From the legendary Robin Hood to the lethally real Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger, notorious outlaws have held a certain attraction the world over for people who would never think of committing big crimes themselves.
In America, Depression-era bank robberies were not bad news to people who had lost their homes or farms to foreclosure. Mobsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano became folk heroes, some scholars say, because they were violating the highly unpopular Prohibition law — too bad about the murders — and the gangland mystique survived repeal, inspiring some of the best American fiction.
If you empathized with Vito and Michael Corleone and doted on Tony Soprano, you were hardly alone.
But now we have a problem of misplaced affection that’s fact, not fiction, and it’s anything but harmless.
Never in the United States have so many idolized an actual lawbreaker like Donald Trump. A CNN poll recently found 70% of Republicans in full agreement with his gigantic lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and 50% of them firmly convinced that there is evidence to support his claims despite there being none.
That lie is destroying America’s faith that our elections are honest and that our transfers of power are peaceful. It has entrapped a significant minority of the Congress in a cesspool of subversion.
To keep the faithful in the dark, Trump’s enablers think they must suppress the truth about who did what to inspire and carry out the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the top Republicans in Congress, were for a bipartisan investigating commission before they turned suddenly against it.
Despite them, the House approved the commission this week by a vote of 252 to 175, with 35 Republicans having the courage and decency to vote yes. But McConnell’s decision to sabotage the plan leaves it vulnerable to a Senate filibuster.
Of Florida’s 16 House Republicans, only freshmen Carlos Gimenez and Maria Salazar voted for the commission. Shame on the others. (Daniel Webster missed the vote.)
Although only 30% of the voting public disbelieves the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election — that in itself is an alarming statistic — those are Trump’s utter faithful and they dominate the Republican Party to the extent that most Republicans in Congress and all Republican-led state legislatures are marching to his drum, feeding the fiction of a stolen election with new laws that would help them actually steal the next one.
They set that stage by trying to reject the certification of the 2020 Democratic electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania. Among those voting to overturn our presidential election in Arizona, Pennsylvania or both were Sen. Rick Scott and a dozen House Republicans from Florida.
For 2024, there are new laws in some states that allow Republican legislators to take over the vote counting if local officials aren’t reporting it their way.
In Georgia, they have kicked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger off the state election board for certifying Joe Biden’s victory there and refusing Trump’s explicit plea to “find” him enough votes to erase Biden’s margin.
A new Iowa statute threatens county auditors with criminal prosecution if they don’t invoke harsh voter purge laws that are vulnerable to misinformation. In Florida and some other states, election workers could be prosecuted and face devastating fines for inadvertently leaving an absentee ballot drop box unsupervised.
Almost everywhere they control, they are making it more difficult to vote by mail — a practice Republicans encouraged so long as they thought it was to their advantage,
They are feeding the fiction, invented and peddled by Trump and his henchmen, that the voting laws have been riddled with opportunities for fraud. In fact, Republican election workers throughout the nation reported no significant fraud of any kind.
For real fraud, consider the “audit” commissioned by the Arizona Republican Senate and given to an unqualified Florida company called Cyber Ninjas. After charging that a key Maricopa County database had been deleted, the bumbling “auditors” admitted that it hadn’t been, but not before Trump adopted that fable as his own — another bell that will be hard to unring. Seemingly incapable of embarrassment or shame, the Arizona Senate leaders insisted on going ahead with the farce.
Writing in the May issue of Washington Monthly, columnist David Atkins described “an unwillingness to concede any electoral victory by a Democrat as legitimate, and an eagerness to punish any Republican elected official who concedes the will of the voters.” Liz Cheney is the most prominent of those, but she won’t be the last.
“The Big Lie that Trump really won the election is now canon among a majority of Republican voters,” Atkins wrote.
To further that lie, some Congressional Republicans have been mouthing such blatant stupidities as the claim that it wasn’t Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol flaunting Trump flags on Jan. 6 but merely peaceful tourists exercising their constitutional rights.
The party covering up the Jan. 6 treason is the same one that devoted two years and four months to multiple (and fruitless) investigations of the foreign assault on our diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans died but the Constitution was never in danger. It was all about disparaging Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential candidacy, as even McCarthy, the present House Republican leader, once admitted in an unguarded moment.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy happily told Sean Hannity on the latter’s right-wing agitprop show on Fox News back in 2015. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today?”
Can the Republican Party ever rediscover its integrity?
It may be too much to expect that sort of leadership from invertebrate power-seekers like McCarthy.
If it is to happen, it will depend on individual Republican voters awakening to how they are being used by the Big Liar and his pack of yes-men.
Sure, there’s a lot in Trump for some people to like. He breaks things. He appears to give voice to their anger about dynamic social and economic forces they can’t control. He hates the people they fear.
But what has he ever done to better the lives of folks who aren’t rich?
No more than John Dillinger ever did.
Trump is the biggest fraud in American political history. His lies should be wearing thin by now. If they aren’t, there’s nothing but trouble ahead. And that’s fact, not fiction.
