NEWS | POLITICS “THE LAST TRUMPTATION OF McMORRIS RODGERS,” CONTINUED... “She’s not on the side of democracy,” Riccelli says “And future generations will judge her harshly.” Either way, her statement is an artifact representing the contradiction that McMorris Rodgers has been trapped in during the Trump years. She kept calling for politics to be more civil. But the rhetoric of the president she supported was calling for something closer to civil war.
THE TEARS AFTER TEAR GAS
In her own impeachment comments, meanwhile, Herrera Beutler detailed how the president had thrown a match onto a tinderbox, inflaming a mob that beat police officers, shattered Capitol windows and raided congressional offices. “During the president’s rally on January 6, he repeated phrases like ‘fight like hell,’ and ‘we’re going to have to fight much harder,’” she tweeted. “Many coming to the rally did intend to fight, with physical violence. Leading up to the rally, specific threats were numerous. Hundreds of TikTok videos promoted violence. Thousands... used hashtags promoting a second civil war.” The morning after the riot, the sun was shining down on a nearly empty National Mall. The tear gas had dissipated. The gallows and noose had been dismantled. The rioters were gone — four of them dead — and the chants of “Hang Mike Pence” were no longer echoing through the halls of Congress. And McMorris Rodgers, says Miles, “was alone in the Capitol.” “No one on the mall; no one out there at all,” says Miles, who exchanged texts with McMorris Rodgers that day. “Totally beautiful, totally peaceful. And she sat down
and cried.” “Today, I find myself weeping for my country,” McMorris Rodgers wrote in a text message, according to Miles. Miles describes McMorris Rodgers as someone with a deep, “almost palpable” sense of empathy. So when the country is wounded, Miles says, she feels that wound as well. “She’s brokenhearted,” Miles says, “about the corruption she sees, about the brokenness of our government, about the distance between the two parties.” From the very beginning of the Trump administration, McMorris Rodgers had touted values like “civility” and “unity,” and spoke of bridging that divide. In a profile with Christianity Today last October, she proudly recounted how, after she was booed at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in 2017, she moved to hold “Unity Dinners” where a diverse group would share “struggles and heartache and loss in their lives.” But Trump, meanwhile, kept speaking in terms of “losers,” “suckers,” “enemies of the people” and “shithole countries.” At times, McMorris Rodgers did critique Trump. She objected to Trump’s family separation policy and slashing of refugee numbers, and she decried his mockery of disabled people and the video where he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” She voted against Trump’s emergency declaration to fund the border wall and, like most Republicans, defied his demand for Congress to approve $2,000 COVID-19 stimulus checks. Yet for the most part, McMorris Rodgers was a loyal
Trump defender to the end. In the same impeachment statement in which she decried Trump’s behavior during the riot, she praised the president for having “supported the rule of law.”
“It’s not like she just stood by. She fanned the flames of the fire. She poured gasoline on it.” “That’s quintessential McMorris Rodgers,” says Democrat Dave Wilson, who was handily defeated by McMorris Rodgers in last year’s election. “She’s walking both sides of the fence.” The mob at the Capitol had been united around a single incendiary claim, a lie that had penetrated deep within the rank and file of the Republican Party: that the election had been stolen through a vast and sweeping conspiracy of fraud. It was a claim that had been extensively debunked, decried and dismissed by Republican election officials, Trump-appointed judges and even Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr. But McMorris Rodgers didn’t try to debunk the conspiracy theory. Instead, like many Republicans, she signed on to support a futile Texas lawsuit that attempted to overturn the election, arguing that “President Trump has every right to pursue legal recourse in response to claims of voter fraud and election impropriety.” “It’s not like she just stood by,” Riccelli says. “She fanned the flames of the fire. She poured gasoline on it.” The day before the Capitol riot, McMorris Rodgers had told the Spokesman-Review, she planned to object to
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