An Open Letter to Congressional Republicans of Conscience

To: Senators Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Rand Paul and Representatives Don Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Thomas Massie

For the past year, the seven of you have been rare voices of opposition from within the Republican Party to many of President Donald Trump’s power grabs. You have critiqued his inflammatory language and expressed concern at the extremist behavior of many of his appointees.

As the author of this weekly “Authoritarian Watch” column, however, it strikes me that your verbal opposition is not enough. In this moment of national trauma, the most effective action you could do to curb the excesses of the Trump regime is to cross the aisle.

So long as your Republican colleagues control the investigative and financial levers of government, Trump will continue to tear apart the country’s social fabric and demolish the pillars of governance that make a functioning democracy possible. In your hearts, you surely must realize this. But if you join the Democrats—not because you agree with all, or even most, of their policies, but because you understand the existential threat to democracy that Trump represents—you could change the political landscape of this country and prevent Trump’s nightmarish dreams from becoming reality. Yes, you might lose your seats to a primary challenge should you do so—but you will be remembered in history for standing up to nascent tyranny.

I say this without hyperbole: The president is unbound and, you must have noticed, increasingly unstable. Trump is exhibiting megalomaniacal tendencies on the international stage that have fractured the post–World War II Western alliance and rules-based global order. The United States has become a rogue state.

Domestically, Trump is attempting to use overwhelming force to break the resistance of ordinary residents in Minneapolis. It’s arguably the first time since the Civil War that the federal government has defined a major city as being a hub for “the enemy within.” Trump’s hard-right henchman Stephen Miller has even demanded that local and state law enforcement in Minnesota “surrender” to the feds, as if he were a commander in a new civil war.

Can you honestly say that the daily imagery of federal agents beating, tear-gassing, macing, and shooting civilians—all the direct consequence of Miller’s might-is-right philosophy—is the face of the United States that you wanted presented to the world when you went into politics?

If you are hoping—as I suspect in private that you are—for a quick demise to Trump’s presidency, you must have noticed that his cabinet members, lickspittles every one of them, hired solely for their ability and willingness to turn departments of state into morally denuded enforcers for Trump, have hardly shown a willingness to stand up to his illegal requests. Can you truly imagine JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, and the other sycophants ending this malignant presidency by invoking the 25th Amendment?

And, despite your affection for the institution of which you have all been long-standing members, can you seriously see Speaker Mike Johnson’s GOP-led House impeaching Trump and John Thune’s Senate then convicting him? It simply isn’t going to happen.

Ten years ago, Trump boasted that he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and retain his core support. In Minneapolis in the last few weeks, we have seen this realized.

Trump may not have personally fired the three shots into Renée Good’s face or the 10 into Alex Pretti’s back and neck, but by empowering an out-of-control ICE, using inciting rhetoric against immigrants, and repeatedly glorifying violence against his political opponents, Trump has given a wink-and-a-nod to ICE agents to spill civilian blood. So, too, has Vance’s unacceptable statement that the agent who shot Good and then called her a “fucking bitch” enjoys “absolute immunity” from prosecution.

In the aftermath of the Minneapolis killings—cold-blooded murders, as I suspect you in your heart of hearts know—Trump, Vance, Noem, Miller, and others in leadership positions launched a propaganda campaign to smear the names of Good and of Pretti. Imagine having the gall to besmirch the name of a young mother killed for trying to speak up for her neighbors or of an ICU nurse shot in the back for trying to tend to a woman who had been pepper-sprayed in the face. In the sanctity of your private quarters, away from the prying eyes of the media, I suspect you would agree with this bleak interpretation of their foul words.

In a similar vein, you probably squirmed in your seats when you saw how Trump’s propaganda team doctored an image of a female African American protester who was arrested in Minneapolis in a way designed to strip her of all dignity, making her appear scared and stupid, and pandering to the worst racial stereotypes peddled by white supremacists.

Self-confident democracies don’t manipulate images of private citizens to serve the political interests and demands of the country’s leadership. But, in contrast, countries controlled by ruthless leaders have no qualms about stripping citizens of basic dignity. Nor do they have second thoughts about sliming and denigrating opposition politicians in a way that goes far beyond the normal rough and tumble of politics: Witness Trump’s allegations this week that Representative Ilhan Omar staged the attack in which a man rushed her on stage and squirted an unidentified liquid in her face. Or the series of subpoenas issued against Minnesota and Minneapolis political leaders because of their opposition to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. It’s no wonder that Trump’s ICE is recruiting far-right white supremacists by including neo-Nazi songs, memes, and slogans in their recruitment videos.

I could go on. I could, for example, explain how democracies don’t embrace politically motivated prosecutions of Central Bank figures who refuse to lower interest rates when ordered to do so, as Trump has done in demanding the prosecution of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. I could explain how democracies don’t order top law enforcement agencies to raid elections offices in search of “fraud” that would explain why a president lost an election; yet, that is exactly what Trump has done this week in siccing Kash Patel’s FBI onto elections officials in Fulton County, Georgia, looking for “evidence” that they committed fraud to ensure that Biden won the state in 2020. This time around, they’re seizing ballots cast more than five years ago. Next time around, if they get away with their actions against Fulton County, they may attempt to seize ballots cast in the 2026 midterms. You must see the calamitous impact this would have on the viability of the US electoral system.

I could even mention the use of humiliation rituals by federal agencies aimed at pushing immigrants into an utterly Kafkaesque situation. In recent weeks, news outlets in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the cities targeted by ICE, have reported that asylum seekers and other immigrants are being summoned for mandatory “check-ins.” When they get there, they find no appointments available for days. If they leave the line, they are technically out of compliance with court orders and thus their asylum cases can be closed, and they can be fast-tracked for deportation. If they stay in line, oftentimes they end up having to camp on the streets for several days and nights in a row, even in freezing conditions, before federal officials let them into the building. That behavior that should shock the conscience of all Americans, yourselves included.

The litany of abuses that Trump’s people are committing every day against the public is vast. This government is fine-tuning techniques of cruelty and humiliation against a growing list of domestic “enemies.” It is the profoundest of betrayals and one that ought to disqualify Trump and his minions from ever holding high office again.

I believe that the seven of you know exactly what is happening. And so, I will close out this letter the way I opened it, with an appeal to all of you to, belatedly, do the right thing. Your party has shown itself entirely incapable of moderating Trump’s extremism. It is time to cross the aisle and deprive Trump of the congressional rubber stamp that has empowered and emboldened him and to start reining in this most morally appalling and antidemocratic of presidencies.