Every time Orange Julius breezes into town to entertain his delirious fandom of red hats (pumped up on the Village People and right wing propaganda) there should be a prominent sign in the background that reads, “The Emperor has no clothes.” At least one truthteller in a sea of madness. That was missing in Dayton this past weekend when Donald Trump strutted onstage before his cult-like devotees — cloaked in nothing but ugly and make-believe.
Caesar Uncovered graced our state Saturday to ostensibly boost the wobbly primary campaign of Republican senatorial candidate Bernie Moreno. But the sketchy car mogul was a merely a throwaway line at the hero-worship rally for an aging huckster/aspiring authoritarian exposed in all his glorious depravity and deceit.
Trump’s adoring uberfans and groveling sycophants swooned over his undraped vulgarity, venom and fascistic dehumanization as though dark malevolence was magnificent finery. They cheered and applauded his absurd whoppers and persecution mania as though he were wrapped in a mantle of validity.
Gospel believers of the bully-laid-bare dare not pierce the pretense that obscures Trump’s true identity as a serial liar, epic fraudster, adjudicated rapist (who continues to defame his victim), criminally charged defendant accused of scheming to overthrow the government, violating the Espionage Act with hoarded and illegally retained classified documents, and secretly buying the silence of a porn star to sway the 2016 election.
But others can reveal the pretension out loud. Like the Hans Christian Anderson fable, one person in the public square who sees what everyone else does can declare the obvious — the grifter from Queens isn’t dressed in a stitch of credibility or human decency! A tentative few in the GOP camp have already summoned the guts to openly say what MAGA flunkeys won’t.
Republican Phil Heimlich is one such profile in courage in southern Ohio. He ran as the “anti-MAGA” congressional candidate in the state’s ruby red 2nd District. Quite a distinction in a field of 10 other MAGA headcases on the GOP primary ballot. Unfortunately, Heimlich is the exception to the rule in a party prepared to hand its presidential nomination to a twice-impeached loser who conspired to overturn his 2020 defeat and threatens a repeat performance in 2024.
But the 71-year-old former prosecutor — a solid conservative with stints as a Cincinnati councilman and Hamilton County commissioner — was burdened by the lies Trump dumped on voters and compelled to tell the truth about him. “He tried to overthrow a valid election and inspired a mob to attack our Capitol,” Heimlich told the Washington Examiner about Trump’s attempted coup that culminated in a violent insurrection.
The ex-president’s corruption went far beyond Jan. 6, argued the Ohio Republican. “It was the pressure on the Justice Department. It was the pressure on [former vice president] Mike Pence. The false electors. This was a combination of efforts to, in effect, overthrow the [incoming] government of the United States.”
Heimlich rails against Republicans who whitewash the traumatic assault on our democracy to appease the dangerous demagogue responsible. He can’t countenance that many in his party still refuse to admit Trump lost the last presidential election — despite every election metric, audit, review, recount, and rejected (frivolous) lawsuit that confirmed the outcome.
Heimlich’s lone crusade to put country over a party drew support from another singular Republican who had his own reckoning with principle and blind partisanship after Jan 6. Before former six-term Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger addressed Heimlich backers remotely last week, he told me defending democracy wasn’t always disqualifying in the GOP caucus.
“It’s funny at the beginning of Trump and Trumpism people would open their mouths a lot, even [Sen.]Lindsey Graham back then, for God’s sake.” But the party is like a cult now and the cult leader rules. Those who stand up to power become pariahs. “Then everybody else is like, I don’t want that, so I’ll just stay quiet here because I’m so special and I need to survive. They’re in love with the title and the identity, and there’s a lot of fear with what comes next.”
“There are many Republicans who do leave but don’t speak out. They just kind of go away because they can’t do it anymore. You don’t want to stand out, you don’t want to highlight yourself in this era of Fox News and maybe Tucker Carlson going at you.” Kinzinger laments that honorable Republicans who are “willing to tell the truth even if it’s uncomfortable” (like Heimlich) remain an anomaly in today’s GOP.
He hopes that will change. He hopes a significant bloc of Republican voters can’t go back to Trump and find a pro-democracy lane away from his anti-democracy one. But it’s frustrating. “I used to think everybody had a red line that they wouldn’t cross or that everybody, to the depth of their soul, was doing politics for the right reason and I’ve come to believe that that’s actually pretty rare. Especially on the Republican side. It’s all about power and people who want to be Internet famous.”
“But every now and again you get a bright spot,” Kinzinger added. One conservative and then another steps forward. Allied and unafraid truthtellers with the guts to say out loud — the emperor has no clothes! — about an evil man uncovered and seen “as the greatest stain on American history.”
This commentary was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.
