameful travesty — but to do it in the midst of a hugely
stressful pandemic, when we needed more than ever to trust one another, look
out for one another and work with our government to stem Covid, was criminal.
I don’t think we fully understand the
damage this has done to our social fabric and political system. It tore apart
families at Thanksgiving dinners. It sundered longstanding friendships. It
divided neighborhoods, City Councils, state assemblies, PTAs, boardrooms and
newsrooms. And it distracted our whole country from the work of nation-building
at home, making it next to impossible to do anything big and hard together.
It not only sullied our nation’s
reputation as a democracy but also motivated a mob on Jan. 6 to storm our
nation’s Capitol — with the expressed aim of overturning the election. Five Capitol or Metropolitan Police officers died
in connection with that attack. Many of the rioters made
clear afterward that they were motivated by that Big Lie. The extremist who
attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in their home
was marinated in
election conspiracies.
It also empowered autocrats like
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping and phony democrats like
Hungary’s Viktor Orban to strut around boasting that their own people will
never have to worry about the “chaos” that democracy and voting bring.
Big Liar Trump, and all the little
liars who surfed his scam for fun and profit — particularly Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch,
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and
virtually the whole Fox crew — have done incalculable damage to our country.
Shame on every one of you.
And Trump now has the gall, the rancid
shamelessness, to plan to stand amid this bonfire of lies, hate and broken
relationships that he ignited and declare that he’s running for president
again?
And now the Murdoch crew, after
indulging this fraud for two years, has the gall to say, “Well, maybe we should
move on to Ron DeSantis” — without any accounting for what they enabled? No,
sorry. History will not be kind to you.
As David Axelrod, a
former adviser to President Barack Obama, put it on
CNN.com about the abandonment of Trump by some Republican politicians now that
he’s become a loser: Watching their “exodus from his camp, led by Rupert Murdoch and his
right-wing media empire, has been something to behold. For them,
trespasses against democracy and decency may be tolerated, but losing cannot.”
It’s why, for the first time in a long
time, I now feel some hope for the American political system again. Since Trump
came down that escalator in 2015, the G.O.P. establishment has tried to have it
both ways: harvest the votes from Trump’s base and avert their eyes from his
shameful behaviors, even his denigration of our electoral system. Trump could
never go too low for them because they were addicted to the votes of his base.
Well, a majority of Americans just
established a floor. Or as Nick Corasaniti of The Times reported: “Every election denier who sought to
become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the
polls this year, as voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to
restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.”
Sure, most of Trump’s cult followers
still embrace his lie, because openly abandoning it in front of family, friends
or co-workers is just too embarrassing. But the G.O.P. establishment is going
to have to choose — keep losing with Trump or vote him off the island for
DeSantis. Welcome to “Survivor: Florida.”
The best part is that this reckoning
was delivered not by the G.O.P. leadership — they are cowards — but by the most
important and quietly courageous people in this election.
It was delivered by
everyday Americans: principled Republicans and Democrats and independents,
young and old, voting against the Big Lie and its perpetrators in their local
voting stations, just like mine, and our principled neighbors and fellow
citizens who counted the votes carefully, fairly and honestly, just the way
they always did — including in 2020.