Finally, a Republican lawmaker has spoken out publicly against Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s illegal dismantling of the federal government.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska says she does not fear Musk spending millions to fund an opponent against her in the 2028 Republican primary. Speaking to Alaska’s Legislature, she boldly criticized the indiscriminate firings led by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and blessed by Trump.
“The Trump administration’s approach lacks the type of planning you need to avoid unintended consequences, and it lacks the fundamental decency you need when dealing with real people,” she said. “Public servants are not our enemies. They’re our friends and neighbors, and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Lisa Murkowski
This rare event is like seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker. The ivory-billed woodpecker is indeed the “Holy Grail” of rare birds in North America and on the wish list of most birders.
I thought what she said was a remarkable, rational, common-sense statement, but Republicans are howling for Murkowski to leave the party.
Fox News reported: “Murkowski also suggested that other lawmakers choose to ‘duck and cover’ rather than speak out against the administration over fears of being primaried in their next elections.”
Some of those other Republican leaders are more chameleons than truth-tellers. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, seems to be a Janus-faced spokesperson. With one face, he praises every action of Trump. Then he turns his head and criticizes Trump. The problem here: No one can tell if Graham has a consistent mind about Trump.
There’s also nothing of value in repeating criticisms of Trump made by various Republicans when they ran against Trump in primaries in 2016, 2020 and 2024. All the accusations have since been swallowed, repudiated or taken back. Marco Rubio, in 2016, claimed if Trump had not inherited family wealth, he would be “selling watches in Manhattan.”
When Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana voted to impeach Trump in his previous term as president, there was a glimmer of hope that finally a true spokesperson for opposing Trump had arisen from Republican ranks. Cassidy has since blown out the candle on that flickering light as he voted to confirm vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Trump’s czar of the nation’s health.
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, like Graham, has been Janus-faced. His two faces have been on a swivel as he goes back and forth. McConnell called Trump “stupid as well as being ill-tempered” and “a despicable human being” after the 2020 election. For good measure, McConnell added, “It’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump leaves office. “And for a narcissist like him that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”
McConnell, like the rest of the Republicans, has not been willing to swim in the frigid waters of Trump criticism for long without retreating. He soon turned his Janus face to a different response: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”
And then McConnell voted against RFK Jr.’s confirmation in the Senate — the only Republican to do so.
About the only other reliable critic of President Trump within the Republican set has been Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. Even Collins often has retreated to the safety of Trump support. Yet she has at least been willing to make public comments in defiance of Trump.
Susan Collins
Collins, for example, says she disagrees with the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education.
She says the Department of Education has had some problems but she believes it should continue: “It takes an act of Congress to abolish the Department of Education. It is not something that can be done by executive order. Certain parts of the programs, of the departments could be downsized, or the bureaucracy could be downsized, there could be some reorganization of the department, but it cannot be abolished without congressional consent.”
Meanwhile, the rest of her Republican colleagues in the Senate seem unwilling to challenge Trump even when he defies the Constitution and steals their own authority to govern.
It is demonstratively absurd that common-sense remarks about some of Trump’s actions should be treated as political heresy. Both Murkowski and Collins have spoken truthful, reasonable and substantive words in defiance of Trump. And yet the rest of the Republican leadership has been aghast at the nerve of these two women.
The Republicans have sloughed off the truth in the name of fealty to Trump.
As strange as it seems, we now live in a political environment where truth-speakers face danger as if our leader were a tyrant — because he is. In days of old, if a philosopher told a tyrant or a king his tyranny was incompatible with justice, that philosopher risked the tyrant becoming angry and punishing him.
Yet this is precisely the current situation in the U.S. today. Any of Trump’s critics risk incurring the tyrant’s anger by telling him he is wrong. In his own warped mind, Trump never can be wrong. And everyone should be “loyal” to him.
“Trump always lashes out in response to every critic.”
Trump always lashes out in response to every critic, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.
We should know we live in absurd times when common sense and common honesty pass for courage and willpower.
Speaking truth to a thin-skinned, petulant, chaotic leader requires frankness, risk, danger and a sense of duty. The ancient Greeks defined this action as parrhesia. Michel Foucault summarizes parrhesia as “a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to the truth through frankness, a certain relationship to her own life through danger. … And a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty.” He adds: “A speaker expresses her personal relationship to truth and risks her life because she recognizes truth-telling as a duty to help other people.”
There’s a certain grittiness and hopefulness about Murkowski daring Elon Musk to spend a billion dollars “primarying” her. Get the popcorn and Coke. There may be more to come.
And to think that in the now male-centered, heteronormative, tough-guy, body-tattooed Hulk world of “strong man” Trump, courage now comes from strong-willed, honest women. The toxic air we breathe has received a breath of freshness.
The hope here is that the voices of dissent will increase in intensity and repetition as more leaders recover their unique, authentic, honest, common-sense voices. The “people” deserve such leaders and not Trump-tamed lapdogs.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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