On Tuesday, Gabriel Sterling, the Republican who serves as Georgia’s voting-system implementation manager, appeared at a press conference. Voice shaking, he talked about how the home of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—his boss—had been targeted after the president once again baselessly claimed that there was massive voter fraud in Georgia and called Raffensperger “an enemy of the people.” Sterling called on the president and the state’s two Republicans senators to condemn threats of violence against election workers.
That scene itself was unsettling. But when, just a few hours later, Trump retweeted Sterling’s plea with a shrug and a reassertion of his desire to steal the election, the situation turned profoundly frightening. “Rigged Election,” the president wrote. “Show signatures and envelopes. Expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia. What is Secretary of State and @BrianKempGA afraid of. They know what we’ll find!!!”
With just a few notable exceptions, Republican officials have met Trump’s lies with a combination of tacit approval, pretending not to notice them, or forbearance. In a recent survey, an alarming 222 Republicans in the House and the Senate—88 percent—refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidency. Another two insisted Trump won. A few more have started speaking out, but what has finally taxed their patience seems to be anxiety that Trump’s antics may cost them an upcoming election for two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia—an instrumental concern about continuing to exercise power, rather than a substantive worry about the attempted election theft itself. (It should be noted that there have been conservative voices who have responded with the appropriate fury, but that few are elected officials or leaders of the GOP.)
After Sterling spoke in Georgia, a local TV station asked the two Republican senators running for election in the January runoff for comment. But instead of offering straightforward denunciations, both issued perfunctory condemnations and then used the opportunity to continue to fan doubts about the process. “Senator [David] Perdue condemns violence of any kind, against anybody. Period,” his campaign said. “We won’t apologize for addressing the obvious issues with the way our state conducts its elections.” The other senator’s campaign took a similar line. “Like many officials, as someone who has been the subject of threats, of course Senator [Kelly] Loeffler condemns violence of any kind. How ridiculous to even suggest otherwise. We also condemn inaction and lack of accountability in our election system process—and won’t apologize for calling it out.”
What is it that the Republican leadership is hoping will pass without too much comment, solved by the ticking down of the transition clock? Let’s run through it—and this is not even all of it. Every day adds more.
The president has repeatedly and baselessly claimed that the election was stolen from him, and continues to do so daily. He is, effectively, charging that election officers around the country are involved in a dangerous conspiracy and that the incoming president is the leader of this illegal attempt.
The president and his key allies have repeatedly called for Republican state legislators to steal the election for him by appointing new electors who will support him instead of backing the winner of the state’s electoral votes.
The president, who has the power to appoint judges for lifetime appointments, and who has appointed nearly a third of federal judges on the crucial circuit-court level in the United States—more than any other president in recent history at this point in their presidency—has asked the courts to throw out valid votes wholesale, especially in cities with minority voters.
Right after the election, a legal adviser to the president stated on national television: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court—of which the president has nominated three justices—to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.”
The president’s high-profile allies are holding rallies where supporters are chanting “Lock him up!,” calling for the imprisonment of Georgia’s Republican governor, who is opposing his attempts to steal the election. (Georgia conducted two thorough recounts of the votes and found that the margin by which Trump lost the election holds.)
The president personally called the two Republican canvassers in Wayne County, Michigan, and then both signed affidavits attempting to rescind their certification of the vote in that state. They had earlier tried to block certification of votes from Detroit, providing a glimpse of what could happen if a more competent president tried to steal an election.
The president has amplified messages that call for people to “fight back hard” against the allegedly stolen election.
The president’s election lawyer said that “the entire election, frankly, in all the swing states, should be overturned, and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump.” She has since been dismissed from his team, but he has not publicly repudiated her statements, and she continues to make similar statements.
Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser—a powerful post—who was just pardoned by Trump, has amplified calls for the president to suspend the Constitution and hold another election (an exercise presumably to be repeated until he wins).
The president summarily fired Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security, because he vouched that the election was not stolen. Joseph diGenova, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, said that Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot.” (DiGenova later said that the statement had been “made in jest.”)
Before the election, the president pressured the attorney general to investigate his opponent and his son, after being impeached for pressuring a foreign state to announce its own investigation into his opponent’s son.
The president also fired the chief of the Pentagon, along with other top officials. These dismissals remain unexplained, but Trump was reportedly infuriated at the defense secretary’s opposition to using active-duty military troops against protesters in U.S. cities—portending what he might have liked to do, even though his incompetence has meant that he hasn’t found a way.
What makes this moment deeply alarming—and makes Republicans’ overwhelming silence and tacit approval deeply dangerous, rather than merely an attempt to run out the clock on the president’s clownish behavior—is that Trump’s attempt to steal this election builds on a process that has already entrenched minority rule around the country.
In North Carolina, where I live, only three of the state’s 13 representatives in the House were Democrats after the 2014 congressional election, despite Democrats getting 44 percent of the vote. In 2016, the Democratic Party’s vote share in the state increased to 47 percent, but still only three representatives were Democrats. In 2018, Democrats won an even larger share of the vote—48.3 percent—but still had only three representatives. In 2019, North Carolina’s blatantly gerrymandered district maps were finally struck down by the Supreme Court. And so, this year, the Democrats managed a meager increase in representation—five representatives out of 13—despite again receiving 48 percent of the vote.
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