It’s been nearly a year since Joe Biden was elected president—and what a strange year it has been. There’s been good stuff, terrible stuff, and stuff that has been wildly frustrating but not really his fault. There have been many bad faith attacks on Biden and his administration. But there have also been some areas where the criticism is entirely legitimate. But whatever one’s feelings may be about the Biden presidency at this point of his term, one thing has been absolutely clear since November 7 of last year: Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
And yet, more than 11 months since the vote and nine months since the inauguration, top Republicans still can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that basic fact. On Sunday, Steve Scalise, the number two Republican in the House, was asked repeatedly by Fox News’ Chris Wallace if he believed the election was stolen from Trump, and while he wouldn’t outright say that Biden rigged the vote, he refused to acknowledge that the sitting president was legitimately elected.
“If you look at a number of states, they didn’t follow their state past laws that govern the election for president,” Scalise said. “At the end of the day, are we gonna follow what the constitution says, or not? I hope we get back to what the constitution says.”
Scalise, one of 139 House Republicans who tried to overturn the 2020 results just hours after armed insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, did not say a single thing in his exchange with Wallace that made sense, reflected reality, or approached anything you could call honest argument; no matter what his questioner asked, the minority whip fell back on the same vague insinuations of wrongdoing and “irregularities” Scalise has been spouting for months. What’s increasingly disturbing—aside from the fact that Scalise and other Trumpists are still getting opportunities to launder these lies on television—is the backdrop against which this tired, bullshit is playing out: an approaching midterms election cycle, the threat of another Trump run in 2024, and a MAGA base that has only seemed to grow more militant after feeding on a steady diet of election conspiracy theories. “I see a civil war coming,” one Trump supporter told a reporter outside the former president’s Des Moines rally Saturday. At that event, Sen. Chuck Grassley and other prominent GOP figure
It’s easy to draw a line between that kind of apocalyptic thinking and the lies Trump and his Republican allies have been telling. The bogus claims already fomented the January 6 attack on the Capitol; that the GOP, from its fringes to its establishment, continues to tout them is worse than reckless. The party, of course, isn’t completely in lockstep: A recent Pew poll found that only 44% of Republicans want Trump on the ticket again in 2024, and some GOP lawmakers continue to push back against the election lies. “Republicans have a duty to tell the American people that this is not true,” Liz Cheney, a member of the committee investigating January 6, wrote in response to Scalise’s remarks Sunday. “Perpetuating the Big Lie is an attack on the core of our constitutional republic.”
But for the courage Cheney has displayed in standing against Trump’s lies, she has also supported the anti-democratic voter suppression laws that have grown out of those lies and that could doom Democrats in 2022 and beyond. And even if a majority of Republicans may not necessarily want Trump to run in 2024, they’d likely still rally around him if he does; that same Pew poll found that more than two-thirds of GOP voters want him to remain a “major” force in American politics. Some of them would surely prefer that influence to be used in service of a different candidate—one of his cynical acolytes, perhaps, like Ron DeSanits or Nikki Haley, who have barely concealed their ambitions. But Trump has never been happy in a supporting role, and in Iowa on Saturday, his hints at another run carried the cadence of a threat: “We’re going to take America back.”
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