Republicans Don’t Want to Talk About It
When then-candidate Donald Trump urged the Russian government to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, in 2016, his own running mate Mike Pence turned on him, warning the Kremlin of “serious consequences” if Russian hackers had interfered in the election. The leader of Trump’s party in the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, advised the “devious thug” Vladimir Putin to “stay out of this election.”
When Trump said he would accept damaging information on a political opponent from another country, this past June, Republican lawmakers reprimanded the president. “If a public official is approached by a foreign government offering anything of value, the answer is no,” said Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s top allies in the Senate.
But something significant happened yesterday. Standing before reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, Trump urged two foreign governments—including one that his administration as a potential existential threat to the American way of life—to intervene in the 2020 U.S. election by investigating what he alleges was wrongdoing by the man most likely to challenge him for the presidency. In a twist on Richard Nixon’s infamous that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal,” Trump signaled that when the president does it openly and unabashedly, that must mean it is a normal use of power rather than an abuse of it.
