(CNN) — In an interview with Donald Trump earlier this week, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt said something truly impressive.
“You know, Mr. President, you and I disagree on the election, but we do agree on a lot,” Hewitt told Trump, leading to a conversation about China’s hypersonic missiles.
That Hewitt spoke that line without irony is a revealing window into how conservatives have found ways to rationalize Trump and his fundamentally undemocratic attempts to undermine the American public’s faith in the 2020 election results.
Here’s the reality: You can’t just say “blah, blah, blah” about Trump’s rejection of the election. Because by refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election and repeatedly (and falsely) alleging election fraud, Trump is actively working against everything that makes America, well, America.
Hewitt’s attempt to dismiss his disagreement with Trump on the election at the time as just another political disagreement is ridiculous. This is not Hewitt saying that we should have stayed in Afghanistan and Trump saying that we should have withdrawn American troops. This is the former president of the United States who refuses to accept the results of a national election.
And actually, it is more than that. It is that Trump has turned the electoral rejection into a litmus test for aspiring Republican candidates. If you are unwilling to say that you believe, against all available evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen, then not only will you not have Trump’s support, but you may also find him actively working to defeat you when you run for reelection. . (Look at the case of Brian Kemp and David Perdue in Georgia. Also from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel).
Trump is working to make believe that the 2020 election was stolen as a centerpiece of the GOP platform. And, again, this is not like making abortion or commerce a party platform. This makes rejection of American democracy an important part of what it means to be a Republican.
Because of all that, Hewitt cannot simply describe what Trump is doing as something they disagree on. That kind of justification is the way we got into this mess, with one of the country’s two major political parties becoming more of a cult of personality than any kind of organization brought together by a shared set of principles and policies.
Refusing to believe in the results of free and fair elections has to be disqualifying for any party leader. It is not negotiable. If we cannot agree that the election was fair, even if our preferred candidate lost, then we have sacrificed what makes America great. That Hewitt, and his fellow Conservatives who continue to do whatever they can to placate Trump, can’t (or won’t) see that that suggests how lost the Conservative movement is right now.
