Defending Trump and repeating his lies damages our democracy

Before Iowa Republicans purchase their Trump mug shot coffee mugs for holiday gifts, I need to share two stories.

One week before Christmas in 2016, I found myself in our nation’s capital looking for pizza. I had just left a Christmas Party and hopped in a cab to venture to a popular pizza restaurant called COMET pingpong. I was on a quest to find not just pizza, but to see the place that two weeks earlier had been visited by a 29-year male who fired shots from an AR-15 inside the restaurant because he wrongly believed he was saving children trapped in a sex slave ring led by Hillary Clinton.

The pizza was great, but the employees were still in shock from the recent events. The shooter rescued no children. Instead, he terrorized employees and was eventually sentenced on federal weapons charges. In his apology to the court, he acknowledged that his grave mistake was based on false rumors found on social media that he had come to believe.

On a recent visit to Oklahoma City, I toured the Alfred Murrah Memorial Museum, site of the largest domestic terror incident in our nation’s history. It is built on the spot of the former federal courthouse, a place where in 1995 more than 168 adults and children lost their lives. At the museum one can view a rambling manifesto left by one of the bomb’s co-conspirators Timothy McVeigh.

McVeigh believed our government had declared open war on its people and was taking away their liberty and freedom. Not only would he resist he said, but would fight back. So, he decided to bomb the courthouse as a response to federal agents raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas and to protest what he believed was the government’s efforts to restrict the gun rights of private citizens.

I share these stories as I continue to hear denunciations from many members of the Iowa Republican Party about the latest indictment of former President Donald Trump. I want them to understand that their words have meanings, and their actions carry real life consequences. Emboldened by Donald Trump’s rants, several Iowans have already been charged with engaging in violent acts and desecrating our nation’s Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.

A common thread found in the Pizza Gate shooting, the attack on the Murrah courthouse, numerous other deranged conspiracy theories and the rise in domestic terrorism is the failure of Republican leadership-including Iowa Republican leadership-to stand up and acknowledge the truth. Instead, ideas once kept to the fringe of the party, today appear front and center.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird’s recent tweet calling Trump’s indictment in Georgia “baseless, political prosecution,” and her not too subtle catcall referencing Fani Willis as “another woke leftist prosecutor,” does a disservice to the rule of law and the credibility of Bird’s office. You cannot be for law enforcement and then thumb your nose at it.

Congresswoman Ashley Hinson continues in the tradition of Trump defenders with her comment, “another Biden scandal, another Trump indictment — just like clockwork. We must stop this un-American politicization of the judicial system.”

Finally, consider Iowa Republican’s elder statesman, the one person who before this Trump train debacle picked up steam, could have made a difference, Sen. Chuck Grassley. Without Obama’s golf game to criticize and unable to find Hillary’s missing emails, Grassley is firmly transfixed on Hunter Biden’s laptop, spending more time and energy in trying to discredit Joe Biden than NASA spent in putting the first man on the moon.

The latest 45-page indictment against Trump lays out evidence already known to most of the country. Yet Republicans pretend these events happened in some alternative universe and argue that the nation should let the responsible parties simply walk away. Facts and integrity no longer matter to this GOP.

For democracy to work, citizens must trust it to work. But when elected officials and those who know better spread lies and misinformation and use deception and false narratives about our democratic institutions for their own personal benefit, it undermines the fundamental foundation of what our Founding Fathers intended and continues to erode our fragile democracy.

The cowardice of the Iowa Republican Party and the failure of Republican presidential candidates (except for two, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchison) to stand up to the four-time indicted stable genius has led this country up the river, just as in the Joseph Conrad novel “Heart of Darkness,” into a very dark place. This time instead of finding Colonel Kurtz, they have found only the narcissistic and delusional Donald Trump. Our reaction is, or should be, “the horror, the horror.”

Dale Todd lives in Cedar Rapids.