By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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I got a little emotional voting this year.
First, I went to the wrong neighborhood school, where a poll worker carefully searched for my name and then explained that I was registered at the Bethesda elementary school down the road. When I got there, a team of volunteers — my neighbors, from eager 20-somethings to gray-haired retirees — patiently explained how to mark the paper ballot. When my cellphone suddenly rang, they practically strangled me: “Shut that off!!!”
This was the best of America — these people, this process, carried out with integrity and solemnity. What a privilege to be able to vote this way.
And what an absurdity that it was these very same people and this very same process that Donald Trump spent the past two years smearing and undermining, managing to bring a majority of his party along with him in his giant, fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
But wait — where was Trump last week?
Did you hear allegations by him or his lackeys that these midterm elections were stolen from his handpicked candidates? Other than some baseless claims by Trump here and there, including that the failed Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake (a clownish Trump impersonator) was being cheated, there wasn’t much. Trump instead spent most of his energy denigrating some of his anointed candidates and blaming his wife and others for persuading him to endorse the bizarre collection of election-denying sycophants who became Team Trump in this election and lost almost every big race.
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The fact that Trump is not today filing lawsuits on behalf of each one to try to prove election fraud speaks volumes. It’s Trump basically telling them all:
“Sorry, this lie about stolen elections only pertains to me. There is only room for one martyr in this party. You don’t get to use my lie in your state elections. I only backed unprincipled, ambitious people — like you, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano and Adam Laxalt — to amplify my lie in order to prove I’m not a loser. I can never be seen as a loser. If you’re losers, it’s your fault.”
That also explains why most of the election deniers who lost, like Oz, simply conceded and did not claim fraud. Why not raise a ruckus, Mehmet? Hey, J.D., why aren’t you alleging that your Republican colleagues lost because their elections were “rigged,” the way you did for Trump? What about you, Doug? What was it you said on Sunday when you conceded losing the governor’s race in Pennsylvania: “Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do.”
What? Why is that the right course today, but it wasn’t the right course for Trump two years ago?
Because none of you ever believed Trump’s lie to begin with, so you never dared deploy it in your own elections!
You were just renting Trump’s lie on the belief that it was your golden ticket, your easy shortcut, to victory. You thought you could echo Trump’s lie, get elected with the votes of his supporters and then just drop it. Now that most of you have failed to get elected on election denialism, you want us to forget how you shamefully tried to exploit that lie to gain power, while you slink away.
No, no, a thousand times no.
We must never, ever forget the damage that Donald Trump and his cynical imitators, cult followers and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for its institutions and the unity of our society by perpetrating this Big Lie. Alone it was a shameful travesty — but to do it in the midst of a hugely stressful pandemic, when we needed more than ever to trust one another, look out for one another and work with our government to stem Covid, was criminal.
Opinion Columnist
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
I got a little emotional voting this year.
First, I went to the wrong neighborhood school, where a poll worker carefully searched for my name and then explained that I was registered at the Bethesda elementary school down the road. When I got there, a team of volunteers — my neighbors, from eager 20-somethings to gray-haired retirees — patiently explained how to mark the paper ballot. When my cellphone suddenly rang, they practically strangled me: “Shut that off!!!”
This was the best of America — these people, this process, carried out with integrity and solemnity. What a privilege to be able to vote this way.
And what an absurdity that it was these very same people and this very same process that Donald Trump spent the past two years smearing and undermining, managing to bring a majority of his party along with him in his giant, fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
But wait — where was Trump last week?
Did you hear allegations by him or his lackeys that these midterm elections were stolen from his handpicked candidates? Other than some baseless claims by Trump here and there, including that the failed Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake (a clownish Trump impersonator) was being cheated, there wasn’t much. Trump instead spent most of his energy denigrating some of his anointed candidates and blaming his wife and others for persuading him to endorse the bizarre collection of election-denying sycophants who became Team Trump in this election and lost almost every big race.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The fact that Trump is not today filing lawsuits on behalf of each one to try to prove election fraud speaks volumes. It’s Trump basically telling them all:
“Sorry, this lie about stolen elections only pertains to me. There is only room for one martyr in this party. You don’t get to use my lie in your state elections. I only backed unprincipled, ambitious people — like you, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano and Adam Laxalt — to amplify my lie in order to prove I’m not a loser. I can never be seen as a loser. If you’re losers, it’s your fault.”
That also explains why most of the election deniers who lost, like Oz, simply conceded and did not claim fraud. Why not raise a ruckus, Mehmet? Hey, J.D., why aren’t you alleging that your Republican colleagues lost because their elections were “rigged,” the way you did for Trump? What about you, Doug? What was it you said on Sunday when you conceded losing the governor’s race in Pennsylvania: “Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do.”
What? Why is that the right course today, but it wasn’t the right course for Trump two years ago?
Because none of you ever believed Trump’s lie to begin with, so you never dared deploy it in your own elections!
You were just renting Trump’s lie on the belief that it was your golden ticket, your easy shortcut, to victory. You thought you could echo Trump’s lie, get elected with the votes of his supporters and then just drop it. Now that most of you have failed to get elected on election denialism, you want us to forget how you shamefully tried to exploit that lie to gain power, while you slink away.
No, no, a thousand times no.
We must never, ever forget the damage that Donald Trump and his cynical imitators, cult followers and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for its institutions and the unity of our society by perpetrating this Big Lie. Alone it was a shameful travesty — but to do it in the midst of a hugely stressful pandemic, when we needed more than ever to trust one another, look out for one another and work with our government to stem Covid, was criminal.
Opinion | The Big Liar and His Losing Little Liars
Most election deniers who lost last week have conceded and did not claim fraud. That doesn’t absolve them from embracing Trump’s Big Lie in the first place.
www.nytimes.com