Every once in while a reporter will slip and print or say a Republican lawmaker is against something Donald Trump said or did….
But a follow up on that is met with silence…
The idea that Republican lawmakers in Washington DC do NOT know that their party leader is a bit bit batshit crazy is hard to believe because it just isn’t true…
That is NOT the issue…
The issue is that grown men and woman are so afraid to rileDonald Trump’s supporters that they stay mute, or worst?
Go along with Trump’s stupidity and arrogance….
This while reporters and media editors play along to maintain their access to sources….
It’s a culture of anonymity, shot through by fear, that has posed a quandary for political journalists of this era — especially in these particularly fraught closing hours of the Trump administration, when the president has lobbed baseless allegations of election fraud and pursued extralegal means in an unprecedented attempt to overturn the voting results and seize another term in office.
Few Republicans have stood up to defend the process under which Joe Biden was elected — except, of course, privately.
But should journalists even be dignifying these off-the-record sentiments — some condemning Trump’s actions, others promising it will all blow over — by putting them in print? Bresnahan says he has a rule not to quote someone anonymously and on the record in the same piece. And he has avoided whenever possible allowing unnamed lawmakers into his stories….
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“Look at the people who have stood up to Trump — they’ve gotten hammered down. And Trump knows that.”
Which has led to a certain genre of Washington political story, built upon a chorus of ghostly voices. Google “privately concerned” and “Trump,” and you’ll see….
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“For the stay-in-office-at-all-cost representatives and senators, fear is the motivator,” wrote Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) in a February op-ed in the New York Times explaining his Republican colleagues’ silence on Trump’s impeachable behavior.
How did he know? “In private, many of my colleagues agree that the president is reckless and unfit. They admit his lies. And they acknowledge what he did was wrong.”
Ron Klain, whom Biden has tapped as his White House chief of staff, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last month that some Republican senators had privately been in contact with Biden. But “I’m not naming names because we read out calls when we read out the calls, when both sides agree to read out the calls,” Klain said.
And so the Washington split screen continues — lawmakers publicly fulminating against so-called election fraud and privately anticipating the dawning Biden era….