CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that MAGA Republicans who were “unhappy” former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election were dragging down American democracy.
Anchor Margaret Brennan asked, “How dangerous is the moment that we are in?
Garrett said, “It feels more dangerous, Margaret than any I’ve encountered in covering politics at the national level since 1990. David and I had to write this book, but we wish we didn’t have to. Stating what clearly happened in 2020, it wasn’t a fraudulent election. No crime was committed. That doesn’t mean you have to be happy with the result, but one of the burdens of democracy is when you’re unhappy with the result, your obligation is to win the next election, not slander, baselessly, the election you fairly lost. And we have a component of American politics now that wants to slander an election that was fairly lost because they’re unhappy. And that unhappiness does not entitle you to drag down American democracy because if Margaret, we enter a phase in American life where either political party refuses to accept a fair and verified election simply because it lost, then we will dismantle democracy bit by bit before our very eyes. And that’s what I am, what we are driving at when we talk about the coming contours of not a bloody civil war, but a procedural Civil War where we separate ourselves from another and the Union, the United States itself, bit by bit begins to break apart.”
He added, “I’ve talked to many Trump supporters who don’t have a coherent or explicable idea of how the election was stolen. They just feel something is wrong, and by articulating that something was wrong there – that is an act of allegiance to former President Trump, which is very important to them, and their own political identity. And they’re not going to abandon the former president just because some nagging journalists like me, or an election law expert, like David, suggest to them that they ought to. That loyalty to Trump and Trumpism, I believe, is a collection place for the idea that something was fundamentally wrong with the 2020 election, even if they can’t exactly explain what that thing was. They don’t want to divorce themselves from former President Trump, and they don’t want the movement that they were so inspired by to disappear. Therefore, they stay here, even though they can’t routinely explain why.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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