Until this week, I believed that the Trump propaganda campaign alleging Joe Biden "stole" the election would collapse, perhaps soon, under the astonishing weight of its own absurdity.
Then two things happened: 45 Republican members of the U.S. Senate voted for a measure asserting that a Trump impeachment trial would be unconstitutional, which strongly suggested Trump will be acquitted at trial of inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol; and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the U.S. House, who has backtracked from an initial statement that Trump bore some responsibility for the attack, made a special trip to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's ring and make up.
I think now that Trump will be able to sustain the big lie for many months, if not years, to come.
Crime does pay.
The truth that Trump lost appears to be gaining acceptance generally in the country, but the lie that Biden stole the presidency is still held dear by a large majority of Republicans. According to poll results announced five days ago by the Monmouth University (NJ) Polling Institute, "...fully 72% of Republicans persist in believing that Biden's win is due to voter fraud."
Patrick Murray, director of the institute, said, "A number of ostensible leaders in the Republican Party continue to peddle this false narrative and many more who know this claim is wrong have not been particularly outspoken in disavowing it. Their fellow partisans in the American public are simply following that lead."
Trump has to be spending most of his days in Florida laughing. Who needs evidence when you've got partisans like this?
The only bright spot for me this week were comments by two Massachusetts congressmen and one former Massachusetts governor condemning the most out-there Republican to come along in years, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Greene is the gun-toting, venom-spewing, Stop-the-Steal-embracing, newly elected congresswoman from Georgia's ultra-red 14th District. Please Google her if you want to glimpse the scope of her awfulness. I'll give just one example: in January, 2019, she "liked" the sentiment, expressed somewhere on the Internet, that "a bullet to the head" would be a good way of removing Speaker Nancy Pelosi from the House.
Needless to say, Greene liked the way her fellow "patriots" took the law into their own hands on January 6. Before the mayhem erupted, she called the electoral college count protest a "1776 moment."
A spokesman for McCarthy described Greene's comments on social media as "deeply disturbing" and said his boss "plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them."
Note to McCarthy: Make sure Greene goes through a metal detector before sitting down for that tete-a-tete.
Yesterday, Jake Auchincloss (like Greene, a rookie in the House) tweeted: "The GOP knew what it was getting well before Marjorie Taylor Greene when it embraced Donald Trump in 2016 -- that is really when a ticking time bomb began. GOP leaders own this issue and they all need to take ownership of removing this faction of white supremacy and extremism."
Jim McGovern, who has served in the House for 24 years, tweeted Friday, "This is sick. What the hell is going on with you @GOP Leader McCarthy? You won't even condemn extremists in your own Republican Conference who advocated for the execution of a member of Congress. What a disgrace. Both of you should resign."
Mitt Romney, our governor from 2003 to 2007, and now a Senator from Utah, was quoted today in Politico saying: "Lies of a feather flock together: Marjorie Taylor Greene's nonsense and the 'big lie' of a stolen election."
Meanwhile, Congresswoman Greene is taking a play from her hero Trump's book, using the controversy she ignited to turbocharge her fundraising on the Internet.
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