A litmus test for Republican candidates

I have a question for Republican candidates:

 Would they defy their oath of office to please Donald Trump?

The litmus test is whether they dare disagree with his assertion that he won the 2020 election. If they won't risk his wrath now, they will surely cave when it really matters.

Click for Audio and transcript

Phone call between President Donald Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Saturday, January 2, 2021

Trump:

You know, we won the state. If you took, these are the most minimal numbers, the numbers that I gave you, those are numbers that are certified, your absentee ballots sent to vacant addresses, your out-of-state voters, 4,925. You know when you add them up, it’s many more times, it’s many times the 11,779 number. . . .

 Raffensperger:

Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.

Trump:  

I mean, look. Brad. We have a new tape that we’re going to release. It’s devastating. . . .

Raffensperger:

 You’re talking about the State Farm video. And I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context. The next day, we brought in WSB-TV, and we let them show, see the full run of tape, and what you’ll see, the events that transpired are nowhere near what was projected. . . .

Trump:

I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes. 

But in Fulton, where they dumped ballots, you will find that you have many that aren’t even signed and you have many that are forgeries.. . . And you will find you will be at 11,779 within minutes because Fulton County is totally corrupt, and so is she totally corrupt.

Ryan Germany, the General Counsel in Raffensperger's office:

 What we’re seeing is not at all what you’re describing. 

Commentary on this hour-long phone call has primarily focused on Trump and his plea that Raffensperger find him 11,780 extra votes. Read in its entirety, one sees how skilled and formidable Trump is as a negotiator. Trump is relentless, unwavering, adamant, and the hard sell goes on for an hour. 

One also gets new respect for Brad Raffensperger. He was under enormous pressure, and he didn't cave. He did his duty.

Trump has a technique that we observe in this conversation and we see repeatedly in his second term of office. He asserts a pretext which is untrue and even implausible on its face that justifies doing something illegal. Invade Venezuela because they are carrying out a "foreign invasion." Impose tariffs on every country because every foreign country is supposedly using slave labor. 

In the conversation with Raffensperger, he was giving a multitude of face-saving pretexts to get the result Trump wanted. Make Trump happy -- or else disappoint him and face the consequences.

The cost of angering Trump is well understood by Republican officeholders and candidates. The list of political roadkill is long: Liz Cheney, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Jeff Flake, Tom Massie, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and the Indiana state senators. I watched the reaction of Republican activists to Pence in New Hampshire. He was not celebrated as a profile in courage. Quite the opposite.

Pence may get his reward in heaven, but not from Republican voters. I was happy to do a selfie with him at a GOP event. He was standing around friendless.

Friendless Pence

GOP candidates for a state office might want to dismiss Trump and his claims as irrelevant to their office, saying it is a federal matter and about Trump, not them. That isn't the reality. Candidates for state office are subject to being dragooned into Trump's web of dishonesty. It is happening in Oregon right now where Trump claims, despite evidence to the contrary, that our vote-by-mail system allows multitudes of illegally-cast votes. 

If Trump were to telephone a Governor Christine Drazan and demand that she use a pretext of "questionable" votes in Multnomah County, perhaps based on a meritless accusation by a talk show host or Republican precinct committee person, and she received the full-court-press Trump laid on Raffensperger, would she defend Oregon's vote, or would she cave? If the same call were made to the Republican caucus of the Oregon state senate, perhaps a demand that they file a lawsuit claiming that alternative slates of electors be given equal weight to the ones who were actually elected, would Brad Hicks consent? That is not a theoretical idea. Incumbent Republican state senator Kim Thatcher did that in the days prior to the January 6 Capitol invasion, and she was re-elected and remains a senator in good standing.

We are at a moment when Republican candidates can prove up. A candidate who mumbles, distracts, and avoids disagreeing with Trump's insistence that he won the 2020 election in a landslide is showing his or her true colors: They are unwilling to disagree with Trump's pretexts. Willingness to concede a loss is an essential element of democracy. If they won't do it now, they surely won't do it under pressure and when it really counts.

Republican candidates might be "nice people," or have "common sense," or be regular church-goers, but if they cannot disagree with a dishonest attack on democracy, they are unfit for political office in a democracy.

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