Just prior to Pres. Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) fumed to his colleagues: “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House—today!”[1]

On August 7 of that year, Sen. Goldwater and two other Republican Congressional leaders went to the White House and told President Nixon he had lost the support of his party and had to resign.[2] The next day the president resigned. Will history repeat itself this year?

As of early April, Trump had made 18,000 false or misleading statements since becoming president.[3] If the latest accusation of Trump’s lying is true, I believe it just may be “one too many” for many Congressional Republicans.

According to the New York Times, Trump was briefed in March about Russian military intelligence paying the Taliban bounty to kill U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan and has yet to take any action against Russia.[4] While the White House has denied that Trump was “verbally briefed,”[5] it has not denied that the information was in the president’s daily intelligence reports. Since it is common knowledge that Trump does not read these daily intelligence briefings,[6] we have to ask ourselves: How can Trump be fulfilling his most sacred presidential responsibility of keeping Americans safe if he is not staying up to date with his intelligence reports?

Can Congressional Republicans actually put up with such an unconscionable failure of duty from their president? Will they continue to stick with Trump?

I can think of only one thing worse for Republicans than losing the White House this year. And that would be losing control of the U.S. Senate. Maintaining a majority in the Senate would allow Republicans to rein in a President Biden, just as they did President Obama in the last two years of his administration. If the Republicans increasingly fear standing with Trump will cost them control of the Senate, they could decide that ditching the president is in their greater self-interest. With 87% of Americans dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country and only 19% of Republicans satisfied in a recent poll,[7] Senate Republicans might just conclude that their only hope of saving their own skins is abandoning Trump. We can only hope.

Contact Republican senators. Go to https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact for their phone numbers. Call and urge them to stand up to Trump.

Bruce Berlin

A retired, public sector ethics attorney, Berlin is the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America (See breakingbigmoneysgrip.com.), the founder of New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics, a former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow, and the founder and former executive director of The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He can be reached at breakingbigmoneysgrip@gmail.com.

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[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/22/trump-impeachment-watergate-barry-goldwater-101836

[2] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2014/0807/Richard-Nixon-s-resignation-the-day-before-a-moment-of-truth#:~:text=Forty%20years%20ago%2C%20a%20Republican%20delegation%20led%20by,support%20in%20Congress.%20The%20next%20day%2C%20he%20resigned.

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/14/president-trump-made-18000-false-or-misleading-claims-1170-days/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html

[5] https://news.yahoo.com/trump-not-verbally-briefed-russia-231006318.html

[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-looks-at-charts-in-intelligence-briefings-2020-5

[7] https://www.people-press.org/2020/06/30/publics-mood-turns-grim-trump-trails-biden-on-most-personal-traits-major-issues/#national-satisfaction-drops