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Sullivan’s impotence is not defensible
By Rich Moniak
Finally, a few prominent Alaskan Republicans are saying it out loud. Sen. Dan Sullivan is afraid to stand up to Donald Trump. Sure, they’re arguing that crossing the president could negatively affect Alaska’s economy. But that doesn’t explain his fealty to Trump when he wasn’t president.
During an interview with Politico last week, Sullivan refused to state the obvious — Trump’s decision to import diesel from Russia is a betrayal of America’s national security interests. Instead, he replied that he’s “hawkish on Russia” and referred to a 2019 Washington Post opinion in which he wrote “the Trump administration, working with Republicans in Congress, has been far tougher on Russia than the Obama administration ever was.”
I agree. But that was when Trump’s top advisors included retired Gens. James Mattis and John Kelly. No one in his current administration is interested in trying to convince him that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a murderous dictator who can’t be trusted.
Sullivan understood that when he condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He supported every bit of the $130 billion in aid for Ukraine while Joe Biden was president.
However, the last package was held up when House Republicans demanded it include extensive immigration reform. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla) was the primary author of a bipartisan bill aimed at accomplishing both. Trump opposed it almost immediately. “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill,” he wrote on Feb. 5.
Unlike when many Republicans bucked him by passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill in 2021, this time almost all of them, including Sullivan, folded. The reason is simple. The infrastructure debate occurred less than a year after Trump left office in disgrace. He was the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination when Lankford’s bill hit the Senate floor in 2024.
Combine Trump’s iron grip on the party with the Supreme Court’s ruling granting presidents near-absolute immunity and it’s obvious why he thinks he’ll never be held accountable for anything.
That’s why it was easy for him to double down on the diesel deal with Russia. He went even further last Friday. Under the auspices of not driving Russia “away from the bargaining table,” he waived sanctions specified in a new law named after the late Sen. Lindsay Graham.
“Great progress is being made,” Trump said last week, referring to talks between the U.S. and Russia.
That’s no more promising than when he said “we’re pretty close to a deal” after his summit with Putin in Anchorage last year. Or when he acted confident that the MOU he negotiated with Iran last June “will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region.”
The diesel deal with Russia and the MOU were humiliating appeasements spawned by the rising cost of oil caused by Trump’s dumb war with Iran. In both cases, the once hawkish Sullivan acted more like a casual bystander.
According to Republican strategist Art Hackney, that’s supposedly because doing anything that triggers Trump “could well have implications for things that affect Alaska’s economy.”
This week, Paulette Simpson complained “some in Juneau can’t seem to quit saying that, ‘Sullivan hasn’t stopped Trump from (insert offending item here).’ I have two questions for you: Has any Republican succeeded in ‘stopping’ Trump at much of anything?” Her second question was a setup for Hackney’s warning.
Taken together, that’s akin to bowing to a mob boss, an analogy Trump made more fitting this week by framing how lawsuits related to the Camp Lejeune Justice Act could be settled.
“If we don’t win, there’s no money,” he told voters in North Carolina. “If we do win, you’re getting it.”
The simple truth is Senate Republicans blew their golden opportunity to stop Trump. All they had to do was convict him of the well-justified impeachment charges following the Jan. 6 insurrection. He would have been banned from ever holding office again.
Instead, they let him get back in the ring and helped rehabilitate his image by refusing to publicly acknowledge he lost the 2020 election. That cowardly habit metastasized into a near-total paralysis after he returned to the White House.
That leaves Sullivan’s supporters the choice of defending his voluntary impotence. Or peddling the myth that holding the president accountable for his blunders and abuses of power isn’t one of the duties of a U.S. Senator.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
