Virtually the entire Republican Party and its vast machine of right wing media megaphones are directly responsible for last week's insurrection against the United States government. The attack on the United States Capitol and our democracy was the direct result of a corrupt lying president and the willingness of members of his political party to repeat those lies and while ignoring the damage Trump was doing to our country.
...Plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really, truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years; that Vice President Mike Pence had unilateral power to revise the election results; that their takeover of the building could change the course of history... But the point remains: They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lies, believing it couldn’t hurt to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base.
Republican leaders at every level took up Trump's "stolen election" lie and amplified it giving it credence and encouraging every one of the 73 million people who voted for Trump to violence.
Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once skewered Trump’s dishonesty, promised “earth-shattering” evidence to support his former rival’s claims of a rigged election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that “President Trump won this election,” told of a plot to cheat him and alerted the viewers watching him on Fox News, “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who famously called Trump “a pathological liar,” himself lied so frequently and so shamelessly it became difficult to keep up. Dozens of other congressional Republicans leveled sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, some of them promoting the #stopthesteal campaign online.
The entire mechanism of the Republican Party joined in the deception, the lies, the wild far out theories. The party itself attacked honest Republican at the state level for doing their jobs correctly.
From party headquarters, the Republican National Committee’s chairwoman flung reckless insinuations left and right as her top staffers peddled a catalogue of factually inaccurate claims. The two Republican senators from Georgia, desperate to keep in Trump’s good graces ahead of their runoff elections, demanded the resignation of the Republican secretary of state for no reason other than the president’s broad assertions of corruption, none of which stood up to multiple recounts and investigations by GOP officials statewide. Local lawmakers in states like Michigan and Wisconsin told Republicans they’d been cheated, citing the suspicious late-night counting of mail ballots, when they were the ones who had refused to allow those ballots to be counted earlier, never mind the fact that Trump’s lawsuits were being laughed out of one courtroom after another.
No lies was excluded, no matter how bizarre and irresponsible. In fact it almost seems that Republicans, Trump's lawyers and the right wing noise machine were in competition to see who could get the MAGA mob to believe the most outlandish and ridiculous lies.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich floated the arrest of election workers. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host, urged Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the results of their state elections and send pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College. Right-wing propaganda outlets like The Federalist and One America News churned out deceptive content framing the election as inherently and obviously corrupt. The RNC hosted disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell for a sanctioned news conference that bordered on clinically insane, parts of which were tweeted by the @GOP account. The president’s lawyers and surrogates screamed about hacked voting machines and international treachery and Biden-logoed vans full of ballots.
Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire Republican Party is corrupt.
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