Scott Powers
Republicans trying to stay with President Donald Trump as he seeks to overturn the election are “victims of hijacked truth,” Republican former U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo said Monday.
“When you abandon the truth in a free society, it’s very difficult to recover, and eventually you become a victim of that hijacked truth,” Curbelo said Monday in an appearance on the MTP Daily show on MSNBC.
Curbelo, who lost his seat in the Miami area to Democratic now-former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in 2018, has become something of a never-Trumper and is a paid political analyst for NBC.
Nonetheless, in an interview with guest host Casey Hunt, he defended his own record of supporting Trump whenever he agreed with Trump’s policies and decisions.
“But when the President was clearly wrong, and here is the most obvious example when he’s trying to overturn an election result, there can be no equivocation. There can be no hesitation,” Curbelo said. “And Republicans for years either ducked or excused some of the President’s behavior and now we’re living the consequences of that.”
“There is no reward for abandoning the truth,” he said.
At least a dozen of Trump’s supporters have announced they plan to object Wednesday to acceptance of Electoral College votes from Georgia and other states won by Democratic President-elect Joe Biden in November.
Curbelo said Trump undercut any credibility they might have through his Saturday phone call seeking to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, into “finding” 11,780 votes for Trump, enough to swing the state.
“This absurd call that the President had with Georgia election officials has really changed the math for a lot of Republicans. The Republicans that are going along with this are doing it for a number of reasons and they’re all driven by fear or ambition,” Curbelo said.
“The excuse that many were going to use, that they are just concerned about election integrity and they just want to make sure that everything went OK in this election, that has now been belied by the President’s call. Because he leaves it clear that this is not about election integrity. This is about mining the exact number of votes that he needs in order to overturn the election results,” Curbelo said.
He questioned what loyalty to Trump is worth. Curbelo noted that some of Trump’s most loyal supporters — he cited former Attorney General William Barr — now are the targets of vitriol and threats from Trump and his supporters.
“You’re seeing some of the President’s strongest supporters in his time in office, Sen. [Mitch] McConnell, Sen [Tom] Cotton, now they are being ostracized, and they are being threatened with getting primaries, with being punished by Republican primary voters,” Curbelo said. “Why? Because for years they refused to express simple truths. They refused to condemn the President when he earned it.”
