This Trump stuff is starting to smell like treason.
When you’re putting one man above principle and patriotism, when you’re destabilizing the Constitution to advance a cult of personality, you’ve gotten a little nuts and you need to pull your head out.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Trump supporter since the Iowa primary of some five years ago. I was at the inauguration. I’ve been in the same room with him in the White House. I’ve backed him and his policies at every turn. I voted for him twice. I believe he accomplished great things as president.
And I am completely willing to defend the first 46 months of his administration.
But this stuff right now is wrong. And silence in the face of it is cowardice.
His phone call Saturday to the Georgia secretary of state sounded like an excerpt from the Nixon tapes. His association with people throwing around the phrase “martial law” is completely unacceptable, and efforts to subvert the vote of the Electoral College – in Congress or out – violate the compact of citizenship and the oath to defend and follow the Constitution.
It’s really that simple.
No matter what you heard on Newsmax or read on your phone.
It’s time to stop believing in fairy tales and conspiracy theories, and it’s time to stand up for America. The Constitution empowers states to select electors as they will, and it calls upon the Electoral College to elect a president. It has done so. On Wednesday it will present its selection formally to the Congress.
That is the law; that is the constitutional order. That is the entirety of the matter. That is the process that every patriotic American must support.
No, I didn’t want Biden, and, no, I don’t believe he will be a good president. He was a dolt before his mental decline, with a legacy of decades of mediocrity, rejected by his own party in three presidential runs, I’m gloomy about what he and his progressive cronies will screw up over the next four years.
But he won.
And if you have a right to vote, you have a responsibility to accept the outcome of the vote.
And just as the Democrats were wrong to spend four years functionally rejecting the outcome of an election, Trumpians are now wrong to seek to subvert and overthrow the results of a subsequent election.
And they are naïve to buy into and repeat repudiated theories of fraud and vote stealing. There aren’t mystery machines and secret codes or votes snuck through in the dark of the night. There is merely an election lost.
Disappointingly and heartbreakingly lost, but lost nonetheless.
The narrative of the stolen election has been proven false, and it is false, no matter how loudly it is shouted or how many “likes” it gets on Facebook.
More than 50 legal actions have been taken by the president or his supporters, most of which were before Republican judges, including the Supreme Court, and all of those actions have been found meritless on either the facts or the law. The elections processes of every state have bipartisan representation in some way or another, and their results have been ultimately certified by Democrat and Republican officials alike. Republican governors and secretaries of state have overseen the majority of elections. The Republican-controlled Justice Department, with an army of agents and Trump-appointed United States attorneys, has found nothing of alarm, and nothing that would change the outcome in any state or nationally.
The processes of integrity and review in our electoral system, overseen by people from both parties, have certified the vote. And that vote, ultimately, is for Joe Biden.
And acceptance of that fact is a patriotic duty.
Abandoning that duty, in a rage of personality worship and selfish refusal to accept a disappointing outcome, is contrary to American culture and tradition. It is, sadly, a trait found not in the world’s advanced societies, but in its most debased.
Resistance to constitutional process is a repudiation of the principles of conservatism and the Republican Party. Worse, it is a betrayal of the very premise of the American Republic. It breaks the compact of citizenship first envisioned on the decks of the Mayflower, and hammered out in Philadelphia in 1787.
The duty of Americans is to America first. All Americans should realize that, and so should all American leaders.
And any leader who goes counter to that, who puts his own interests above the interests of the country and the stability of its Constitution, is wrong.
This Trump stuff is starting to smell like treason.
And you should reject it. No matter who you voted for