McConnell’s hypocrisy on Trump continues to amaze as election grows close | Opinion

Last week, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and the Minority Leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, issued a joint statement that was stunning in its hypocrisy. The odd couple decried Kamala Harris’s pinning the label of “fascist” on Donald Trump. Such “irresponsible rhetoric,” they warned, was escalating the likelihood of further attempts to assassinate the former president.

Johnson himself had been the House of Representatives’ point man for Team Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In Oath and Honor, Liz Cheney’s powerful expose of the Republican Party’s capitulation to Donald Trump, she recounts how, on January 5, 2021, Mike Johnson employed intimidating tactics to get 125 members of the House Republican caucus to sign onto a Trump-generated amicus brief supporting the bogus lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Even after his most improbable elevation to the speakership, Johnson continued to be a crucial purveyor of Trump’s lies and calumnies. After Trump had been indicted by state and federal prosecutors for business fraud as well as for his role in the 2020-2021 coup attempt, Johnson announced that the House would be holding hearings on the government’s illegal deployment of the courts against the former president, who, Johnson stressed, had “done nothing wrong . . . All these cases need to be dropped.” It was jaw-dropping gaslighting.

Unlike Johnson, McConnell has not always been a mouthpiece for Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. When the Senate gathered on Jan. 6, 2021, to certify Joe Biden’s election, McConnell told his fellow senators that the upcoming vote would be the most important one he had cast in the 36 years he had served in the body. Those objecting to the results were engaged in nothing less than an assault on our democratic process and the Constitution itself. It would not be the last time that McConnell condemned Trump’s fascism. In the aftermath of the Senate’s failure to convict Trump for effectively inciting an insurrection, McConnell called on the legal system to hold Trump fully accountable for his crimes.

At that point, McConnell still believed that Jan. 6 had been Trump’s Waterloo. He soon found it necessary, as he always has, to tack with the prevailing winds in the Republican Party, even though they were in a direction he would not have chosen. So, in the past week, when previously undisclosed comments by McConnell revealed his contempt for Trump as “a despicable human being” unfit to hold office, the minority leader aptly responded that plenty of other Republicans had said worse about Trump. “We are all on the same team now,” he explained, tacitly acknowledging that in McConnell World, party takes precedence over everything else, even democracy.

Last week the Herald-Leader also carried the story of “the rising wave of threats to election workers and political activists” in swing states A survey conducted among election workers by the Brennan Center found that nearly 40% of them had been the targets of threats or harassment. A third of the workers reported knowing someone who had quit because of the intimidation. One has heard nothing from Johnson or McConnell about such threats. Just as they have been silent about the threats to judges, prosecutors, court personnel, jury members, and the families of all of the aforementioned — all occasioned by Donald Trump’s rhetoric of such an irresponsible magnitude that several judges issued gag orders against the former president.

Nor are Johnson and McConnell bothered by Trump’s incendiary rants at his rallies, during which Trump conjures up a dystopian America, “occupied” by murderous illegal immigrants brought in by a criminal Democratic regime and championed by a “fake news” industry hellbent on destroying the country’s economy, Christianity, and white supremacy. This “enemy within” Trump gleefully assures he will eliminate with massive roundups, jailings, deportations, and selective executions needed to make America great again.

Sunday night’s Nuremberg reenactment at Madison Square Garden was a sickening display of the baseless demonization and venomous rhetoric which has become the lingua franca of the Republican Party. Every Trump rally, every interview, every tweet in the middle of the night provides new evidence of his fascism. If someone sounds like a fascist, and acts like a fascist, you can rightly conclude that he is a fascist. It would be a grave dereliction of one’s civic duty not to call out Trump for who he is. Nothing less than the fate of this nation is at stake.

Robert Emmett Curran is a Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University who lives in Richmond.