This is why tRump has to be taken out a.s.a.p.
President Trump was the proximate cause of the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. His words of incitement to a crowd of thousands of angry supporters -- including “[y]ou’ll never take back your country with weakness” -- may well qualify for criminal punishment notwithstanding the First Amendment. And those presidential words inciting insurrection certainly justified Trump’s second impeachment by the House.
The actions of Republican congressmen and senators who knowingly raised frivolous objections to Congress’s certification of the electoral college vote that same day, while not warranting criminal punishment, also deserve censure and contempt. Their effort to block the electoral vote count was an attempted coup against democracy -- just of a different sort from the simultaneous storming of the Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.
Indeed, these two coup attempts were related, and both were the logical culmination of the Republican Party’s two-decades-long assault upon democracy through gerrymandering and voter suppression and of the propagation of the big lie of voter fraud by GOP leaders and the right-wing media ecosystem. To focus censure mainly on Trump -- which has been a leading tactic among Republican elites, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- is to enable others who share significant responsibility for the dual coup attempts of January 6th to escape the blame they deserve.
Beginning around 2005, Republican-controlled state governments throughout the nation have enacted a variety of measures aimed at enabling the GOP to remain in power while no longer commanding the support of a majority of voters. Republicans have suppressed votes through restrictive voter identification laws and purges of the voter rolls -- both on the ostensible ground of preventing voter fraud, which numerous academic studies have conclusively demonstrated barely exists in the United States. Republicans have also grotesquely gerrymandered legislative districts, enabling them to maintain control of state legislatures and the House of Representatives while failing to win majorities of the vote.
Republicans have also erected obstacles to college students’ voting, delayed elections that they anticipated they would lose, eviscerated the powers of Democratic governors, and rejected the results of voter initiatives of which they disapproved as well as imposing obstacles to placing such initiatives on the ballot in the first place. In the months prior to the 2020 election, Republican officeholders sought to make it harder to vote during a once-in-a lifetime pandemic: refusing in some states to expand excuse-based absentee balloting, restricting the availability of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots, declining to relax witness-signature requirements for absentee ballots, and refusing to allow the counting of absentee ballots postmarked but not received by Election Day.
In addition, beginning with a contested U.S. Senate race in Missouri in 2000, when Republican Senator Kit Bond charged that “Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal the election,” Republicans have consistently propagated the myth of widespread voter fraud (especially in cities with large African American populations). After that election, the Justice Department of President George W. Bush established a voter integrity initiative to uncover evidence of voter fraud (of which it found almost none); Fox News broadcast fraudulent stories of pervasive voter fraud beginning after the 2000 election and “a new right-wing voter fraud movement was born.” In 2006, the Bush administration fired a dozen U.S. Attorneys for pretextual reasons after they failed to pursue voter-fraud allegations with sufficient ardor.
After losing the popular vote in 2016 by nearly three million votes, President Trump repeatedly insisted without any evidence that three to five million undocumented immigrants had voted in the election. President Trump then established his own “voter integrity” commission, which quickly folded after uncovering no significant evidence of voter fraud. The logical culmination of this voter-fraud lie was that 70 to 80 percent of Republicans after the November 2020 election denied that Joe Biden had been legitimately elected president of the United States, despite a complete absence of actual evidence of voter fraud or other electoral irregularities.
At the same time, Republican politicians overwhelmingly have remained silent in the face of Trump’s repeated exhortations to political violence. In 2015-16, candidate Trump regularly incited crowds to “knock the crap” out of protestors, and he offered to pay the legal expenses of anyone doing so. As president, Trump expressed admiration for Montana Republican congressional representative (now Governor) Greg Gianforte, who had physically assaulted a reporter during his 2017 special-election campaign. Trump has warned that immigrants being blocked at the border who threw rocks at American soldiers might be shot, and he has threatened war crimes against foreign foes and pardoned American war criminals.