Six weeks ago, I wrote the Republicans who represent me at any level of government (excepting President Donald Trump): Connecticut State Sen. Ryan Fazio, Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo and Selectwoman Lauren Rabin. I asked if they were going to speak out against Trump’s destruction of our democracy, his lawlessness and his attacks on human dignity. None of the them responded. As far as I can tell, none of them have publicly denounced the president’s actions.
The German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” He was sentenced to death and executed in a concentration camp for his resistance to Hitler’s fascist regime.
My Republican elected officials’ silence speaks volumes. As leaders in the President’s party, their voices have influence that Democrats simply can’t match, and not for want of trying. Given the stakes at hand, their silence makes them complicit in the unprecedented attacks on our constitutional democracy being carried out daily by President Trump and his administration.
It makes them complicit in Trump’s incoherent trade war that is increasingly likely to lead to a global recession, cost American jobs and perhaps most alarmingly, undermine the U.S. dollar as the world’s most stable currency which will dramatically raise the cost of financing our nation’s debt.
They are complicit in seriously compromising our self-defense, saying nothing about the gross incompetence of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior national security officials who used an unsecure, commercial messaging platform to unknowingly share military strike plans with a journalist. Nor saying anything about substantially degrading the country’s cyberdefenses, including substantial portions of the systems that protect elections from cyberattacks and provide early warning of attacks on the power grid, communications and pipelines.
Fazio, Camillo and Rabin are complicit in wrongly deporting without notice, legal justification or due process, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal immigrant who posed no threat. They are complicit in creating a constitutional crisis now that the Trump administration has willfully ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling to return him from the notorious Salvadoran prison that a federal judge called one of the most “inhumane and dangerous prisons in the world,” exposing him to harm that “shocks the conscience.”
They are complicit in supporting a president who has said he has no problem deporting U.S. citizens, who has declared himself king and who incited an insurrection to keep himself in power despite losing the 2020 election.
They are complicit in Trump’s sweeping attack on voting that could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, especially women, by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. Trump’s baseless claims about noncitizen voting reveal his true intentions to undermine free and fair elections that are the foundation of our representative democracy. Voting by noncitizens is virtually nonexistent and already illegal, with penalties including prison time and deportation. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found only 30 suspected incidents of potential noncitizen voting out of 24 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential election.
Rather than actually encouraging the rigorous analysis needed to reduce government waste, with their silence these three Republican officials are complicit in Trump’s corrupt crony capitalism aimed at further enriching his billionaire friends. Trump delayed a Biden administration effort to close a loophole that has resulted in Medicare spending more than $10 billion annually on unproven “skin substitute” bandages, more than it spends on ambulance rides, anesthesia or CT scans. Trump received a large campaign contribution from one of the bandage sellers.
With their silence, Fazio, Camillo and Rabin are complicit in Trump’s war on the rule of law, which J Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal judge, characterized as a “full-frontal assault on the constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system and the nation’s legal profession.”
Because they chose not to respond to my email, I can’t say whether Fazio, Camillo and Rabin (along with the vast majority of GOP officials nationwide) agree with Trump’s lawless, corrupt and inhumane agenda, don’t have the courage and integrity to stand up to him or don’t want to risk losing their power for the good of the American people.
Regardless of their motivations, the silence of Republican elected officials is putting the economic security, health and safety of Americans, and our democracy at grave risk. Perhaps with enough encouragement from their constituents, they’ll do the right thing and stand up to President Trump.
Jonathan Perloe lives in Greenwich.
