On Jan. 26, 2022, my opinion piece, “Where are the Good Republicans?” was published by BNG. The article was prompted by the Senate’s defeat of two voting rights bills — the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. All 50 Republican senators voted against the Democrats’ bills they had championed to protect every American’s freedom to vote.
In my analysis of the situation two-and-a-half years ago, I wrote:
Robert Sellers
What did they feel they had to lose if they sided with the Democrats? The logical guess is their power, position and paycheck. It sounds cynical to suggest that United States senators would choose personal over national benefit, or value their own names on Senate office doors more than Constitutional duty.
Yet, that is exactly what five of them privately told President Biden. Talking about his efforts to accomplish bipartisanship in the Senate, he explained: “I’ve had five Republican senators talk to me, “bump into me” … or sit with me, who’ve told me that they agree with whatever I’m talking about for them to do. “But, Joe, if I do it, I’m going to get defeated in the primary.”
The lack of courage many Republicans in Congress are exhibiting today has embarrassingly remained the same. Only now, the consequence of their cowardly inaction will not just be the passage of a couple dozen state laws but the potential reelection of Donald Trump and the implementation of the frightening anti-democracy measures of Project 2025.
Even so, many of these disappointing prominent “civil servants” remain publicly silent, although they secretly oppose the former president.
U.S. Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) (R) delivers remarks alongside Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Vice Chairwoman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, during a hearing on the January 6th investigation in the Cannon House Office Building on October 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. The bipartisan committee, in possibly its final hearing, has been gathering evidence for almost a year related to the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. On January 6, 2021, supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol Building during an attempt to disrupt a congressional vote to confirm the electoral college win for President Joe Biden. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
One courageous Republican
That is not the case for former member of Congress Adam Kinzinger, who has vocally and publicly called out Trump as “a man who is more flawed than anyone who has ever sat in the Oval Office.” He was the only former Republican congressional leader invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention, where he began by declaring:
The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself. Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim.”
The DNC was a place Kinzinger admitted he never thought he would be – yet was a gathering he was happy to join because he no longer recognizes his own party of Republicans, nor can he fathom their loyalty to Trump. When asked if there were any other Republicans who felt the same way he did, but were not speaking out, Kinzinger responded:
Oh, there’re so many of them. People will tell me sometimes, “Adam, you’re courageous,” and I appreciate it. I’m not courageous, though. I’m surrounded by cowards. I mean, how hard is it to tell the truth? … But there are so many people I talk to who are just sitting around (saying), “I just can’t speak out.” They’re scared. … I had a number of people tell me, and this was when I was still in (Congress), “Adam, I appreciate what you are doing. I can’t say that, because I’d lose in my district. But I appreciate you doing it.”
“His lost career in Congress, however, has not been the only price he has paid.”
Kinzinger knew he was going to lose in his own district by telling the truth about Trump. So, he decided not to seek reelection rather than have his family endure all the vitriol that was coming at him.
His lost career in Congress, however, has not been the only price he has paid. Even close friends and family who support Trump have turned on him. His Air Force co-pilot with whom he flew in Iraq texted him to say he was “ashamed to have ever flown” with him. Extended family members sent a certified letter to his parents’ house, “disowning” him because he is “part of the devil’s army.”
Corroborating evidence of cowardice
Interestingly, in the last few days, what Kinzinger said about there being other Republicans who oppose Trump but are afraid to do so publicly has been the subject of reports in multiple respected national publications.
Joan Walsh, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, quoted conservative commentator Eric Erickson who tweeted that he had “an increasing number of ‘private conversations’ with Republicans who are secretly hoping former president Donald Trump loses this November.”
Walsh comments: “So-called ‘reasonable Republicans’ have been waiting for Trump to pivot away from overt racism, cruelty, sexist attacks on women, and increasingly batshit crazy ‘threads’ of mental effluvia since he declared his candidacy more than nine years ago. It hasn’t happened, and it won’t.”
She was tempted to discount Erickson’s story had it not been that Jonathan Martin, Politico’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief, posted a similar story. Martin wrote:
The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly. GOP leaders won’t tell you that on the record. …
Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and Electoral College, the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.
Martin intriguingly continued: “For most Republicans who’ve not converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario is barely even provocative. In fact, asking around with Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I came across in the party was how best to accelerate Trump’s exit to the 19th hole.”
These Republican leaders, however, will not speak their opinions out loud. Meanwhile, Trump surrogates are continuing to drink and serve their high priest’s Kool Aid. Brian Hughes, a Trump spokesperson, claimed Trump has “unified the GOP like never before” and “expanded his coalition of support across partisan lines to Democrats and independents.”
“Our campaign and down-ballot Republicans are poised for a great result in November,” he insisted, “despite a few handwringing, anonymous sources who are not bold enough to attach their names to this drivel.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., speaking during the second day of the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, July 16, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Why the secret hope of Trump’s defeat?
What are the reasons many top Republicans want Trump to lose this November? Some of them worry about his “shift away from fiscal conservatism and free market economics,” and they also disagree with his unpredictable stances on in vitro fertilization and abortion rights.
Moreover, “there’s a lot of anxiety about what Trump does to Republican ability to win in 2028 — and what he also may do to the party in terms of policy long-term,” one of the GOP conservatives admitted.
But with the strong personality cult the former president has created and the loyalty he demands, it is highly unlikely that without Republican leaders becoming willing to criticize — even reject — Trump openly, he will continue to assume his place as the unchallenged head of the GOP.
As Charles Davis, deputy news director for Salon, points out: “Republican voters like Trump not in spite of his moral failings, but because of them; that a serial liar is regarded by the GOP base as ‘honest’ is in part a reflection of the candidate’s open racism and misogyny, which reads among bigots as him ‘saying what we’re all thinking.’”
Nonetheless, many of the Republican mainstream in Congress continue to harbor the hope that Harris will win. If that should happen, reports Davis, one GOP source even fantasized that “a President Harris would make their job easier by actually pardoning a defeated Trump (along with Hunter Biden), removing the former president’s ‘persecution complex’ and accompanying grip on the party while enabling Republicans to ‘get on with the business of winning elections.’”
I have to say, however, as just one Democratic Party observer, that I feel there is about as much chance of a President Kamala Harris pardoning Donald Trump as there is in Mexico’s paying for a border wall.
The nature of courage
A famous scene in the 1967 Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke shows Strother Martin, playing the Captain, saying to the prisoners, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Maybe the problem we have with congressional Republicans too afraid to oppose Donald Trump openly is a failure to communicate. Not enough people have accused them publicly of being cowards. Adam Kinzinger at the DNC did not convince them Trump is a weak, small, faithless man who is not worth defending or fearing. Vice President Dick Cheney’s announcement that he supports Harris has seemingly not inspired them to act. Most importantly, perhaps, no one has explained to them that showing courage in the cause of justice is actually worth losing everything. There’s a failure to communicate the real nature of courage to these leaders.
The philosophical meaning of courage goes all the way back to ancient Greece. Socrates (469-399 BCE) believed “courage is a timeless trait” that “requires wisdom and hence cannot serve evil goals.” Aristotle (384-322 BCE) considered courage a “cardinal virtue” yet taught that it was most glorious in wartime.
But then Thomas Acquinas (1227-1274 CE) — the Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian and greatest figure of 13th-century Europe — “transformed Aristotle’s understanding of (bravery) into the courage of the martyr and not the soldier, with the weapons of patience and faith. He redefined courage as persevering in doing what is ‘just’ — with justice defined by compassion for the underdog.”
As Stassen and Gushee remind us, Acquinas’ view of self-sacrificing courage sounds like what Jesus said: “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
“What these silent, secretive Republicans are failing to comprehend is that to oppose Donald Trump is a just cause.”
What these silent, secretive Republicans are failing to comprehend is that to oppose Donald Trump is a just cause — that if they are persecuted by their constituent voters, Trump’s surrogates or Trump himself, it will be for the sake of the national good. They just don’t understand that there is glory in being “martyrs” for the truth.
Bernadette Devlin, an Irish civil rights leader, at age 21 became the youngest ever member of the British Parliament. She served Northern Ireland during all 30 years of the Protestant-Catholic conflict known as “The Troubles,” and along with her husband she survived an assassination attempt. Asked about her view of bravery, she explained, “To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything.”
Adam Kinzinger and his family have received their own death threats. But he understands this trade-off: His congressional job, political party membership and even personal safety for his integrity. That’s why he has declared: “To every American of every political party, and those of none: I say now is not the time to watch quietly as Donald Trump threatens the future of America.”
To quote a profound turn of phrase from Elmer Davis, director of the United States Office of War Information during World War II: “This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”
That’s why opposing Trump secretly isn’t enough.
Rob Sellers is professor of theology and missions emeritus at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary in Abilene, Texas. He is a past chair of the board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. He and his wife, Janie, served a quarter century as missionary teachers in Indonesia. They have two children and five grandchildren.