Never Fear

Something happened this week that should put a chill down your spine. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had this to say in response to being asked about what she would say to people who are afraid in the era of Donald Trump:

“We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

Murkowski is a longtime Republican senator who has less to fear than most. She lost a primary election in 2010 but won the general through a write-in campaign. In her last election, she beat back a Trump-endorsed challenger. The bottom line is, she knows how to win, even with MAGA coming for her.

But that’s not why Murkowski is afraid. She is afraid on a much more granular level, the way dissidents are afraid in authoritarian regimes. She is afraid that Trump will come after her personally, that his mob of Proud Boy brownshirts will physically harm her, that his weaponized Justice Department will indict her on some trumped-up charge, that her communities will be targeted because she occasionally refuses to bend the knee to Trump.

Donald Trump is a deeply damaged man, leading a manosphere movement of deeply damaged men. These are the guys who feel that the world owes them something. In high school, they felt that girls owed them sex. In their adult lives, they felt that the elites owed them respect. But high school girls snubbed them and the elites ignored them. They paid attention when Trump told them, “I am your retribution.”

For Trumpists and for Trump, it is all about revenge. Revenge means making “the libs cry harder,” even if the policies they espouse will make life more difficult for them too. But — and Murkowski is only the first example of this — it is not just “the libs” who should be scared. It is even people like Murkowski, who voted to confirm Pam Bondi to lead the Department of Justice. Now, Murkowski is terrified that the attorney general she helped install, along with other Trump nominees, will weaponize their positions to retaliate against her if she, a United States senator, dares to exercise her voice in ways that will displease Trump.

What do you tell a person like Murkowski? That this Republican Party is no longer the party in which she grew up? That she should caucus with the Democrats until Trump commits to honoring the constitution? That she made a huge mistake voting for any of Trump’s nominees, because if you give a wannabe dictator like Trump an inch, he will take a mile — or punish you for not giving it to him?

If Murkowski means it — if she is really afraid — she needs to stop with the half-measures and do everything in her power to prevent Trump from instilling fear into the souls of her own constituents and her own senate colleagues. That means using every lever at her disposal to stop every single part of his agenda, even the parts with which she agrees. It means publicly calling on other like-minded senators, like the outgoing Mitch McConnell and the endangered Susan Collins and Thom Tillis, to tell Senate Majority Leader John Thune that they will not agree to move any business in the senate forward until Trump respects judicial orders and congressional independence.

It means understanding that there is much, much more at stake for all of us than just professional survival. The nation will remember the leaders who stood up far longer than it will remember the ones who issued a few sternly worded statements, occasionally bucked their own party on votes, but largely went along as an authoritarian dismantled our democracy.

None of us should be afraid. We should be angry that this little man has attempted to instill fear in us, to cow us into submission. Each of us has the power to fight back in our own way, but Lisa Murkowski, a United States senator in the majority, has the ability to fight back more effectively than most. Rather than giving into fear, she should give in to anger. And then she should do something about it by refusing to cast one more vote in support of a president and an agenda whose primary mission is to instill fear.