Republican Senator Mitt Romney paid $5,000 a day after the insurrection to protect his family from his party’s own voters. Other Republicans were warned not to vote to convict Trump in the second impeachment, with echoes of real-life terrorism: “Consider your personal safety, said another. Think of your children.”
After the deadly January 6 domestic terrorist attack, incited by the party’s then-president, Republicans were even more reluctant to hold Donald Trump accountable — not just because of their fear of backlash from their base, but now also because of fear their family safety.
In a stunning Atlantic Ocean From an excerpt from McKay Coppin’s forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney, in which he discusses his reckoning with the costs of exercising power, we learn:
“Part of the reluctance to hold Trump accountable was a result of the same old perverse political incentives: elected Republicans feared a political backlash from their base. But after January 6, a new, more existential form of cowardice had emerged. A Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but decided against it out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by Democrats in the House of Representatives with or without him — why would he put his wife and children in danger if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while speaking to a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of the leadership, said he was leaning toward voting for conviction, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney remembered someone saying. Think about your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator ultimately decided they were right.”
Romney, who is rich, was able to provide private security for his family for $5,000 a day (my bold text):
“As upset as Romney was by this way of thinking, he understood it. Most members of Congress do not have security credentials. Their addresses are publicly available online. Romney himself had started the fire $5,000 per day since the riot to cover his family’s private security – an expense he knew most of his colleagues could not afford.”
This nugget tells a much bigger story about the current state of the Republican Party. Romney paid $5,000 a day to protect his family from voters of his own party. Many other senators who could not afford personal protection were terrorized into voting to protect Trump from the consequences of his actions.
They were terrorized into releasing the party leader and domestic terrorist from the insurrection he fomented, which led to the deaths of law enforcement officers and shook Americans’ weak faith in democracy.
This is how fascism gets its hooks into a system. It doesn’t start as an all-out attack, otherwise people would rise up against it. The cheers from the Trump base on Wednesday night when Governor Ron DeSantis promised “extrajudicial killings at the border” tells the true story of where Republican senators are terrified of country at this base.
DeSantis gets applause from Hannity’s studio audience when he promises extrajudicial killings at the border pic.twitter.com/LWBjYMubik
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 14, 2023
Romney confided a few months after Trump’s 1/6 attack: “A very large part of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
McCay writes about what Romney was struggling with: “Was the authoritarian element of the Republican Party a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment – people like him, the reasonable Republicans – played in allowing the rot of the right to fester?”
When mainstream Republicans wonder whether they played a role in ushering in the authoritarian element of the Republican Party, it is well past time to take the threat seriously.
Romney is said to have thought, “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking above the cathedral, ready to strike.”
The problems facing this country are not a matter of Democrat versus Republican, as the media often presents them. The issue is democracy versus autocracy.
It could happen here, it’s happening here now. Senators vote a certain way out of fear for their own safety, it seems, as authoritarians push to the edges looking for weaknesses they can exploit to shift a democracy toward democratic backsliding. Unfortunately, this is not an exaggeration, and even Mitt Romney is concerned about it.