They All Knew
Bob Woodward knew Donald Trump was dangerous. He didn't say anything until his second Trump book came out in September 2020.
Jonathan Karl knew Donald Trump was dangerous. He didn't say anything until his book came out in November 2021.
Mark Meadows knew Donald Trump was dangerous. He didn't say anything for four years until his book came out in December 2021.
Maggie Haberman knew Donald Trump was dangerous. She didn't say anything until her book came out in October 2022.
Mitt Romney knew Donald Trump was dangerous. He didn't say anything until his book was scheduled to come out in September 2023.
While our good friend LL so succinctly ripped Brave Sir Romney a new one yesterday, it cannot be overstated that his inaction was part of a much larger pattern during the Trump years. From the start of the presidential run in 2015 until today, countless individuals in either the GOP or DC Beltway media have firsthand witnessed just how unfit Donald Trump was to hold or return to higher office. Many of these individuals, through formal or informal education, had a strong sense of the norms of government and specifically the norms of a president of the United States. They knew what it meant to not only be presidential but to be decent and kind and to put the American people first when it came to making difficult decisions. Every person in Donald Trump's orbit had a choice: they could be horrified by what they saw and resign and or withdraw from their assignment or they could stay in their role and be complicit as Donald Trump's heinous instincts took over and he governed in a way that caused irreparable damage to millions of families.
They all chose the latter.
And they did it without a second thought. Because maintaining the GOP's power or writing a best-selling book was much more lucrative than doing the right thing. Because Donald Trump was the gift that kept on giving by being so extreme that people wouldn't actually believe what was going on behind the scenes. Any sort of intervention would have caused a potential future author to get outside of Sir Tiny Hand's inner circle, thereby putting him or her on the outskirts looking in. They all needed Trump to continue being Trump. They needed him to make ridiculous policy decisions on a whim. They needed him to hurt working families. They needed him to be one tweet away from nuclear war. They needed a man so insanely unfit to be the president that people would have to read their book to believe that their worst fears about the man just so happened to be true.
They sold out to do so. They sold you out. They sold me out. They sold out their country. All in the hopes that down the road the good people of America would one day read their book.
But Americans are smarter than that. Journalists like Haberman, Karl, and Woodward have been raked over the coals for their journalistic malpractice. Meadows, as we all knew, was a Trump sycophant from the earliest days so his inaction should come as so surprise. And Romney, dearest Willard Romney, sold his soul for Donald Trump long ago. His one aberration on his 2020 impeachment vote against Donald Trump had less to do with his taking a stance and more to do with how he viewed his faith as a central tenant of his work as a United States Senator. Because other than that single vote, Mitt Romney willingly toed the Republican line. All so that the wealthiest 1% like him could get a nice little tax cut and the GOP could flood the courts with extreme anti-abortion judges that would successfully overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Tax cuts and judges were all the rage and all that mattered to the GOP.
When future historians look back on the Trump era, they will talk about the heroics of the era that saved the republic. Those heroics will not include the complicit journalists and GOP members who willfully withheld critical information to later hock books in hopes that they would become best sellers. Instead, historians will rightfully identify Democratic Party members, community organizers, voting rights activists, municipal and state leaders, legal advocates, and everyday Americans who fought off voter suppression and a global pandemic to make Donald John Trump a one-term president. Because like the authors mentioned, they too, saw the dangers of Donald Trump. They too, knew how dangerous he was. They too, knew how utterly terrifying a second Donald Trump term would have been to the United States and to the world as a whole. They too, knew that we were one election away from losing everything that we as a nation had found for for over 240 years.
And unlike the authors mentioned, they actually did something to prevent it from happening.