It's been a week since a horde of insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol. The last seven days have seen the closest thing akin to actual consequences for Donald Trump since he entered office nearly four years ago. He's been banned from Twitter and temporarily suspended from Facebook. And he's facing a second impeachment mere days before the end of his term.
But with the Trump administration coming to a pathetic, disgraceful end in the wake of last week's domestic terror attack, the same Republican politicians who enabled the president attempting to distance themselves. Like rats escaping an authoritarian, violence-inciting sinking ship, Trump's most loyal allies are really hoping you forget the role they played in the president's election fraud con.
So don't forget.
Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, the two most notable Republican congresspeople who advocated against confirming Joe Biden's electoral victory, are the most egregious examples of this. Both have claimed that they had no role in inciting violence while simultaneously perpetuating the same ludicrous lies of a stolen election that precipitated Wednesday's attack in the first place.
Cruz, Hawley, and the five other GOP Senators who sided with them watched as an armed, fanatical crowd invaded the US Capitol. They saw their colleagues forced to put on gas masks and hide in barricaded offices and under chairs because of the lies the president told. And still, after the dust had settled, after they knew that at least one person had died during the attacks, they continued to tell bald-faced lies about election fraud.
They want to hide behind the guise of asking innocent questions about election security. They want to pretend that they did what they did so that no one could question the integrity of the vote going forward.
And it was all a lie.
There may have been a handful of GOP congresspeople last Wednesday who were truly delusional enough to buy Trump's lies. But the vast majority of those who voted to undermine democracy, Cruz and Hawley included, did so purely as a political calculation. They hoped that, by going along with whatever Trump said, his base might become theirs if they ran in 2024. What was the harm, right? They knew Biden would be confirmed anyway.
But now, five people are dead because of lies they helped spread. There's blood on their hands. No matter how much they want to downplay their role in this domestic terrorist attack in the coming months, don't forget that they were more than happy to lie and undermine democracy until it started to backfire in their face.
