As much as President Trump loves to enact loyalty tests for his underlings to pass, he just failed the final loyalty test of his presidency, proving he will put his own hubris over the fate of the party he claims to lead when it matters the most. For two months, Trump has shown that he would be happy to cost the Republican Party control of the U.S. Senate, giving Joe Biden total control of the elected branches of government, so long as it means he can bully Republicans into pretending there is any chance he can overturn the election.
Republicans have accepted the results of the election that gave them an additional 10 seats in the House of Representatives and at least 50 in the Senate. Trump has had his multiple days in court, where he and his allies have lost 62 lawsuits attempting to overturn the result of the 2020 election. No one but the most raving of the #Resistance crowd had a problem with Trump trying to use the legal system to make his case, but that time is past. Multiple judges, including judges he himself appointed, have said it’s time to move on. We are no longer at the stage of “just asking questions.”
Yet, Trump has spent the final days of his presidency platforming kooks such as Sidney Powell, whose “Kraken” conspiracy theory claims that dead dictators are somehow involved with rigging Dominion voting machines, and Jenna Ellis, who brands herself as a constitutional law professor despite having never taught at a law school. Even as the federal government fails to implement a vaccination distribution plan to combat the exploding coronavirus crisis, Trump is spending his days on Twitter, firing off insults toward those he deems insufficiently loyal to him. Meanwhile, Georgia conservatives are being indoctrinated that they cannot believe their votes for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue will be fairly counted.
The entire nation is waiting to find out whether these two Republican incumbents will win their races in Georgia, a red state where Republicans enjoyed a 5 point edge as recently as 2016. At stake is whether the GOP can stop Democrats from creating a public healthcare option, installing socialists and rabid culture warriors into Biden’s Cabinet, and reeducating the country’s children with critical race nonsense and the anti-American 1619 Project. All Georgians need to do is reject a trust fund carpetbagger beholden to Big Tech and a Louis Farrakhan pal who may have run over his ex-wife with his car.
Both races are dead heats, even after both Loeffler and Perdue’s leads seemed safe. That’s because Trump has forced the Republican candidates into a circus of his own delusion.
Instead of channeling all of the party’s energy into defeating Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the GOP has been forced to decide whether to give in to Trump’s lie or else follow the Constitution and certify Biden’s win, at the risk of alienating the base. Ossoff and Warnock have run on the claim that Republicans are trying to enact the lamest coup in the nation’s history — and they are right. Even after Tuesday’s runoffs, the stain of attempting to steal a democratically decided election will harm Republicans in future elections.
A president with loyalty to the party he leads would not force this dilemma on those he leads, knowing full well it could lead to his party’s ruin. From the moment he no longer needed the party’s favor for his own personal gain, Trump has shown no loyalty to Republicans at all. They should not pay him a favor now by denying voters a Constitutional election certification and dooming their own careers with disgrace.
