Jake Tapper sarcastically thanked Donald Trump on Sunday for revealing which Republicans were willing to “subvert the will of the voters” by signing on to unhinged Texas lawsuit rejected by the Supreme Court that sought to block the election results of four states whose residents voted for Joe Biden.
Initially beginning his monologue by saying he wanted to “praise Donald Trump” for a number of “legitimate achievements” during his watch, such as Operation Warp Speed, the CNN State of the Union anchor pivoted to the president’s last-ditch effort to overthrow Biden’s decisive election victory.
“The president pushed an insane lawsuit, ‘the big one,’ he called it, from the attorney general of Texas,” Tapper said. “It was a clownish legal brief based on conspiracy theories and outright lies. And 18 state attorneys general, some U.S. senators, and a majority of the House Republican caucus, 126 members, supported it.”
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Adding that Trump “did us a favor by exposing these elected officials,” Tapper went on to note that these Republicans are “definitionally people who signed on to a desperate desire to subvert the will of the American people, to disenfranchise voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan based on lies and conspiracy theories, putting an immoral and corrupt power grab above democracy.”
Tapper, who has been outspoken over the attempted coup by Trump and his allies, commended GOP state and election officials who have refused to go along with the president’s lies about widespread voter fraud before circling back to the Republicans backing Trump’s effort to steal the election.
“Many Americans hoped that most Republican officials, while they agreed with Trump’s policies, did not like the uglier parts of his style, his willingness to lie or smear to achieve his ends. But President Trump made House Republicans go on the record,” he declared. “He made them stand and be counted, and 126 of them, including Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Whip Steve Scalise, they actually signed their names to this, this unconservative, undemocratic, unAmerican, mendacious joke of a lawsuit that would disenfranchise millions of their fellow Americans.”
“These House Republicans raised their hands,” Tapper concluded. “They said: Sign me up. The hope that most Republicans in the House were better than this—that has been destroyed. For those of us who believe in standards and norms and the U.S. Constitution, we need to thank President Trump for bringing this fact to light.”
