I’m lying awake here tonight because I honestly can’t fathom how we have gotten to the point that the leader of the GOP, the last Secretary of State, some of the party’s most vocal members and a major U.S. TV network all are actively taking Russia’s side in a conflict with America and the West.
Yes, I lived through the 2016 campaign and all four years of Trump placing Putin ahead of our intel community, praising Putin and defending Russian positions. And yet here we are at a moment of great crisis, a threat to the order Americans and allies fought and died for.
And Trump and Fox and the rest are actually praising the man who has threatened the entire international order, who has put tens of millions of innocents at risk. They’re defending him. They’re spreading his lies. They’re betraying our country and our values.
Why should that surprise me? They, like the man they are defending, have attacked the very foundations of our system of democracy. They, like Putin, sought to discredit our electoral system and to cheat it. They engineered a coup and are still defending it.
One of America’s two major political parties is, at its core, not just corrupt, not just racist, not just misogynist, not just opposed to truth or science or history. They are, their leaders are, actively enemies of the U.S., our system and what we stand for.
Even as I write that–and check and check again to make sure it is not hyperbole–I also know it has been true for years, apparent for years, reaffirmed for years by investigation after investigation. And yet, somehow, because this crisis is so enormous, I am still in disbelief.
This is the kind of moment when for almost all our history we really did set differences aside when we came together. What’s more, our president and his team are so clearly on the right side at this moment–pro-peace, pro-democracy, pro-international law, pro-our allies and friends. And yet, even today, Trump and Fox defended the aggressor, the enemy of democracy, a man who has devoted his entire life to bringing down America and the west. Even after another invasion. Even on the brink of potential cataclysm.
How have we gone so wrong? How is there even a shred of support for this? How has such a large and vital part of our system become so corrupted? Why are the voices of decent people in the GOP not united in a chorus of denunciation and renunciation of the Trumpist-Putinists?
How can it be that this is a fact of life and that neither coups nor impeachments nor proof of wrongdoing nor just the light of day does not expose and end the threat these people pose? For the moment, we must turn our attentions to the crisis in Europe.
But we must in due course acknowledge the depth of this dysfunction and the profundity of its ugliness. And we must find those in the GOP and in all corners of civil society who will rise up to stop this movement and contain the spread of this political disease.
We are fortunate to have a capable president with a capable team right now. We are fortunate to have responsive and clear-eyed allies. We will, I believe prevail. But we cannot accept what these people say and do as a fact of our life.
We can’t accept the threat they pose to our democracy or our values or our standing in the world as just part of the mix here in America or we will be doing the work that Putin ultimately wants done. We will be inviting division and decline.
And we will be less than we have been, less than we should be, less than we hope to be for our children and for our children’s children. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t shrug it off. Don’t minimize the toll it takes. Don’t pretend the origins are not the same as the many movements currently afoot that are targeting democracy, tolerance, and diverse societies and promoting autocracy and racial purity in their place.
It’s easy to shrug it off after the past six years. But nothing could be more dangerous. I have faith we won’t. But faith alone won’t do it. We all most call it out, stand up to it and offer better alternatives whenever we have the opportunity. And then we can leave it to deep self-examination and history to judge how we came to this strange, profoundly disturbing, and dangerous moment.
