Trump’s enablers should not get a pass

The “crazies” who spun the “Big Lie” about the 2020 presidential election have been exposed by the Jan. 6 committee. It’s time to hold accountable the so-called “normals” — the silent enablers.

Bill Stepien, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, told the committee that soon after it became clear Joe Biden had won the election, he and what he called the “Team Normal” acknowledged the fact — in contrast to Rudy Giuliani and the collection of klutzes and clowns that joined Trump in baseless allegations the election was fraudulent.

Except Stepien failed to tell the rest of us.

In those dark November-December days, Stepien, with Trump’s cowardly chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the president’s daughter and others, let the Big Lie take hold.

Today, a year and half later, polls show that 70 percent of Republicans believe the election was stolen.

Leading GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidates all over the country embrace what has — in scores of court cases, recounts and audits — been proven demonstrably false.

This has had dangerous consequences.

“When a nation loses faith in elections, democracy is dead,” says the distinguished Princeton historian, Sean Wilentz. “We’re on the verge of what Hamilton in ‘The Federalist’ called government by brute force.”

The Associated Press called the election for Biden on Nov. 7. His closest state win was by more than 10,000 votes, an amount that is never overturned. By Dec. 1, Attorney General William Barr publicly declared there was no evidence to change the election result.

Yet “Team Normal” and prominent Republicans who knew the truth about the election kept quiet as Trump incited his followers to “Stop the Steal,” which ultimately led to the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Louisville Courier Journal reported, “finally acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden won,” only after the electoral college, on Dec. 14, formally ratified the obvious result.

That was true of other supposedly responsible GOP Senators, including Ohio’s Rob Portman and Missouri’s Roy Blunt. In a television interview weeks after the AP call, Blunt refused to call Biden “president-elect,” saying there is no such title; that’s exactly what he called Trump the day after the 2016 election.

(Some Republican Senators, like Mitt Romney of Utah and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, were more forthright in earlier declaring Biden won.)

Vice President Pence is praised for doing his official duty and certifying the electoral count on Jan. 6 over the objections of Trump and the mob; however, the vice president was vocally part of the Trump ruse until then. On Dec. 10, in Augusta, Ga., in a riff on election integrity, Pence praised a frivolous lawsuit by the Texas attorney general seeking to overturn the results in four other states. It was quickly dismissed by the Supreme Court.

I’m not suggesting that if these men and women who knew the truth had not enabled the Trump lie for those weeks and months, it all would have gone away. Paranoia, conspiracies and duplicities have long been present in American politics. But if they had stood up earlier when it mattered, it might have tempered this anti-democratic storm.

But that train left the station.

This year, there are hundreds of GOP election deniers running for office, including prominent gubernatorial and Senate candidates, in states ranging from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, to Georgia, Alabama, Wisconsin and Nevada.

Some of the 147 Republicans who refused to certify the election results right after the mob attack, still contend that some voting procedures were illegal. They zero in on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, responding to mail snafus and COVID, extending the deadline for receiving mail ballots by a few days without the approval of the state legislature. But there were only 10,000 of these mail ballots that were segregated from the rest — Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000.

These silent enablers and propagators of the lie have paid no price.

Stepien, who boasted of his reputation for “being honest and professional,” is back on Trump’s political action committee payroll and trying to help an election denier in Wyoming defeat Rep. Liz Cheney, who actually is honest and professional.

No place is this disconnect more egregious than in Arizona, where Biden won the count and a recount, certified by election officials. The Republican legislature then hired an outside firm with conservative connections to do a new audit of Maricopa County. After months, it reported a change: Of the 2.1 million votes, Biden gained 99 votes, Trump lost 261.

Yet in the Aug. 2 primary, the leading two GOP gubernatorial candidates and the leading three U.S. Senate candidates all claim the election and Biden’s victory were fraudulent.

There is one Arizona Republican who has paid a price. Rusty Bowers, the conservative state house speaker who told the Jan. 6 committee about rebuffing Trump’s pressure to manipulate the vote, was censured last week by the Arizona Republican Party.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.