Attention, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and all the Republican leaders who are your followers:
You have maintained your craven silence as President Donald Trump has sabotaged our democracy and is now inciting his cult followers in ways that are endangering patriotic public officials and their families. So today we must ask you:
What will you be saying the morning after a tragic attack — maybe an assassination — wounds or kills a dutiful state or local election official, or their spouse or child?
What will you be saying the morning after we see the tragedy looping across our news screens — and we discover the attacker was a brainwashed Trump true believer who believed the inflammatory words of the president were their call to act?
Will you be wishing on that morning after that you’d had the guts to stop covering up for Trump with your silence and condemn his shameful effort to overturn his 2020 reelection defeat?
Whatever you’ll know on that morning after the tragedy is what you must muster the political courage to say – right now!
In Georgia, Trump has repeatedly attacked the governor and secretary of state, as the recounts showed Biden winning the state. Georgia’s dutiful secretary of state (a conservative, faith-based Republican) has received death threats; his wife has received what officials called “sexualized threats.” Why? Because he was repeatedly denounced by Trump. When a former Homeland Security official said this was the most secure election ever, Trump’s lawyer, Joseph diGenova, said he should be shot.
“It has to stop, Mr. President,” said Gabriel Sterling, a senior Republican election administrator in Georgia, who now needs around-the-clock police protection at his home.
On Wednesday, Trump put on Facebook a video of an address he said may be “the most important speech I’ve ever made.” It was a 46-minute video of rant and ramble that was loaded with baseless allegations of election fraud that the president said was a “coordinated assault and siege” against our election system. Trump claimed it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
If you watched Trump’s “most important speech,” you saw the president looking very presidential, standing at a lectern adorned with the presidential seal (which is supposed to be used for official events only) in the White House Diplomatic Room. And you heard him sounding like no American president had ever sounded in the history of our republic.
“This election was rigged,” said America’s 45th president. “Everybody knows it.” Trump claimed, without showing any proof, that “corrupt forces” stuffed ballot boxes in “massive” fraud “on a scale never seen before.” Russia’s Vladimir Putin has spent billions to sabotage America’s democracy by making voters distrust their own election system. And Trump has been happy to help.
In a fake reality TV moment, Trump showed you a very hard-to-read chart, saying it showed he was winning decisively in Wisconsin when, at 3:32 a.m., somebody dumped in lots of Biden votes. But wait! That was Trump’s old fake non-news con, first tweeted Nov. 18: “Look at this in Wisconsin! … Biden receives a dump of 143,379 votes at 3:42AM, when they learned he was losing badly. This is unbelievable!” (Finally, a true Trump statement – it was absolutely not believable. As fact checks by The Washington Post and Texas Monthly showed, it was just the late-night vote tally, just received from heavily Democratic Milwaukee County.
Of course, Trump offered a solution: The U.S. Supreme Court must “do what’s right for our country” — by somehow rejecting hundreds of thousands of votes. That, Trump said, would mean “I very easily win in all states.”
Gabriel Sterling, the loyal Georgia Republican who received death threats because he did his job dutifully, continues to tell truth to power. “Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” Sterling said. “… It has to stop. Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. … Tell your supporters, ‘Don’t be violent. Don’t intimidate. All that’s wrong. It’s un-American.’”
