Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joined those condemning former President Donald Trump after he pushed the idea of doing away with whatever in the Constitution might stand in the way of holding a redo of the 2020 presidential election or simply installing Trump as president — both of which are obviously just ludicrous ideas.
“Well, the Republican Party is the Constitution Party. So when he calls to suspend the Constitution, he goes from being MAGA to being RINO,” Romney said. “I think elected officials would distance themselves from him and have been willing to do so for a long time. But what elected officials think is close to irrelevant. The real question is what does the base of the party think, and they’re still firmly behind him.” RINO stands for “Republican in Name Only,” and it is a derisive nickname that Trump himself has frequently used for opponents. Trump, of course, tied his push for a suspension of the Constitution to his false claims of election fraud. This wasn’t the first time he has pushed either for a new election or just making him president, but this time, his comments were connected to renewed outrage over Twitter’s pre-2020 election decision to (temporarily) limit the spread of reporting about Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
That reporting remained easily available elsewhere. The restrictions on sharing the coverage via Twitter were themselves well-publicized at the time, meaning the measures really hardly did much to conclusively stop all or any major part of the story’s spread. Any user interested in the story could just close the app and Google it. As for Trump, he eventually tried to do damage control after his call for upending the Constitution. “What I said was that when there is “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” as has been irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election, steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG,” he ranted on Truth Social. Calling to suspend the Constitution because it’s Tuesday and doing so because you think there was widespread fraud that makes the move warranted are both calling to suspend the Constitution. “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he originally said. That’s pretty direct!
There has been hardly any condemnation of Trump’s comments from within the GOP beyond those you’d ordinarily expect to make such a rebuke, like Liz Cheney. There has been no public statement from the Republican Party reiterating its commitment to the Constitution and insisting that any candidate with which it aligns must share that commitment. “I’m not going to waste my time trying to dissect when he said this and how he said that. We should be focused on problems that matter to us at home,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said. He thinks having a discussion about the potentially next Republican presidential pick explicitly calling to ditch the Constitution is a distraction? What if Trump gets into power and tries to forcibly undo — via executive order — election rules nationwide? And what if local officials committed to the cause decide to abide by whatever he was doing — like, say, ending mail-in voting — no matter the legality? This stuff matters, Roger.
