BROOKINGS – “Is democracy safe right now?” That was the question posed to Tom Daschle on Sunday afternoon, prior to the evening’s Daschle Dialogues at South Dakota State University with guest Jonathan Karl, ABC News chief in Washington.

“I think democracy’s safe, but it needs our attention,” replied the former congressman, who served as both Senate majority leader and the senior Democratic senator when his party was out of power. “It needs our engagement; it needs our recognition that there are more challenges to democracy than we have faced before.

“We don’t have the luxury of ignoring the challenges as they present themselves today.”

“I really worry about (that),” Karl responded as to the safety of our democracy. The best-selling author of two books addressing the Trump presidency – “Front Row at the Trump Show” and “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show” – added, “I came to the conclusion that we came much closer to truly being in danger of losing our democracy. I fear that many of the same conditions that put us in that situation are somewhat present today, maybe more dangerous.” 

Karl’s first book covered the first three years of the Trump presidency, when he literally was in the front row. The second year covered the final year of his presidency.

Liz Cheney

In an interview with The Brookings Register, the focus shifted to Trump’s grip on the GOP lawmakers and their constituents. 

“There’s a fear of losing his voters. I don’t know if there’s necessarily a fear of Trump himself. It’s a fear of alienating his voters,” Karl said.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney took an unwavering stand against Trump and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and paid the price. 

“It cost her her seat in the leadership. She would have probably been a future speaker of the House. She was a true star – really conservative, by the way. And look what happened,” Karl added. 

Karl noted that he was present in Wyoming in August for the election when Cheney lost her primary.

“She got trounced,” Karl noted emphatically. “In Wyoming, a race that she had won two years earlier by as big a margin as she just lost it. And for one reason: she had the courage to stand up against Donald Trump.”

Other shows of courage, not as straightforward as Cheney’s, included 10 Republican congressmen who voted for the impeachment of Trump. Eight of them pretty much saw the demise of their political futures in the GOP. 

“Some of them chose not to run again, because they would have lost. Others, like Liz Cheney, lost their primaries,” Karl said.

Harking back to post-Civil War days and the “highly partisan” impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Karl cited a chapter in John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” that told of eight “Republican senators who stood up and voted ‘not guilty,’ despite their party’s position, ‘Let’s get rid of the guy – vote guilty.’

“They paid a political price. History remembers them as doing the right thing. You have to be willing to pay a political price; otherwise it’s not courage.”

Trump not fading away

Karl has spent a good deal of his career as a reporter and writer covering those men and women who go into public service. He sees most of them as having honorable ambitions, going into it “for the right things.”

“People love to attack Washington, to attack politicians,” he explained. “But it’s a hard job. I think most people go into it because they want to in some way change the world for the better. They might disagree as to what direction they want to go.

“I don’t understand what we’ve seen so often now. … I’ve seen people who say one thing in private and the completely opposite thing in public. That’s not new in politics. But when’s it’s something as fundamental as our democracy. That is new and it’s distressing,” Karl said.

While there’s little evidence of GOP lawmakers speaking out against the former president, there are what Karl calls “establishment Republicans, who think that Trump is fading and that he will go away. That may be wishful thinking. I think that a lot of them thought that way in 2016.”

Now, however, the former president is “dominating the polls in the early rounds of Republican primaries. And (back then) they didn’t take him on until it was too late.  I think you’re seeing that again.”

Karl doesn’t see convincing evidence that Trump is losing his hold on the GOP or fading away.

Who’s watching?

But will the documentation of the events of Jan. 6, 2021, change any GOP minds?

The author believes that the Jan. 6 Committee “has done a very good job of establishing the facts of what happened not just (on that date) but also in the weeks ahead of Jan. 6 that led to the events that we saw happen. And they’ve uncovered details about the day itself.” Many of those details came to light when the committee showed video shot by surveillance cameras. 

“You see the building coming under assault; the people assaulting the building were carrying Trump flags, wearing Trump paraphernalia. They were quoting Trump slogans and anti-Mike Pence slogans. Hang Mike Pence,” Karl said.

The committee has established very clearly what happened: “The problem is, who’s watching? Are the people who have come to believe the lies about that day watching? For the most part they haven’t. And the lies are taking hold.

“Unfortunately, I think a lot of the misinformation has broken through.”

Later, in his closing remarks to the Dialogues audience in the Oscar Larson Performing Arts on the South Dakota State University campus, Karl urged, “Take some time to try to understand the other side. We all have our set of information. We confirm our own biases. … If you’re a diehard conservative, spend some time watching MSNBC. If you’re a liberal, try to take some time to watch FOX (News). Get out there and talk to people; try to understand where they’re coming from.”

Contact John Kubal at at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.