How Murkowski is enabling Trump’s enablers
- Rich Moniak
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
Sen. Lisa Murkowski has rarely been afraid to stand up to President Donald Trump. This month alone, she characterized the administration’s criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell as an illegitimate “attempt at coercion;” voted to prohibit Trump from ordering further military strikes against Venezuela without the approval of Congress; and in response to his threats to take control of Greenland, co-sponsored a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds “to blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state without that ally’s consent.”
Then she turned around and endorsed one of Trump’s reliable enablers.
“We've had a pretty solid team here in the Senate for the past 12 years,” she said. And because Sen. Dan Sullivan has been part of that team, she’s backing his bid for reelection instead of Democrat Mary Peltola who she previously endorsed twice for Congress.
Maybe the team that Murkowski was referring is just the Alaska delegation. But on the important national issues mentioned above, Sullivan has been missing in action.
The chiefs of central banks in eight allied nations, including England and Canada, issued a joint statement in support of Powell while noting theirs and the Fed’s independence from partisan politics “is a cornerstone of price, financial and economic stability.”
None of our allies supported the Maduro regime in Venezuela. But many expressed concerns that America’s military attack to capture him violated international law.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump followed up by threatening Columbia, Cuba and Mexico. And has since said if Denmark doesn’t make a deal for the U.S. to take over Greenland, then “we’re going to do it the hard way.”
“Bullying Denmark will make the United States weaker and perhaps even poorer,” conservative columnist David French wrote in the NY Times. “It’s not just wrong to turn on our friends; it’s stupid, and that stupidity is spreading across the length and breadth of American foreign policy.”
Back in August when Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Sullivan boasted that America was “ally rich” compared to Russia. That fact is one reason why Putin must love watching Trump threaten to seize territory from a NATO ally.
More than two years ago Sullivan argued on the Senate floor that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were enjoying watching Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) block all military promotions. “They are loving it,” he said. “How dumb can we be, man?”
My response then was they were dumb enough to ignore how Trump’s “utterly divisive rhetoric and relentless attacks on our nation’s election integrity, judiciary, and free press” was music to the ears of our adversaries.
Now, Matt Labash is wondering if America is "too dumb for democracy.” The former National Correspondent for the now-defunct, conservative Weekly Standard described Trump and most of the people in his administration as “unapologetically dumb.”
Sullivan helped put those people there. Before voting to confirm them, he and the 42 other Republican senators enabled Trump’s political comeback by voting to acquit him of the Jan. 6 insurrection-related impeachment charges.
They know pigs will replace airplanes in the sky before Trump ever admits he lost the 2020 election. It’s why they looked the other way last week when he used the official White House website to lie about it and the insurrection.
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) epitomizes the party’s commitment to those lies. Publicly, he’s refused to say the election was stolen. But in his secret 2022 grand jury testimony in Georgia, Graham admitted repeatedly telling Trump in private that he lost. He added that if someone told Trump “Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”
That’s obviously an exaggeration. But Trump still seems to think there’s something to the thoroughly debunked Venezuelan/Dominion Voting Machine conspiracy. Immediately after Maduro was captured, he shared several social media posts about it. Right-wing podcaster Bennie Johnson even told his 6 million followers that Maduro has solid evidence that the election was rigged and that’s “why they took him alive.”
Of course, Murkowski doesn’t believe any of that nonsense. But by endorsing Sullivan, she's letting him and other party members help Trump continue deceiving millions of Americans about that and a lot more. And that must be making our allies wonder if America is indeed too dumb for democracy.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
