The uprising at the American Capitol was incredible and predictable, the result of a Republican Party that repeatedly enabled President Donald Trump’s destructive behavior.
When Trump was a presidential candidate in 2016, Republican officials ignored his call to supporters to eliminate the protesters. Less than a year after taking office, IDP leaders argued he was out of context when he said there were “very good people” on both sides of a deadly white supremacy.
Last summer, most party leaders looked the other way when Trump forcibly removed hundreds of peaceful protesters from a rally near the White House so he could pose with a Bible in front of a church.
But the violent siege on Capitol Hill offers a new, and perhaps last, moment of reckoning for the GOP. The party’s usual excuses for Trump – he is not a typical politician and is not interested in thinking of Washington’s delicacies – have fallen short of images of crowds occupying some of the most sacred spaces of American democracy.
The party, which has been defined for the past four years by its loyalty to Trump, began recalibrating after Wednesday’s chaos.
One of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said “enough is enough.”
Rep. Nancy Mace, RS.C., said Trump’s performance in office “was erased today.”
Trump’s former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, now a special envoy for Northern Ireland, has joined a growing number of resigning administration officials. “I can not do that. I can not stay, “Mulvaney told CNBC on Thursday. “Those who prefer to stay, and I have talked to some of them, choose to stay because they are worried that the president may put someone worse off.”
Stephanie Grisham, the first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff and a former White House press secretary, has resigned. Deputy National Adviser Matt Pottinger, White House Social Secretary Rickie Niceta, and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews also resigned, officials said.
For the party to continue, he will have to deal with the reality that Trump lost by more than 7 million votes to President-elect Joe Biden and a margin of 306-232 in Electoral College, a result that Congress Thursday certified when he was done accepting all the election votes.
Trump has admitted that his term is coming to an end, but not that he has actually lost.
“Although I completely disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts confirm me, there will be an orderly transition on January 20,” he said in a statement minutes after Congress confirmed the vote. ‘I have always said we will continue to fight for only legitimate votes to be counted. Although this is the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it is only the beginning of our struggle to make America great again! ”
Former Republican President George W. Bush described the violent mob as a sickening and heartbreaking sight. “He refused to call Trump or his allies, but the implication was clear when Bush said the siege was ‘undertaken by people whose passions were ignited by lies and false hopes.’
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a top Republican and the daughter of Bush’s vice president, was very direct in an interview on Fox News.
“The president formed the mob. “The president has incited the mob,” Cheney said. “He lit the flame.”
Bush and Cheney were already among a smaller group of Republican officials who were sometimes willing to condemn Trump’s most outrageous behavior. The overwhelming majority of the GOP was far more reluctant and eager to keep Trump’s fiery base on their side.
Yet Trump’s grip on his party seemed somewhat weakened when members of Congress returned to the Capitol on Wednesday night after crawling to safe places for several hours after being evacuated. Before they left, a handful of Republican senators and more than 100 Republican House members would confirm the vote against Biden’s victory.
It was a step led by sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, each with his own 2024 presidential ambitions, over the objection of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who warned that American democracy would “enter a death spiral” if Congress rejected results of the state election.
When they started debating again, a great deal of the energy whispered behind the extraordinary pressure. Several Republicans dropped their objections altogether. Hawley and Cruz did not, but they offered diminutive arguments.
Hawley condemned the day’s violence, but also called for an investigation into ‘irregularities and fraud’. His home page, The Kansas City Star, released an editorial earlier in the day claiming Hawley had “blood on his hands” because he made Trump’s false allegations possible.
Other Republicans were clearly more concerned about the day’s violence and the events that preceded it.
“Dear MAGA- I’m one of you,” tweeted former White House assistant Alyssa Farah. ‘But I need you to hear me: the election was NOT stolen. We lost. ”
Jefferson Thomas, who led Trump’s campaign in Colorado, expressed some regret that he joined Trump’s team in the first place, calling Wednesday’s events an embarrassment to our country. ‘
“This is not what I ever imagined when I signed up for #Maga. “If I had known then that it would end, I would never have joined,” he wrote on Twitter.
Although there were clear cracks in Trump’s grip on the Republican Party, his fiercest blackmailers come from a well-known pool of regular critics.
Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who denounced the president last year as a threat to the Constitution, described the violent attack on the Capitol as “an attempt to subdue American democracy by a mob” ‘and’ was fueled by mr. Trump. ”
“His use of the presidency to destroy confidence in our election and to poison our fellow citizens was made possible by pseudo-political leaders whose names would be notorious as profiles in cowardice,” Mattis said.
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, often has harsh words for Trump. But on Wednesday, he offered his hardest to Trump’s Republican enablers.
“Republican-elected officials who still support Trump should be tried with him for treason,” he tweeted.
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Associated Press author Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.