Every Senate Republican knew in 2016 what an awful human being Donald Trump was. Republican Senators like Lyndsey Graham even said so before Trump was nominated in 2016. Yet, when Donald Trump got the Republican nomination, the truth-telling stopped for Senate Republicans, and the lying began. People like Senator Graham started saying the exact opposite things about Trump as they had said before he was nominated. By January of 2020, Donald Trump had clearly abused his power and committed a crime in extorting the President of Ukraine, yet Senate Republicans refused to do their job and remove Donald Trump from office.
Near the beginning of 2020, Republican Senators were so busy covering for Donald Trump that they refused to even let witnesses testify during his impeachment trial. Then these same Senate Republicans failed to convict Trump and remove him from office. Because of this, Donald Trump was President as COVID-19 began to sweep over American. Because of this, it was President Donald Trump who failed to adequately act as COVID-19 began to kill dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Americans. As this went on, cowardly Republicans failed to speak up—they failed to say that Trump wasn’t doing enough. Senate Republicans failed to say that Trump wasn’t making sure that enough tests were done. These Republicans didn’t point out that Trump should have been making sure that there was a coordinated effort to get the states the PPE and medical equipment that they needed, and these same Senate Republicans didn’t tell the truth about the need to wear masks or about the danger of COVID-19. As a result of Trump’s inadequate response, hundreds of thousands of Americans died.
Then, when Donald Trump clearly lost the general election last November, and when Trump kept lying about his loss, Senate Republicans kept silent about Trump’s lies and then some of these Republicans even supported Trump’s lies to the point of being willing to disenfranchise tens of millions of American voters yesterday.
By yesterday, some Republican Senate Members, such as Lindsey Graham, had begun to realize that Trump’s lies had gone too far—that they were hurting our American Democracy. Yet for other diehard Senate Trump supporters, only when bullets were flying in the nation’s Capitol did some of these Republicans begin to wake up to reality. Only when Senate Republicans were cowering behind the Senate furniture did some Senate Republicans begin to appreciate the horror that they had unleashed. Only when deadly karma started stalking the halls of Congress did Senate Republicans have a taste of the horror that their lies had unleashed upon America.
In Nazi Germany, it was the lies that lead to the Holocaust. It was the lies about the Jews, the homosexuals, and the Black citizens that lead to the horror. It was the lie that the Aryan race was superior to all other races that helped Germans do the unthinkable. In Nazi Germany, the lies were told, year after year, and year after year, more and more people believed those lies. Yesterday, Donald Trump’s lies led to at least one person being killed. In addition, last year, Donald Trump’s lies and incompetence may have led to tens of thousands of people dying from COVID-19 that did not have to die.
Yesterday, we learned once again a truly horrible truth. Lies can kill, and those who allow those lies to continue, and even aid those lies, are also culpable in those deaths.