That the two officials who did come to the White House later said they had no plans to challenge the Michigan results is not the point. The point is that the president of the United States is doing everything he can to stay in power even though the people have voted him out. As The New York Times put it in an unusually direct headline on Friday: “Trump Targeting Michigan in His Ploy to Subvert Vote,” and calling the invitation to the legislators a “brazen step” to “subvert the will of voters.”
On Thursday, Joe Biden issued his most forceful rebuke to Trump and his delaying tactics, saying Trump would be remembered as “one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history.” Speaking after a meeting in Wilmington Del. with a delegation of Democratic and Republican governors, the president-elect said: “It’s hard to fathom how this man thinks. I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won, and is not going to be able to win, and we’re going to be sworn in on Jan 20.”
Finally, some Republicans are beginning to speak out—though, notably, no one in the leadership team of either the Senate or the House. The boldest statement came from Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 nominee and the lone Republican senator to have voted to impeach Donald Trump earlier this year:
Another rebuke came from Jeff Flake, the former senator from Arizona and someone who has been mentioned as a potential 2024 presidential candidate:
But there has not been even a peep of protest from either Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy,
I recently read The Splendid and The Vile, Eric Larson’s masterful book about Winston Churchill in the darkest period of WW II, and I came across a passage that brought me immediately back to 2020.
After another disastrous setback to the British forces and the continued ineffectuality of Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain as he clung to the little power he had left, a back-bencher named Leopold Avery stood up in the House of Commons and shouted down at Chamberlain, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go!”
Three days later, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill was named the new prime minister.
It is time for someone of principle to stand in the chamber of the United States Senate and shout out the words, “Donald J. Trump, in the name of God, go!”