Profiles in cowardice: Can GOP find courage to defy Trump?

If Donald Trump isn’t the worst president in the history of the United States, he’s certainly a serious contender for that title.

There is not enough room in all of cyberspace to tick off his many offenses. But he is good at a few things. No one in recent political history, for example, has been better at bamboozling those gullible Americans who practically worship at his feet. 

In 2016 he told them he’d not only build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out of this country but that Mexico would pay for it. That lie, which was one of many, helped him get elected as president.

Ever since he lost the election in November, he told his most loyal supporters, again playing on their gullibility, that he really won the election — and it wasn’t just any old victory, it was a landslide win. And the gullible bought that lie, too.

The story was amplified by the president’s friends in right-wing media. It didn’t matter to his fans or his media toadies that the president’s legal team made their case to some 60 judges, some of whom Trump himself had appointed — and he lost every time. It didn’t matter to the president’s most loyal, gullible fan base because it didn’t matter to the president. That’s also why it didn’t matter to the so-called analysts on conservative cable TV. Pandering to Trump’s loyal base is what translates into ratings … and money.

And when he whipped up a crowd in Washington on Jan. 6 with more lies and conspiracy theories about how he’d really won the election, and how he would never concede, and how he should rightfully remain in office for four more years, too many in the crowd responded by storming the Capitol. 

Which brings us to something else the president excels at: Scaring the cowards in his party.

When they went on television, they condemned the rioting, which was the easy part. But one politician after another, with few exceptions, refused to state the obvious: that Trump was the instigator, the one who whipped up the passions of his supporters, the one who said “We’re going to the Capitol” to “try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Of course, the “we” in “We’re going to the Capitol” didn’t include the leader of the pack, the president. He went back to the White House.

But Trump isn’t the only one who bears some blame for what happened. The cowards in his party, the ones who never told him to stop the chaos that he caused on an almost daily basis — they also bear responsibility for the wretched end of his presidency.

They were afraid to stand up to him when he mocked the heroism of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). They were afraid to stand up to him when he suggested a female primary opponent was too ugly to be in the White House. They were afraid to stand up to him when he made fun of a journalist with a serious physical disability. 

Time after time after time, over four long years, they refused to draw a bright red line; they refused to tell him to stop acting like a schoolyard bully and to start acting like the President of the United States of America.

And what exactly was it that his Republican enablers were afraid of? They were afraid of Trump’s gullible but loyal base, the voters who would never abandon him, no matter what. They were afraid that if they stood up to Trump, his most passionate followers would make them pay for their disloyalty by finding a primary opponent to run against them or, failing that, by sitting home on Election Day and allowing the Democrats to win.

Yes, the GOP has a problem, one brought on by Trump and his party’s refusal to stand up to him and the gullible fans who support him. So what to do now? 

Here’s an idea for Republicans: Stop being cowards. Stop fearing the wrath of those rabid Trump supporters — the ones who will demand loyalty to their leader long after he’s out of office, who won’t support you if you ever say a bad word about Donald Trump. Let them go and start their third party, as they’re threatening to do. The Republican Party will be better off without them; like Trump, they alienate more voters than they attract. 

At the same time, mainstream Republicans should try to win back a bloc that has voted for GOP candidates in the past but abandoned the party when Trump came along. They should make their case to those educated, moderate, suburban voters — mostly women — who voted for Joe Biden because they couldn’t stomach four more years of Trump.  

If the GOP wins them back, they can win elections. But it takes courage to stand up to a bully. Profiles in courage are always hard to come by — but cowards in the age of Trump, unfortunately, have been plentiful.

Bernard Goldberg, an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist, is a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” He previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Patreon page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.