Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia election official and longtime Republican, held a news conference last week in which he excoriated Donald Trump's lies about voter fraud and the threats of violence those lies inspired.
He railed against Trump's campaign lawyer, Joseph diGenova, who called for the shooting of Christopher Krebs, a federal cybersecurity official fired by Trump for saying that the election wasn't rigged. (DiGenova later claimed he was joking.)
"It has to stop!" Sterling said, visibly seething. "Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop."
The next day, Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, expressed his support for Sterling. "It's about time that more people were out there speaking with truth," he said.
Along with many other state-level Republican election officials, Sterling and Raffensperger have shown admirable commitment to the rule of law. Yet it's hard not to notice that their outrage is a bit selective.
There is nothing new about Trump inciting harassment against private citizens, or of his lackeys calling for violence against the president's opponents. In 2015, after an 18-year-old college student asked Trump a question he didn't like at a political forum, he targeted her on Twitter, and she was deluged with graphic, sexualized threats.
In September, Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide who was put in charge of communications at Health and Human Services, said in a Facebook video, "When Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin."
Yet Raffensperger voted for Trump. On Thursday, he told CNN that he supports the president still. The fact that Trump has openly sought to undermine the 2020 election, or that he delights in siccing his followers on his perceived enemies, was not a deal-breaker for Raffensperger. If he is now incensed, it's because he and his colleagues have become Trump's targets.
Since Trump's defeat, the MAGA revolution has begun devouring its own. As it does, some conservatives are discovering the downsides of having a president who spreads malicious conspiracy theories, subverts faith in democracy and turns the denial of reality into a loyalty test.
People and institutions that get involved with Trump often end up diminished or disgraced. Since the election, this is happening faster than ever. The president is reportedly thinking of firing Attorney General Bill Barr because he has declined to repeat Trump's fantasies about widespread electoral cheating. Much of the MAGA-verse has turned on Fox News, because its news programs aren't pretending that Trump won.
Both Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona have been slavishly faithful to Trump, but stopped short of breaking the law by refusing to certify the vote in their states. For that, they've been at least temporarily cast out of Trump's movement. At a berserk Georgia rally on Wednesday, the pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood led the crowd in a "lock him up" chant against Kemp.
In concert with the recently ousted Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Wood called on Georgians to boycott the Jan. 5 Senate election runoff unless state officials do more to help Trump cling to power. Speaking of Georgia's senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, Wood said: "They have not earned your vote. Don't you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election, for God's sake!"
Naturally, Republicans who understand that Trump lost and are worried about Senate control in a Joe Biden presidency aren't happy about these antics. But what disconcerts these Republicans is that this misinformation might, for once, work against Republican power.
"At best, Wood-Powell are distracting from the GOP message in the races, and at worst, they are convincing persuadable Georgians that it is the Republican Party that needs to be checked, not Joe Biden," wrote Rich Lowry in Politico. At worst! Republicans would almost certainly be fine with Wood and Powell eroding confidence in American democracy if it didn't threaten members of their party.
Republicans helped Trump unleash countless civic evils. They shouldn't be surprised when those evils don't spare them.