Obama's New Words Claim Republicans are Cowards, Don't Support The Country

“You write about Sarah Palin – about her brief ascendancy – and you talking about ‘dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the Republican Party coming center stage.’ Did you ever think it would get this dark?”

“No,” replied Obama.

I thought that there were guard rails, institutionally, that even after Trump was elected that you would have the so-called Republican establishment who would say, “Ok, you know, it’s a problem if the White House doesn’t seem to be concerned about Russian meddling,” or, “It’s a problem if we have a president who’s saying that neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, “‘There are good people on both sides.'” That’s a little bit beyond the pale.

And the degree to which we did not see that Republican establishment say, “Hold on, time-out. That’s not acceptable. That’s not who we are,” but rather be cowed into accepting it, and then finally culminating in January 6th where what originally was, “Oh don’t worry, this isn’t going anywhere. We’re just letting Trump and others vent,” and then suddenly you now have large portions of an elected Congress going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election.

Cooper began to suggest that shortly after the January 6 Capitol insurrection, it appeared the Republican leadership might turn against Trump for inciting the violence.

“And then, poof,” Obama interjected, adding,

Suddenly, everybody was back in line. Now, the reason for that is because the base believed it. The base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch and nobody stood up and said, “Stop. This is enough. This is not true.” I won’t say nobody. Let me correct it. There were some very brave people who did their jobs, like the secretary of state in Georgia, who was then viciously attacked for it. And all those congressmen started looking around and they said, “You know what? I’ll lose my job. I’ll get voted out of office.” Another way of saying this is, I didn’t expect that there would be so few people who would say, “Well, I don’t mind losing my office because this is too important. America’s too important.”