Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a joint statement astonishing in its hypocrisy. The strange couple denounced that Kamala Harris labeled Donald Trump “fascist.” They warned that such “irresponsible rhetoric” was increasing the likelihood of new attempts to assassinate the former president.

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

Even after his most improbable rise to the presidency, Johnson remained a crucial purveyor of Trump’s lies and smears. After Trump was accused by state and federal prosecutors of corporate fraud, as well as his role in the 2020-2021 coup attempt, Johnson announced that the House would hold hearings on the government’s illegal deployment of the courts against the former president, who Johnson emphasized “had done nothing wrong.” . . “All of these cases should be dropped.” It was amazing gas 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 the election of Joe Biden, McConnell told his fellow senators that the upcoming vote would be the most important he had cast in the 36 years he had served in the body. Those who opposed the results were involved in nothing less than an assault on our democratic process and the Constitution itself. It wouldn’t be the last time McConnell condemned Trump’s fascism. Following the Senate’s failure to convict Trump for effectively inciting an insurrection, McConnell called on the legal system to hold Trump fully accountable for his crimes.

At the time, McConnell still believed that January 6 had been Trump’s Waterloo. He soon found it necessary, as he always has, to follow the prevailing winds in the Republican Party, even though they were going in a direction he would not have chosen. So last week, when previously undisclosed comments from McConnell revealed his disdain for Trump as “a despicable human being” unfit to hold office, the minority leader accurately responded that many other Republicans had said worse things about Trump. “We’re all on the same team now,” he explained, tacitly acknowledging that at McConnell World, party takes precedence over everything else, even democracy.

Last week, the Herald-Leader also broke the story of “the rising wave of threats to election workers and political activists” in swing states. A survey of poll workers by the Brennan Center found that nearly 40% of them had been subjected to threats. or harassment. One-third of workers said they knew someone who had quit due to bullying. Nothing has been heard from Johnson or McConnell about such threats. Just as they have remained silent about the threats to judges, prosecutors, court staff, jurors and the families of all of the above, all caused by Donald Trump’s rhetoric of such irresponsible magnitude that several judges issued gag orders against the former president. .

Johnson and McConnell are also unbothered by Trump’s incendiary tirades at his rallies, during which Trump evokes a dystopian America, “occupied” by murderous illegal immigrants brought in by a criminal Democratic regime and defended by a hell-bent “fake news” industry. in destroying the country’s economy, Christianity and white supremacy. Trump blithely assures that this “enemy within” will eliminate him with the mass raids, imprisonments, deportations and targeted 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 poisonous rhetoric that has become the lingua franca of the Republican Party. Every Trump rally, every interview, every middle-of-the-night tweet provides new evidence of his fascism. If someone sounds like a fascist and acts like a fascist, one can reasonably conclude that they are a fascist. It would be a grave breach of civic duty not to denounce Trump for who he is. Nothing less than the destiny of this nation is at stake.

Robert Emmett Curran is Professor Emeritus of History at Georgetown University and lives in Richmond.