CNN’s Jake Tapper has never been one to praise outgoing president Donald J. Trump. Quite the contrary. But on Sunday — mere days after slamming the GOP House for letting a “deranged” lawsuit make its way to the Supreme Court, where it died a quick death — he decided to change that, sort of. Tapper used the end of his program with a monologue in which he offered Trump thanks. Again, sort of.
It began, seemingly, in earnest. Tapper cited some “legitimate achievements” from his presidency, among them Operation Warp Speed, which indeed led to a vaccine being quickly approved and whose first batches have already been dispensed. (Tapper didn’t mention that Trump’s administration, many of whom have recklessly caught COVID-19, were among the first recipients.) He said he’s “rethought trade deals,” “reimagined peace in the Middle East,” and for bringing some service members home, “even if his follow-through has been rather wanting.”
Once Tapper got that out of the way, his tone changed to sarcasm. The remainder of his monologue laid out the many ways Trump has, by challenging democratic, inadvertently exposed cracks in a system largely based, he said, “on the honor system” — ones that could have been even more thoroughly exploited by a more focused conman. “A government upheld upon the honor system only works if everyone involved…has honor,” Tapper said.
Tapper then moved onto the events of the last week, when his legal team, plus a bevy of Republican lawmakers, pushed that aforementioned lawsuit against key battleground states that have already certified their elections for Biden. “It was a clownish legal brief based on conspiracy theories and outright lies,” he said. “And 18 state attorneys general, some U.S. senators, and a majority of the House Republican caucus, 126 members, supported it.”
Thus, in Tapper’s estimation, Trump “did us a favor by exposing these elected officials.” He then described those supporters as “definitionally people who signed on to a desperate desire to subvert the will of the American people, to disenfranchise voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan based on lies and conspiracy theories, putting an immoral and corrupt power grab above democracy.”
The GOP has largely kept quiet over the last month-plus since Biden was declared winner, which has seen Trump and his minions make baseless accusations of voter fraud and been shot down in dozens and dozens of court cases. But when the Trump team filed that DOA lawsuit, he forced them to expose their real selves:
“Many Americans hoped that most Republican officials, while they agreed with Trump’s policies, did not like the uglier parts of his style, his willingness to lie or smear to achieve his ends. But President Trump made House Republicans go on the record … He made them stand and be counted, and 126 of them, including Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Whip Steve Scalise, they actually signed their names to this, this unconservative, undemocratic, unAmerican, mendacious joke of a lawsuit that would disenfranchise millions of their fellow Americans.
“These House Republicans raised their hands … They said: Sign me up. The hope that most Republicans in the House were better than this — that has been destroyed. For those of us who believe in standards and norms and the U.S. Constitution, we need to thank President Trump for bringing this fact to light.”
Then again, maybe no one needs to thank Donald Trump for a thing.