Juan Williams: The GOP’s epidemic of intentional blindness

Act 1 — Intentional blindness? 

How else to explain the GOP’s reaction last week after a Daily Beast report that Herschel Walker, running for the Senate as an abortion opponent, paid for a woman to have an abortion?

Even as the former football star denied it, Walker’s son called him a liar. “He has four kids, four different women. Wasn’t in the house raising one of them,” tweeted Walker’s son, Christian. “[H]ow dare you lie and act as though you’re some ‘moral, Christian, upright man.’”

The GOP response to this embarrassing elephant in their room was intentional blindness.

“Republicans stand with him,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. So much for opposition to abortion if it means losing a Senate seat. 

Act 2 — More Intentional blindness?

How else to explain the silence among Senate Republicans when former President Trump said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had a “death wish,” before throwing a racist barb at McConnell’s wife?

Not one of McConnell’s Senate colleagues opened their mouths to stand by him and condemn Trump. None opened their eyes to Trump’s threat and racism.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was a lonely voice among Republicans in Congress, noting that Trump’s words could lead to “violence against the Republican leader of the Senate.” She labeled his attack on McConnell’s wife “absolutely despicable.” 

Cheney also noted her party’s intentional blindness. How it could be that “nobody in my party will say that’s unacceptable,” she asked.

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page noticed the chilling GOP silence. 

“The ‘death wish’ rhetoric is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards and deserves to be condemned…It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr. Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr. McConnell.”

Act 3 — Intentional blindness is now a pandemic?

Republicans running in the midterms are now required to close their eyes to the nearly two-year-old reality that a Democrat, President Biden, won the 2020 election. Blind eyes are now a sign of party loyalty.

Last week, data and polling website FiveThirtyEight ran a chilling headline: “60 Percent of Americans will have an election denier on the ballot this fall”

“Out of 552 total Republican nominees running for office, we found 200 who fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election. These candidates either clearly stated that the election was stolen from Trump or took legal action to overturn the results, such as voting not to certify election results or joining lawsuits that sought to overturn the election,” the site’s staff wrote.

Opinion polls put the share of Republican voters who refuse to accept Biden as a legitimate president at around 70 percent.

Similarly, The Washington Post reported last week that “a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.”

One politics professor, Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota, told the Post that mistrust of elections — and the intentional undermining of their legitimacy — is “a disease that is spreading through our political process and its implications are very profound.” 

Jacobs’ thinking is supported by Pew Research polling. In August, Pew found “51 percent of Republicans say they like political leaders who assert [Trump won in 2020] compared with 17 percent who dislike such leaders.”

Many of the Republican candidates running on intentional blindness will be sworn in as members of Congress in January 2023. Their presence on Capitol Hill will give more energy to claims of election fraud which have been proven false in courts, by intelligence experts and repeated audits.

Once in Congress, their next act of intentional blindness might be to try and reverse the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if they don’t win.

A Yahoo! News/YouGov poll released in late September shows that among self-described Trump voters from 2020, just 33 percent say candidates should agree in advance to accept the results in this fall’s elections.

Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election and baseless claims of voter fraud have proven damaging to the GOP in the recent past.

When he introduced the ‘Big Lie’ about the 2020 election being stolen, it depressed Republican turnout in Senate run-off elections in Georgia two months later. Two Democrats won, costing Republicans the Senate majority. 

The final act in this story of Republicans blinding themselves has yet to be written. 

In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a naked king parading through the streets as if he had dazzling clothes, it took a child to get people to open their eyes. He shouted out that the king had no clothes.

Here is hoping that there is a daring child to open Republican eyes.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.