Inciter-in-chief needs to be removed now; Sullivan still doesn't get it
Before Trump’s elite strike force of thugs ransacked the Capitol, he incited them by urging them to fight, “because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
The U.S. House has the right idea: Impeach Trump a second time.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski has the right idea. He needs to resign.
The first Senate Republican to call for Trump’s removal, Murkowski said he has caused enough damage and he is not focused on the job. Exactly right. So far, she has been joined only by Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
While thousands continue to die every day from the pandemic and the nation faces a crisis of leadership, Trump focuses on himself and whines about being erased by Twitter. He cares about his damaged pride, not about the damage he has done to our country.
“He only wants to stay there for the title. He only wants to stay there for his ego. He needs to get out. He needs to do the good thing, but I don’t think he’s capable of doing a good thing,” she told the Anchorage Daily News Friday.
Murkowski finally told the truth about Trump, for which I say better late than never. She started in this direction in November when Trump ramped up his lies about his election loss. As I wrote at that time, “It has been the obsequious silence of Republican senators, Republican representatives and Republican governors that has allowed Trump to think he can get away with a coup.”
The other day I castigated her in this space for the tepid response as her fallback position on Trump. Not this time.
To her credit, Murkowski now sees that keeping quiet and not calling out Trump’s lies makes her partially responsible for allowing him to lead America to this dangerous point.
“I allowed myself to refrain from speaking my truth,” Murkowski told Alaska Public Media. “And I can’t just be quiet right now.”
The other Alaska senator might as well be quiet for all the truth he is telling. Sen. Dan Sullivan is not accepting responsibility for his role in the Trump fiasco and the danger the nation faces at this moment. This has been Sullivan’s MO all along.
Trump is now planning to waste money on a visit to the Alamo. You don’t have to guess what that’s about.
I had an harsh reaction at first to this Q&A in the Anchorage Daily News with Sullivan for simply parroting Sullivan’s weasel words about the terrorist attack.
But on second thought, I’m glad the Daily News published the material—it is a profile in evasion and deflection.
Sullivan’s voters are Trump voters and Sullivan doesn’t want Trump or Trump fans to turn on Sullivan.
Sullivan has refused to accept his share of the blame for Trump’s failures on everything from the pandemic to the trade war and the wall that wasn’t built or paid for by Mexico. In most cases he didn’t see or hear about whatever he as asked about.
In the Anchorage Daily News Q&A and again in a 2,100-word term paper his office sent as a response letter to those who contacted him about the election, Sullivan now claims that he wishes that Trump had “accepted the election results” earlier.
It was his “fervent wish,” according to Sullivan, that Trump accept the election results.
It is my fervent wish that Sullivan be honest about this with Alaskans.
Let’s look at the timeline of the fervent wish.
In late November, Sullivan refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the election and refused to say a thing about Trump’s repeated election lies. Sullivan refused to defend important American institutions under attack by Trump..
It was obvious to Murkowski in November that Trump had lost. It was obvious to everyone who was not in the Trump cult.
The failure to produce any winning legal arguments should have ended this, but Senate Republicans encouraged Trump with their support or silence and Trump continued to lie from the highest office in the land.
The Trump loss was probably even obvious to Sullivan, but he had Trump and Trump voters in Alaska to placate, so he said nothing.
As late as Monday, Jan. 4, Sullivan refused to comment on the GOP coup proposed by radical members of Congress who didn’t want to accept the election results and wanted to boost Trump.
Sullivan went out of his way to refuse to say anything about Trump accepting the election results. He said nothing that would have angered Trump or Trumpists in Alaska.
On Thursday, Jan. 7, Sullivan claimed to the Daily News he had "decided a number of days ago" to oppose the coup and accept the election results. Sullivan had claimed on Dec. 14 that he had personally accepted Biden’s win, but he never called on Trump to stop lying.
"I think had the president accepted the election results earlier and repudiated the mob violence earlier and more forcefully, it could have had an impact yesterday,” Sullivan told the Daily News a day after the riots, rewriting history to portray himself as someone who wanted Trump to change his behavior.
In the post-riot term paper his office has inflicted on Alaskans, Sullivan says, “I wish fervently that President Trump had accepted the results of the election. . .”
The truth is that Sullivan waited until after the insurrection to express his fervent wish. Before that he was giving it the Sullivan Pebble Mine treatment—fervently wishing to stay quiet in a corner, trying to ride out the election without crossing Trump or Trump voters.
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