Part 2: Rats Leaping from a Sinking Ship
Source: little green footballs
Two months after he’d lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump continuously tried to coerce Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find” the 11,780 votes needed to overturn his state’s election results. This coercion was also exhibited by Lindsey Graham (R, South Carolina) who, Raffensperger later revealed, had also tried to coerce him to find the needed votes.
For those not suffering from political amnesia, it might be remembered that this kind of coercion is the same as the attempt to coerce the Ukrainian president to exonerate Vladimir Putin’s role in the American presidential election of 2016, and instead, to “dig up dirt” on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. This coercion had also been in play when Trump and his twin consiglieres Rudy Giuliani and William Barr required the Ukrainian president to cave to their demands in order to release the funds already appropriated by Congress to the Ukrainians, who were badly in need of the funding due to their hot war with Russia.
And it was this very coercion in the attempt to extract a political gain that directly led to Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial. (A trial by the Senate that was to prevent fact witnesses and their documentation from ever appearing—and this, in the most important trial of our time). A trial in which only one Republican senator—Mitt Romney (R, Utah) voted in favor of finding Trump guilty as charged. Had other Republican senators been less cowardly—or more faithful to their oath of office, we might have been spared so many deaths from the pandemic, and the continued degradation of American democracy that had prevailed before the 2020 impeachment trial, and ever since.
Raffensperger and Romney—Republicans both—are notable exemplars in this account. But they are also notable exceptions. And they were notable for their courage and their faithfulness in upholding their oaths of office—the vow to protect and defend the Constitution of this nation from its enemies, both foreign and domestic.
Yet the vast majority of Republican politicians had caved in to the coercion of Trump. After he’d succeeded in a hostile takeover of their party, they then failed to stand up to him out of fear of the revenge he would take on anyone breaking ranks. In this cowardice, they had failed in their oversight duties, and broken their vow to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. In this, they had also failed to embody the till-now prevailing idealization of America, as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
And if the past four years have taught some of us anything, it is simply this: The greatest enemy of America over the past four years has been, arguably, the American president himself. And the plethora of elected officials and cabinet members who’ve either resigned or broken ranks with Trump only since the invasion of his mob at the Capitol are a little late in evidencing any courage or integrity. They’re just covering their ass now, as they had for the previous four years. What they provided to the nation wasn’t leadership in any real sense, but rather the obsequious nature of cult-followers.
Two and a half millennia ago, the Chinese moral philosopher Confucius noted that when societies begin to flounder and devolve, it is in part due to their having given the wrong names to things. In such times, cultures must thus begin to employ what Confucius termed “the rectification of names.”
In this light, it would be completely wrong-headed to regard as “leaders” the 147 duly-sworn lawmakers in Congress still objecting to the 2020 presidential election results, even after the attack on the Capitol—or for that matter the dozen and a half cabinet or sub-cabinet appointees who resigned only after the attack. And bestowing a Freedom medal—the highest civilian award in the nation—to Devin Nunes, is analogous to placing a Bible in Trump’s hand while protesters had just been tear-gassed.
Those whom I mention above have, throughout the last years been more self-serving and concerned with defending a corrupt president, who in turn had coerced and corrupted them—rather than serving and defending the nation. Collectively, their keen nose and hunger for power had gnawed at the very foundations of our democracy. In no sense are they patriots. What is it then that they more truly resemble?
Rats, leaping from a now sinking ship...