Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said a failure by elected Republicans to tell the truth led to the deadly Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Friday, Cantor focused on the challenges to the 2020 election results but argued that the trouble began when conservative groups such as Heritage Action and Tea Party Express “purposely ramped up expectations” for Republican voters who wanted to repeal Obamacare in the GOP-controlled House in 2013.
“At first, this was a political headache for me and my colleagues … but then a small group of lawmakers in the House and the Senate, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), started telling the base what they longed to hear: that Republicans could indeed defund Obamacare,” he wrote. “These members, and indeed every other elected Republican, knew better, but very few were willing to say so.”
Cantor argued that the same tactic of intentionally feeding voters misinformation to gin up the base pervaded in 2020, when claims of widespread voter fraud cast a shadow over President Biden’s electoral victory in the minds of many Republican voters, even as the courts and election officials rejected the allegations.
“‘Stop the Steal’ narratives about widespread fraud, albeit without evidence, sought to undermine the [2020 election] results,” wrote Cantor while decrying former President Donald Trump’s role in the unrest.
Rioters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as lawmakers met to affirm Biden’s victory. Five people, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer, died, and Trump has been impeached on a charge of “incitement of insurrection” in connection to the mayhem of that day. Trump faces a Senate trial next month.
Calling himself “by nature an optimist,” Cantor offered a prescription for members of both parties going forward.
“To my fellow Republicans who hope that Trump’s departure from office will end this cycle [of misinformation] … and to my Democratic friends who think this is a Republican problem … [I ask that you] engage in the competition of ideas and solve problems while moving the country forward [rather than continuing] to promote disinformation and false narratives designed to undermine our democracy,” he wrote.
Cantor, a Republican who represented Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, chastised Trump previously. He criticized Trump for “assigning equal blame” after the deadly 2017 clash at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A political centrist, Cantor lost his primary in an upset by challenger Dave Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College who challenged Cantor from the right in June 2014. Brat went on to win the general election that November. Brat was defeated by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, in 2018.
