“How we came to a place where we are fighting now with Canada and making nice with Russia is beyond me,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said during her address to the legislature on Tuesday. After alluding to Russian jets flying into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, she told them “I’m not going to trust Putin here. And I’m not going to be quiet about it. I’m going to stand up and say so.”
That line earned applause from a lot of legislators. But not from very many members of her own party. Republicans who for the past four years have been too afraid to publicly acknowledge Donald Trump lost the 2020 election aren’t about to applaud someone questioning his judgment about anything else.
And that explains how America arrived in this unrecognizable predicament.
On the floor of the U.S. Senate a week earlier, Murkowski reminded her colleagues what’s at stake. If America is seen “walking away from Ukraine, if we embrace appeasement, we embolden every aggressor around the globe.” Putin “wants NATO to be divided,” she said, “and he wants the United States isolated. This works to his advantage.”
And then, without naming names, she pointed a finger directly at Trump and those too cowed by him. Putin, she said, “just didn’t expect that America was going to do it for him.”
There might be a few U.S. senators who are too ignorant to understand that. But most of them know she’s right. From the moment the war started until Trump arrived to “make nice with Russia,” none of them needed a lecture about who the enemy is.
They still don’t. The problem is they’re taking a page from the Fox News 2020 election playbook. The network knew Trump lost. But to keep their audience tuning in, they refused to say it out loud.
“Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25% of Americans was a huge disservice to the country,” Rudolph Murdoch wrote after Joe Biden was inaugurated. “Pretty much a crime. Inevitable it blew up Jan. 6th.”
Tucker Carlson wrote he hated Trump “passionately” in a text message sent two days before the insurrection. About his four years in office, he wrote “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show it because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
Those messages became public following the discovery process in an election-related lawsuit filed against Fox. They paid $787 million to settle the case. But Fox never shared those or dozens of other incriminating messages with its viewers.
Now Ukraine and the free world may pay the price for the four years in which Fox and the Republican Party kept the truth about the election from Trump’s supporters.
Murkowski has been the one consistent and resilient voice standing up to Trump. And on Ukraine, she may be among the very few speaking for nearly half of the nation’s Republican voters. According to a very recent YouGov poll, 49% of them side with Ukraine while only 7% are sympathetic with the Russian viewpoint.
Why isn’t that giving congressional Republicans what they need to sternly push back against Trump’s misguided approach to ending the war?
It’s possible though unlikely that the poll is horribly inaccurate. A better explanation might be that Republican voters are comfortable sharing their opinion privately with pollsters but not challenging the leader of their tribe publicly. Especially given the way the party excommunicates its members — or in Murkowski’s case, tries but fails — for the simple infraction of harshly criticizing Trump.
You can wave the flag all you want, but at a time when international respect for America is on the line, cowering in silence isn’t patriotism.
“History doesn’t lie,” Murkowski told her Senate colleagues, “and the appeasement of tyrants does not bring peace. Russia started this conflict, and it is critical for us to stand with Ukraine to end it — not just because it is right but because it is necessary.”
And if Republican voters stand down while Trump negotiates a peace deal, and Russia gets to keep any part of Ukraine that it seized during the war, our allies across the world may never trust America again.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
