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Murkowski can’t save her party
By Rich Moniak
Many Alaskans might think Sen. Lisa Murkowski didn’t attend last week’s White House announcement about Alaska’s LNG pipeline because of her combative relationship with President Donald Trump. But I suspect she knew that the U.S. and South Korea governments had not reached an agreement and chose not to participate in an “unprecedented” use of the White House as a prop for a campaign event.
The scare quotes around unprecedented are there partly because that’s how she described the announcement in a press release. Recognizing it’s not what she intended to mean, I still want to point out that this wasn’t the first time Trump turned a White House event that was supposed to be about official accomplishments into a partisan affair.
He’s also broken the long-standing tradition against inserting partisan politics into his military speeches.
In 2022, Sullivan blasted President Joe Biden for being flanked by two active-duty Marines while telling “the country that many of his fellow Americans, all of whom are Republican, don’t ‘respect the Constitution.’”
But Sullivan purposely distorted Biden’s statement by not fully quoting him.
“I want to be very clear. Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans,” he said. “Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.”
Sullivan, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Rep. Nick Begich III all intended to deceive Alaskans last week by participating in the White House event when they knew Trump would lie about South Korea agreeing to invest $54 billion in the LNG project.
Dunleavy has been promising a deal with South Korea was imminent for almost a year. Last November, he claimed a $44 billion deal would be finalized within a month.
That obviously didn’t happen.
Then he called three special sessions aimed at enacting tax breaks for Glenfarne, the project’s majority owner and developer. As recently as August he argued they were necessary to help the “project get the financing it needs to start construction as soon as possible.”
None of that makes any sense if the Trump administration was close to securing an agreement with South Korea.
During the White House event last week, Trump said enough to prove it was all about boosting Sullivan’s candidacy. Less than three minutes into it, he mentioned the controversy of Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy several times, claimed without evidence Democrats recruited him to confuse voters, and called them corrupt. Later, he said if Democrats win the House and Senate energy prices will double and lead to a recession or depression.
Astute observers who have closely followed the LNG story recognized the purpose of the event before it happened.
“This is nothing but a campaign stunt aimed at duping the voters in Alaska,” Dermot Cole wrote on Tuesday.
Murkowski knew it too. Which is why she wouldn’t have attended even if she had been invited.
But she’s still in a bind because she endorsed Sullivan last January.
“We've had a pretty solid team here in the Senate for the past 12 years, so we want to figure out how we're going to keep in the majority,” she said. “And Dan delivers that.”
Maybe it was part of the deal she agreed to when Sullivan went against Trump by endorsing her for reelection four years ago. But he might not have needed to if the Trump administration hadn’t been cruelly deporting tens of thousands of immigrants who entered the country illegally but have been law-abiding contributors to their communities.
Her endorsement came a week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents killed Renee Good during a protest in Minneapolis against those mass roundups. Trump and his administration brazenly lied to the world about the circumstances surrounding her death. A few weeks later ICE agents killed Alex Pretti and administration officials lied about that too.
Then in February, Trump launched a war against Iran without advising Congress or America’s allies. Like she did on the question of Trump’s unconstitutional tariffs, Murkowski voted to rein in his abuse of Congress’s war powers. In both cases, Sullivan ignored his oath.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of the administration’s egregious actions. By passively condoning it all, Senate Republicans surrendered their moral integrity. They don’t deserve to keep their majority.
Murkowski should withdraw her endorsement of Sullivan. And declare her independence from the Grand Old Party before it croaks under the weight of Trump’s incompetence, corruption and never-ending stream of lies.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
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