After four years of enabling and appeasing U.S. President Donald Trump, Republicans find themselves at the end of his tenure in exactly the place they had so desperately tried to avoid: a toxic internecine brawl over his conduct and character that could badly damage their party.
With their Senate power on the line in Georgia on Tuesday, Republicans entered the new Congress on Sunday bitterly divided over the basic question of whether to acknowledge the reality that Trump had lost the election, or to abet his unjustified and increasingly brazen attempts to overturn the results.
The extraordinary conflict among congressional Republicans reflects the quandary they face after four years of acquiescence to Trump’s whims and silence in the face of his most outrageous actions. Now that the president has escalated his demands to subvert an election, they are confronting a litmus test involving democracy itself, keenly aware that many voters could punish them for failing to back Trump.