Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan didn’t praise the leadership of President Trump in their speeches to a nearly-empty Senate about the $2 trillion emergency bailout bill.

I think they know that Trump is incompetent, but they are loyal Republicans and believe the best thing to say to a general audience about the president is nothing at all. I doubt they believe that Trump deserves a “10” for his handling of the crisis, but they keep forgetting to mention his excellency.

Their continued cautious-lawyer silence about Trump’s lies is a disservice to the country.

Murkowski gave a heartfelt speech about the problems with partisanship. I agree with a lot of what she said.

“Right now we don’t need the words that just further separate us as Americans,” she said.

Murkowski failed to identify the biggest culprit in the country—the stable genius. His words and deeds continue to put lives at risk.

The closest that Murkowski has come to criticizing Trump was this in the Anchorage Daily News: “I think there was an effort by the White House to downplay this early on.” That is hardly the full extent of Trump’s errors, which have continued while the pandemic gets worse and the death toll climbs.

For Sullivan’s part, he said some of his closest friends are Democrats. “This issue should not be about partisan politics,” he said.

It shouldn’t be, but it is because Trump puts the preservation of his political carcass above all else.

The Anchorage Daily News quoted Sullivan as complaining about the slow federal response on testing, but he blamed the Centers for Disease Control for that and not Trump.

Sullivan, who knows his audience, never criticizes Trump.

While speaking on the phone to Alaska members of the National Federation of Independent Business, Sullivan got a call from Trump and put him on the line with the business group: “Mr. President, thank you very much sir, these are all the small businesses in Alaska, and I know they’re big supporters of you, if you could just maybe say a word to them and we’ll let you get back to the business of the country.”

At the end, Sullivan told Trump, “Thank you Mr. President. Really really appreciate the call and all you’re doing.”

One of Sullivan’s fixations in all of this is insisting that the $2 trillion relief plan is not a bailout. He said the federal response to the economic collapse more than a decade ago was a bailout.

“This is more like a natural disaster. No one’s to blame for this, maybe China at some point,” Sullivan told an Anchorage radio show last week.

On the Senate floor, he said, “What we’re seeing right now is much more like a natural disaster, much more like a war. There’s no one to be blamed right now, the airlines shouldn’t be blamed for what’s happening right now. This is a pandemic. So this term being thrown around, ‘Oh it’s a bailout.’ What we’re trying to do is help the American worker, help the American family.”

“It’s not a perfect bill. But we are dealing with a natural disaster. Something came over from overseas on our shores. And now we’re all trying to deal with it.”

It’s a bailout. It’s also necessary.