Trump's Enablers and Apologists Deserve Adverse Consequences

Donald Trump did not assault American democracy, objective truth and common decency single handedly.  Nor was he solely responsible for the sacking of the U,S. Capitol, although he played a principal role. Trump may have been the moral bankrupt root of the assault but he had many apologists and enablers who all played a hand in the climax of his depravity embodied by the sacking of the U.S. Capitol this past Wednesday.  These enablers range from Mike Pence, the Senate and House Republicans who refused to vote against Trump during impeachment, the far right media, including Fox News talking heads, the sedition caucus in the Senate and House of Representatives, and the Republican's National Committee which remains unrepentant as noted by the Washington Post:

Winds of change did not blow through a luxury seaside resort here as top Republicans huddled Friday to chart their party's future. . . . . Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman Trump installed four years ago as the titular head of the GOP, was reelected unanimously without a challenger. She lavishly praised Trump for attracting new voters in his losing campaign while thanking him for choosing her for the post.

Other enablers consisted of those who joined the Trump/Pence administration and further Trump's policies, including the horrific separation of families at the nation's southern border and his war against civil rights for non-whites and LGBT Americans.  Just as Hitler could not have implemented his horrors without lieutenants and underlings, Trump war on the truth and democracy could only happen with a cast of thousands.  As a column in the Washington Post argues ALL of these people must suffer consequences for their roles if the damage is to be undone and an example made to prevent future actors from following a similar pattern.  Here are column excerpts:

Poor Josh Hawley. The first senator to announce that he would object to the certification of the 2020 election results, Hawley fed the delusion that Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump could be overturned. He set himself up as one of the “strong" Republicans Trump praised at his rally Wednesday before urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and to inspire “weak Republicans” to “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” And unlike his colleagues who returned to their senses after the Capitol was trashed, Hawley continued to object to the certification of Biden’s win. After all that, Hawley lost his book contract with Simon & Schuster and then promptly cast himself as a free speech martyr, pledging to “fight this cancel culture with everything I have.”

It’s reasonable to debate which ideas fall outside the spectrum of acceptable public opinion: . . . But we should all agree that there are some views and behavior that must be met with social, professional and moral sanction. Or, to borrow Hawley’s own words: “It’s community that helps us find moral purpose.”

Inciting, enabling or participating in an attempted insurrection aimed at overturning the results of a free and fair election should fall into that category. Everyone else who played a role in Wednesday’s disgraceful spectacle deserves far more than the annoyance of losing a prestigious publisher and being forced to hunt for a down-market conservative alternative.

But if an event truly is uniquely horrible, and if it should not be repeated, the only response to such an occasion can’t be to say so and move on. The people who participated in that event on every level have to be held responsible. Our collective horror at their actions has to be made clear, over and over again, for as long as it takes a norm that has been broken to be restored.

The law has an obvious role to play here: The people who killed Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, planted pipe bombs at the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican national committees and rampaged through the Capitol must be identified, arrested and prosecuted.

But the law has limits: Encouraging the fantasy that the election could be overturned is not illegal, just disgusting. We shouldn’t forfeit the moral tools we have to express that disgust.

If the prospect of canceling a book on an unrelated subject in response to the attack on the Capitol raises First Amendment-adjacent concerns for you, recent days offer some creative suggestions for how to reestablish the moral guardrails that were plowed down during the Trump era.

Randall Lane, the editor of Forbes magazine, has announced that if private companies hire Trump press officials who lied to the public, “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.” Publishers can certainly hold authors who peddled lies about the 2020 election to a more rigorous fact-checking standard than currently is the norm.

It’s possible to believe in someone’s right to speak without helping them to make money doing so. And certainly, high-profile institutions can opt to not offer paid speaking opportunities, board seats or prestigious appointments to people who have demonstrated themselves self-interested to the point of recklessness or worse.

Voters and professional associations have a role to play, too.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall heads the Republican Attorneys General Association’s nonprofit Rule of Law Defense Fund, which participated in organizing Wednesday’s gathering, including through robocalls saying that “we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.” He should be voted out of office.

Some lawyers are pressing for ethics investigations and possible disbarments of lawyers who participated in efforts to get the courts to reverse the outcome of the election.

Five people are dead because of the mendacity Josh Hawley legitimized, and he’s the victim? He, and everyone else who made Wednesday possible, should be beside themselves with shame. The rest of us should help them feel it, for as long as it takes.