Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia election official and longtime Republican, held a news conference this week in which he excoriated Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud and the threats of violence those lies inspired.
He railed against Trump’s campaign lawyer, Joseph diGenova, who called for the shooting of Christopher Krebs, a federal cybersecurity official fired by Trump for saying that the election wasn’t rigged. (DiGenova later claimed he was joking.) Sterling described a “20-something tech” involved in the vote tabulation who was getting death threats.
“It has to stop!” he said, visibly seething. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop.”
The next day, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, expressed his support for Sterling.
“It’s about time that more people were out there speaking with truth,” he said. Trump’s language, said Raffensperger, was creating a “growing threat environment for election workers who are simply doing their jobs.”
Along with many other state-level Republican election officials, Sterling and Raffensperger have shown admirable commitment to the rule of law. Their refusal to participate in Trump’s attempted auto-coup helped avert a constitutional crisis. Yet it’s hard not to notice that their outrage is a bit selective.
There is nothing new about Trump inciting harassment against private citizens, or of his lackeys calling for violence against the president’s opponents.
Yet Raffensperger voted for Trump.
Since Trump’s defeat, the MAGA revolution has begun devouring its own. As it does, some conservatives are discovering the downsides of having a president who spreads malicious conspiracy theories, subverts faith in democracy and turns the denial of reality into a loyalty test.
Much of the MAGA-verse has turned on Fox News because its news programs aren’t pretending that Trump won.
Both Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona have been slavishly faithful to Trump, but stopped short of breaking the law by refusing to certify the vote in their states. For that, they’ve been at least temporarily cast out of Trump’s movement. “What is going on with @dougducey? Republicans will long remember!” Trump tweeted. At a berserk Georgia rally on Wednesday, the pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood led the crowd in a “lock him up” chant against Kemp.
In concert with the recently ousted Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Wood called on Georgians to boycott the Jan. 5 Senate election runoff unless state officials do more to help Trump cling to power. Speaking of Georgia’s senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, Wood said, “They have not earned your vote. Don’t you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election, for God’s sake!”
Naturally, Republicans who understand that Trump lost and are worried about Senate control in a Joe Biden presidency aren’t happy about these antics. But what disconcerts these Republicans isn’t, by and large, that Trumpist lawyers are spewing demented misinformation. It’s that this misinformation might, for once, work against Republican power.
Republicans helped Trump unleash countless civic evils. They shouldn’t be surprised when those evils don’t spare them.
Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for The New York Times.
