Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a joint statement of stunning hypocrisy. Some couples decried Kamala Harris calling Donald Trump a “fascist.” Such “irresponsible rhetoric,” they warn, increases the likelihood of further attempts on the former president’s life.

Johnson himself had been the point man in the House of Representatives for the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Oath and honor, In her powerful expose on the Republican Party’s capitulation to Donald Trump, Liz Cheney recounts how, on January 5, 2021, Mike Johnson used intimidation tactics to get 125 members of the House Republican caucus to adhere to a deal generated by Trump. amicus brief supporting bogus lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Even after his most unlikely elevation to the presidency, Johnson continued to be a crucial purveyor of Trump’s lies and smears. After Trump was indicted by state and federal prosecutors for business fraud as well as his role in the 2020-2021 coup attempt, Johnson announced that the House would hold hearings on the illegal deployment of the courts by the government against the former president, who, Johnson stressed, had “done nothing wrong.” . . All these cases must be abandoned. It was breathtaking lighting.

Unlike Johnson, McConnell has not always been a spokesperson for Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. When the Senate met on January 6, 2021, to certify Joe Biden’s election, McConnell told his fellow senators that the upcoming vote would be the most important he has cast in the 36 years he has served in the body. Those who objected to the results were engaging in nothing less than an attack on our democratic process and the Constitution itself. This wouldn’t be the last time McConnell condemned Trump’s fascism. Following the Senate’s failure to convict Trump of inciting insurrection, McConnell called on the justice system to hold Trump fully accountable for his crimes.

At that point, McConnell still believed that January 6 had been Trump’s Waterloo. He quickly found it necessary, as he always did, to align himself with the prevailing winds in the Republican Party, even if they were moving in a direction he would not have chosen. So last week, when undisclosed comments from McConnell revealed his disdain for Trump as “a despicable human being” unfit for office, the minority leader aptly responded that many other Republicans had said worse about Trump. “We’re all on the same team now,” he explained, tacitly acknowledging that in McConnell World, party trumps everything else, even democracy.

Last week, the Herald-Leader also reported on “the growing wave of threats against election workers and political activists” in swing states. A survey of election workers by the Brennan Center found that nearly 40 percent had been the target of threats. or harassment. A third of workers said they knew someone who had quit because of bullying. Neither Johnson nor McConnell has heard of such threats. Just as they have remained silent on threats against judges, prosecutors, court staff, jurors and the families of all those mentioned above – all provoked by Donald Trump’s rhetoric on a scale so irresponsible that several judges issued orders of silence against the former president. .

Johnson and McConnell are also unfazed by Trump’s incendiary speeches at his rallies, in which Trump speaks of a dystopian America, “occupied” by murderous illegal immigrants brought in by a criminal Democratic regime and defended by an industry of ” fake news” determined to destroy the country. the country’s economy, Christianity and white supremacy. This “enemy within” Trump happily assures that he will eliminate it with the massive roundups, imprisonments, deportations and selective executions necessary to make America great again.

Sunday night’s Nuremberg reenactment at Madison Square Garden was a sickening display of the baseless demonization and venomous rhetoric that has become the lingua franca of the Republican Party. Every Trump rally, every interview, every middle-of-the-night tweet provides new proof of his fascism. If someone looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, you can rightly conclude that they are a fascist. It would be a serious breach of civic duty not to denounce Trump as he is. Nothing less than the fate of this nation is at stake.

Robert Emmett Curran is professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University and lives in Richmond.