It is a book about the Senate, specifically focusing on Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans' failure to stop Donald Trump. It argues that they failed to uphold their duty to protect the country from a president who threatened its democracy. In the 2022 edition, the author found that the Senate actually had some bipartisan accomplishments, such as the gun safety legislation and the Marriage Equality Act.
I believe that Trump's presidency was an unmitigated disaster for America with continuing repercussions that inflicted grave damage on our country. With echoes all over the world, I stand by my view t...
— Episode: Lawrence: Donald Trump is proposing the...
Episode: Lawrence: Donald Trump is proposing the ‘worst eco...
It is a book about the Senate, specifically focusing on Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans' failure to stop Donald Trump. It argues that they failed to uphold their duty to protect the country from a president who threatened its democracy. In the 2022 edition, the author found that the Senate actually had some bipartisan accomplishments, such as the gun safety legislation and the Marriage Equality Act.
I believe that Trump's presidency was an unmitigated disaster for America with continuing repercussions that inflicted grave damage on our country. With echoes all over the world, I stand by my view that he will go down as the most reviled American president in our history. But in our system, no one man or woman, even the president, is supposed to be able to destabilize our democracy. For that reason, I contended that the responsibility for the catastrophic failure of government resided with the Senate, specifically with Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans. It was the Senate's role to stop a president who was threatening our constitutional democracy. And the polarized, degraded Senate knowingly and repeatedly failed to do so, even after Trump instigated the January 6th attack on the Capitol in his indefensible effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
I think the Republicans, to some extent, wanted to make up for their catastrophic failure in failing to stop Donald Trump.
I'd like people to think about it at some point. Fundamental change in the Senate is probably years off. But I thought if you elected 15 senators nationally, these national senators would have a different sense of their responsibilities. They would upgrade the Senate overall. And I think they would encourage the other 100 senators to think about their commitments to the national interest, as opposed to simply being representatives of their state or party members.
The Senate's deteriorated quite a bit because the senators have become fundamentally partisan operatives. Many of the Republican senators, particularly, became partisan operatives as opposed to people who were looking at the national interest.