How To Defeat Trumpism
Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney is all but certain to lose her leadership position in the GOP this week, punished for the crime of telling the truth, that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, that there was no ‘rigged vote’, and that the nonsense that he has been spewing about the election is the Big Lie.
Cheney is to be commended for her courage to speak the truth, but the price that she is going to pay speaks volumes not just about what Trumpism has done to the Republican Party, but what its continued presence and power is about to do to the nation.
As she wrote in the Washington Post last week:
“I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law. The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have.”
If she is removed from power, which seems likely, then a marker will have been set for the rest of the GOP. Only those who adhere to the Big Lie will be considered electable, only those who swear their allegiance to what will become ‘The True President in Exile in Mar-a-Lago” will be considered electable. This is incredibly dangerous for the future of the nation.
As Tom Friedman wrote in the NY Times last week:
“Denying the legitimacy of our last election is becoming a prerequisite for being elected as a Republican in 2022,” observed Gautam Mukunda, host of Nasdaq’s “World Reimagined” podcast and author of the book “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Mattered.”
“This is creating a filter that over time will block out anyone willing to tell the truth about the election.” It will leave us with “a Republican Party where you cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in the East, a Republican Party where being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement.”
In defense of his wounded ego, Trump would rather set the nation on fire than accept the idea that he lost, and he is dragging not just the GOP but the whole country to the coming conflagration.
How to stop this? How to extinguish the flames before they consume us all?
The answer is right before us — cut off the oxygen.
Trump made his extremely short lived political career by leveraging off the media. The media craves ratings, it is their lifeblood, and Trump was a ratings machine. So in the 2016 election, they offered a man with no experience in government and no policy other than an ability to insult in a very entertaining way, a billion dollars of free publicity. The media MADE Donald Trump.
Well, now the media can unmake Trump, but cutting him off.
You can see already the benefits of his being banned from Twitter and Facebook. But that is but the beginning. Every major media outlet from The NY Times to CNN should institute a complete moratorium on any and all stories about Donald Trump. Not a word. Not a mention.
This is not a free press issue. These are all private companies and they may publish or not publish what they like. He is still free to put as much of his vitriol up on his own website. That’s how a free press actually works.
Let Fox News continue to parade him if they want.
But for the rest, it’s time to cut off the oxygen, before he cuts off all of ours.
