It says something about today’s Republican Party, and not something good, that those rare GOP members of Congress who have condemned Donald Trump for seeking the “termination” of the U.S. Constitution are being credited with unusual courage. Such condemnation should be a baseline for any elected official, not a novelty.
More to the point, those precious few all sound like they’re doing some political imitation of Captain Renault from “Casablanca”: They’re shocked — shocked — to discover there is constitutional contempt going on here!
What movie have these people been watching for the past six years?
Trump’s latest descent into wannabe authoritarianism came last weekend as he was once again beating the long-dead horse of his stolen-election claims.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote on his misnamed Truth Social network. He added: “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!”
When a former president and current presidential candidate says something this fundamentally dangerous, it demands universal repudiation from every serious political leader. That’s especially true of Republicans. He’s their monster — they’re the ones with the obligation to get him back into the laboratory before he destroys the whole village.
Yet most congressional Republicans have responded with the same mute chorus of cowardice that they perfected during and after Trump’s presidency. Most notably, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, likely the next House speaker, has yet to even comment on his party’s standard-bearer calling for the first-ever suspension of America’s founding document. (But McCarthy still plans to have his caucus read that entire document aloud on the House floor in January to show the nation how much they really, really respect it. Words fail.)
Still, some prominent Republicans did push back, in ways they haven’t before. Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt noted: “I was standing 10 feet from [Trump] when he took the oath of office and there was no emergency clause not to follow the Constitution.” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas predicted that Trump winning the party’s 2024 presidential nomination is “increasingly less likely, given statements like that.”
For those and other elders of the party, Trump’s comment seemed to come as a surprise. Ditto for some conservative pundits who used to support him. “I’m sorry,” wrote one of them, Marc A. Thiessen, in The Washington Post, “but this is bat-guano crazy.”
Just this is?
How is it possible that elected Republicans and their conservative-media allies are just now figuring out that Trump has never viewed the Constitution with anything but contempt?
His role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was, of course, the clearest example, one for which he was impeached and should have been removed from office and barred from ever running again. The only reason Trump is still around to sabotage the GOP with his looney candidates and psychotic antics is because Blunt, Cornyn and the rest cravenly let him off the hook back then, thus keeping him politically alive. To the extent they now view this as a huge mistake that has boomeranged on their party, it feels something like justice.
But Trump’s disdain for the Constitution was evident long before he attempted to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. In fact, it was evident from even before he won the presidency with an Electoral College asterisk in 2016.
It was early in that campaign that candidate Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — about as clear a violation as imaginable of the First Amendment’s religious freedoms and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He also vowed to “open up” libel law in order to go after media outlets he didn’t like (“enemies of the people”), and expressed his desire to violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by torturing terrorists (and their families).
Once in office, Trump’s contempt only grew for the document he swore to “preserve, protect and defend.” He consistently violated the constitutional prohibition on personally profiting from his post, using his various properties to collect travel and lodging fees from the government and the military. He resisted congressional oversight throughout his term, instructing his underlings to ignore congressional subpoenas.
In 2020, Trump continued his assault on the First Amendment by tear-gassing a crowd of peaceful protesters so he could do a photo-op in front of a Washington church. That’s the same year Trump was impeached for the first time, for trying to extort political help from Ukraine, thus endangering U.S. interests for the sake of his own reelection — a clear violation of his constitutional oath.
As they would a year later, Republicans refused to uphold their own oaths by expelling Trump from office. Their shock now at hearing him finally say the quiet part out loud is an Oscar-worthy performance, indeed.
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