By John Podhoretz
Monday, February 08, 2021
The question before us now is whether and in what fashion
the Republican Party will survive Donald Trump and the insurrectionist riot of
January 6, 2021, for which he was impeached by the House of Representatives.
Unlike the first impeachment of Donald Trump, this second
impeachment was appropriate and necessary. Congress had to do what it could to
intervene to forestall the rise of a new era of political lawlessness and
violence in the United States—in which political leaders treat the
constitutionally mandated procedures that undergird our representative
government as entirely conditional, only worthy of being followed if the
results come out the way they like them.
The idea was a novel one, to be sure—sending a mob to
intimidate Trump’s own toadyish vice president into magically refusing to
accept the electoral count and forcing Mike Pence to announce, through a power
he did not possess, that someone else had won the election. But it’s only novel
once. The unthinkable is no longer unthinkable once it has been tried. That is
why a door to nihilistic evil, once opened, must be locked, nailed shut,
epoxyed as a seal, and bricked up—and then, after all that, the aperture must
be hardened from assault like a nuclear silo.
That is the justification for the impeachment. It also
speaks to the need for the Senate’s conviction based on the House’s indictment,
no matter when or how long it takes. The events of January 6 were incepted,
encouraged, galvanized, and implicitly directed by the country’s most powerful
single person, out of his disappointment and rage at the imminent loss of his
power.
The horror had to be anathematized. The political and
social wound it opened had to be cauterized. And all present and future leaders
had to be put on notice that any such action taken in the future will be met
with the only kind of political force we do sanction—the force of impeachment
and the potential removal from office.
So vital is this remedy, and so serious, that we can see
just how foolish it was to use it with questionable intent both in Trump’s
first impeachment and in the case of Bill Clinton in 1998. Had those
self-defeating efforts been avoided, it would have been far more difficult for
Republicans to vote no on this open-and-shut case, as most did in the House either
out of an instinct of political self-preservation or as a result of their own
partisan—or literal—madness.
I say literal madness because at least one newly elected
Republican member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, issued the
following statement a week after the Electoral College tally of 306–232 had
been certified and Joseph Robinette Biden had formally become the
president-elect: “President Trump will remain in office. This Hail Mary attempt
to remove him from the White House is an attack on every American who voted for
him. Democrats must be held accountable for the political violence inspired by
their rhetoric.” The only way President Trump could, at the time she issued the
statement on January 12, remain in office would have been through a literal
coup d’etat.
It’s possible that Greene, who endorses the
many-tentacled conspiracy called QAnon, might be clinically insane. But if so,
what of the 137 members of her party in the House who, the week before, joined
her in contesting the electoral results in Pennsylvania? The argument made on
their behalf is that they believe the election was stolen and their belief is
their truth and their truth must be honored. Yeah, well, people believe in lots
of things. And genuinely. Arthur Kopit, a notable American playwright, once
said in no uncertain terms that he’d seen the Loch Ness Monster. I admire
Kopit’s play Wings. That doesn’t mean I think he actually saw a sea
creature in a Scottish lake.
There is such a thing as electoral fraud. I can think of
elections that might well have been stolen. The Minnesota Senate race in 2008
saw the mysterious discoveries of missing ballots and the likely participation
of ineligible voters turn a 215-vote lead for incumbent Republican Norm Coleman
into a 312-vote victory for Democrat Al Franken, out of more than 2.8 million
cast. But the margin of victory in Pennsylvania was 80,555 out of 6.8 million.
You can see how an effectively tied contest election can be gently pushed in
the wrong direction by fraud. But not a race won by 1.2 percent.
Any fair-minded dive into the supposed “vote-fraud”
controversies of 2020—by which I mean ones that do not involve either the
rantings of soon-to-be-disbarred lawyers or the factitious intellectual
droolings of slavering MAGA apologists—gets you nowhere. The only grounds to
claim the election was run irregularly have to do with changes to liberalize
methods of voting due to the pandemic.
The fact that those seem to have favored Democrats has
more than a little to do with the intervention of one Donald J. Trump, who
loudly insisted and preached that voting early or voting by mail was some kind
of evil act. In only one state—Florida—did he bow to the wishes of a friendly
governor and cease his lobbying against voting ahead of time. He won Florida by
two points, in part because Florida Republicans participated in early voting to
a far greater degree than in other states—especially Pennsylvania. In this way,
as in so many others, Trump’s behavior played a central role in his own defeat.
Then he instantly demanded other Republicans take up the
cudgel on behalf of his stolen-election excuse, even though it was he who cost
the party the White House and then, in January, the Senate with the losses in
the two Georgia Senate runoff races. (A credible study found that 115,000
Republican voters stayed home rather than participate in the runoff due to
Trump’s theft claims; the margin of victory in the more decisively won race in
Georgia was 75,000.)
Trump’s demand here was one of the most chutzpahdik
in political history, but he knew what he was doing. He was demonstrating how
he had turned the GOP into a party of one—the party of Trump. Even in defeat,
he remained and, in the wake of impeachment remains, the most powerful figure
on the American right, and power in this instance isn’t just metaphorical. It’s
literal. He summoned a vast crowd to Washington on January 6, promising them it
would be “wild.” And then he said they should go to the Capitol and let Mike
Pence know how they felt.
The crowd he summoned was real, representing the
political threat to those who would oppose Trump in the House and Senate—in the
form of grassroots activism that might lead to primary challenges and election
losses in the future. The violent evildoers in the crowd, much smaller in
number but still several hundred strong at the last, were real, too. But the
threat they posed, and that those who likely admire them for their zeal pose,
was and is more immediate.
Representative Peter Meijer told Reason magazine,
“I had colleagues who, when it came time to recognize reality and vote to
certify Arizona and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College, they knew in their
heart of hearts that they should’ve voted to certify, but some had legitimate
concerns about the safety of their families. They felt that that vote would put
their families in danger.”
Courage is an exceptional quality; one cannot expect
people to exhibit it, and being unable to do so does not mark those who fail to
show it as bad or sinful. Kevin McCarthy, the top-ranking Republican in the
House of Representatives, said during the impeachment debate that Joe Biden won
the election. A week earlier, he had voted to object to the electors because he
didn’t want to be outflanked on his Trumpian right by the number-two
Republican, Steve Scalise. That is normal political behavior. It is
understandable. As I say, we cannot expect people to be brave. But we can make
note of who stepped up and who didn’t. The Republicans who voted for
impeachment, led by Liz Cheney in Wyoming, showed bravery of a rare sort for
the reasons I’ve just outlined. They have put their political careers at risk,
and perhaps they have put their lives at risk as well.
It is painful for me to think that the circumstances of
2021 have compelled me to write these words about elected politicians in the
United States, and what these words might portend for this country’s future.
And it is painful for me to think as ill as I am thinking today about politicians
whose ideological perspective is closer to my own than the politicians who cast
what I believe to be the right and proper vote to impeach Donald Trump. But the
truth is the truth, and we must look the truth in the face. The Republican
Party is in an existential fight for its own survival as a positive force in
American politics and American society.
At his rallies, Donald Trump loved to recite the lyrics
to “The Snake,” in which a “tender-hearted” woman finds a half-frozen poisonous
asp. She nurses it back to health. Then it bites her. Dying, she asks why he
would do such a thing. “The Snake” concludes: “‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said
the reptile with a grin. ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me
in.’”
Trump claimed “The Snake” was a metaphor for illegal
immigration, with America as the kind but fatally naive woman and the snake as
a stand-in for the illegal immigrants who were supposedly poisoning us. The
analogy was labored, but that didn’t matter, because that’s not what the words
really meant to Trump or his acolytes. The way Trump recited the lyrics, the
snake was not the villain but its hero—and that is how the crowds reacted,
roaring with delight at the snake’s grin and the honest and pitiless cynicism
his words revealed. Trump loved reciting it, and his throng loved hearing it,
because they both knew the truth: He, Donald Trump, was the snake.
Trump’s pitiless cynicism was and is the quality they and
he most prize in him. He doesn’t stand on ceremony; he squats atop it like a
man over a toilet. Asked in a 2015 debate how he could claim he was a true
rival to Hillary Clinton when he had made sure she would attend his wedding in
2005, he replied, “She had no choice because I gave to a foundation. I gave to
many people before this. When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need
something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are
there for me.” Bill O’Reilly asked Trump how he could say he respected Vladimir
Putin, given that he is a killer, and Trump replied, “We have a lot of killers.
Well, you think our country is so innocent?”
Not any longer I don’t.
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