Happy Thanksgiving to All Those Who Told the Truth in
This Election
Civil
servants, elected officials and judges did their jobs and protected democracy.
Opinion
Columnist
- Nov. 24, 2020
With so many families gathering, in
person or virtually, for this most unusual Thanksgiving after this most unusual
election, if you’re looking for a special way to say grace this year, I
recommend the West Point Cadet Prayer.
It calls upon each of these future military leaders to always choose “the
harder right instead of the easier wrong” and to know “no fear when truth and
right are in jeopardy.”
Because we should be truly thankful
this Thanksgiving that — after Donald Trump spent the last three weeks refusing
to acknowledge that he’d lost re-election and enlisted much of his party in a
naked power play to ignore the vote counts and reinstall him in office — we had
a critical mass of civil servants, elected officials and judges who did their
jobs, always opting for the “harder right” that justice demanded, not the
“easier wrong” that Trump and his allies were pressing for.
It was their collective integrity,
their willingness to stand with “Team America,” not either party, that
protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from
within. History will remember them fondly.
Who am I talking
about? I am talking about F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee,
who in September openly contradicted the
president and declared that historically we have not seen “any
kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election” involving
mail-in voting.
I am talking about Georgia Secretary of
State Brad Raffensperger — a conservative Republican — who oversaw the Georgia
count and recount and insisted that Joe Biden had won fair and square and that
his state’s two G.O.P. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, did not
garner enough votes to avoid election runoffs. Perdue and Loeffler dishonorably
opted for the easier wrong and brazenly demanded Raffensperger resign for not
declaring them winners.
I am talking about Chris Krebs, the
director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who not only
refused to back up Trump’s claims of election fraud, but whose agency issued a statement calling
the 2020 election “the most secure in American history,” adding in bold type,
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed
votes or was in any way compromised.”
Krebs did the hard right thing, and
Trump fired him by tweet for it. Mitch McConnell, doing the easy wrong thing, did
not utter a peep of protest.
I am talking about the Republican-led
Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz., which, according to The Washington
Post, “voted unanimously Friday to certify the county’s election
results, with the board chairman declaring there was no evidence of fraud or
misconduct ‘and that is with a big zero.’”
I am talking about
Mitt Romney, the first (and still virtually only) Republican senator to
truly call out Trump’s postelection
actions for what they really were: “overt pressure on state and
local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election.”
I am talking about U.S. District Judge
Matthew W. Brann, a registered Republican, who dismissed Trump’s allegations
that Republican voters in Pennsylvania had been illegally disadvantaged because
some counties permitted voters to cure administrative errors on their mail
ballots.
As The Washington Post reported,
Brann scathingly wrote on Saturday “that Trump’s attorneys had haphazardly
stitched this allegation together ‘like Frankenstein’s Monster’ in an attempt
to avoid unfavorable legal precedent.”
And I am talking about all the other
election verification commissioners who did the hard right things in tossing
out Trump’s fraudulent claims of fraud.
Asking for recounts in close elections
was perfectly legitimate. But when that failed to produce any significant
change in the results, Trump took us to a new dark depth. He pushed utterly
bogus claims of voting irregularities and then tried to get Republican state
legislatures to simply ignore the popular vote totals and appoint their own
pro-Trump electors before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.
That shifted this postelection struggle
from Trump versus Biden — and who had the most votes — to Trump versus the
Constitution — and who had the raw power and will to defend it or ignore it.
To all of these people who chose to do
the hard right thing and defend the Constitution and the rule of law over their
party’s interest or personal gain, may you have a blessed Thanksgiving.
You stand in stark
contrast to Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo (who apparently never attended chapel at
West Point), Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Kevin
McCarthy, Nikki Haley, Kayleigh McEnany and all the other G.O.P. senators and
House members, who put their party and self-interest before their country and
opted for the easy wrongs. History will remember them, too.
Though Trump is now grudgingly letting
the presidential transition proceed, we must never, ever, forget the damage he
and his allies inflicted on American democracy by attacking its very core — our
ability to hold free and fair elections and transfer power peacefully. Tens of
millions of Americans now believe something that is untrue — that our system is
rigged. Who knows what that will mean in the long run?
The depths to which Trump and his legal
team sank was manifested last Thursday when Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a
news conference alleging, among other things, that software used to
disadvantage Trump voters was created at the direction of the late Venezuelan
President Hugo Chávez. It was insane.
As Jonah Goldberg, a conservative
critic of Trumpism, wrote in thedispatch.com: “The G.O.P.’s social media account
spewed sound bites from Powell and Giuliani out into the country like a fire
hose attached to a sewage tank.” Fox carried the whole news conference live —
uninterrupted — for virtually its entire 90 minutes.
Shame on all these people.
Sure, now Trump and many of his
enablers are finally bowing to reality — but it is not because they’ve
developed integrity. It is because they WERE STOPPED by all those people who
had integrity and did the hard right things.
And “shame” is the right word for these
people, because a sense of shame was lost these past four years and it needs to
be re-established. Otherwise, what Trump and all his sycophants did gets
normalized and permanently erodes confidence in our elections. That is how
democracies die.
You can only hope that once they are
out of power, Barr, Pompeo, Giuliani and all their compatriots will be stopped
on the streets, in restaurants or at conferences and politely but firmly asked
by everyday Americans: “How could you have stayed all-in when Trump was
violating the deepest norms that bind us as a democracy?”
And if they are deaf to the message
being sent from their fellow citizens, then let’s hope some will have to face
an interrogation from their own children at the Thanksgiving table this year:
“Mom, Dad — did you really side with
Trump when it was Trump versus the Constitution?”
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs
Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer
Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,”
which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
