Johnson Privately Concedes Biden Won

Mark Becker, the former chairman of the Brown County Republican Party, had a telephone conversation recently with Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson that speaks volumes about Johnson and other Republicans who continue to do all they can to undermine the results of the November election.

Becker wrote about this in a story for the conservative anti-Trump publication The Bulwark, with the headline “My Call With Ron Johnson: He Knows Biden Won But Won’t Admit It.”

The gist of their conversation, as Becker wrote: “Senator Johnson knows that Joe Biden won a free and fair election. He is refusing to admit it publicly and stoking conspiracies that undermine our democracy solely because it would be ‘political suicide’ to oppose Trump.”

Johnson told Becker that “yes, Donald Trump is an asshole,” but the votes Trump got, “especially in Wisconsin, cannot be overlooked.” Trump received the highest number of Republican votes in the history of the state, but as Becker notes, “It did not seem to occur to Senator Johnson that President Trump motivated massive, greater turnout in opposition to him than he did in support… It was a rejection of Trumpism, and of the politics of division and toxicity which has poisoned our communities.”

Johnson told Becker that the one constant throughout all the Trump rallies was, “the people there absolutely love America.” When Becker said the same could be said of people attending rallies for Democrat Bernie Sanders, Johnson disagreed. “Absolutely not. Bernie Sanders and AOC want to fundamentally change our country. And you can’t love something you want to fundamentally change.”

Johnson said “he knew and accepted the fact that Joe Biden had won,” Becker wrote. “I asked why he wouldn’t say so at a moment  when Trump was taking a sledgehammer to the very foundation of our democracy. Senator Johnson replied that the institutions of our democracy are strong enough to withstand what is going on. This response shocked me.”

“Johnson knows that this  is BS,” Becker added. “Because five years ago he said so. In 2015 he introduced legislation streamlining the transition process, saying ‘the peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. It is also an enormous undertaking requiring months of planning in order to be successful.’”

Yet Johnson has refused to congratulate Biden and opposed the transition to a new administration, Becker notes and on Tuesday went “even further,” responding to Attorney General William Barr‘s announcement that he’d found no evidence of fraud that would alter the election’s outcome by demanding Barr “show evidence” of this, meaning he had to prove a negative. As Johnson told CNN: “I think there’s enough irregularities, there are enough questions, enough suspicions that in order to come to the final results of the facts, so that hopefully the vast majority of Americans are satisfied with the result.”

Among other revelations from Becker: Johnson claimed Trump was defeated only because of hatred of him advanced by the media every day. And he blasted groups like the Lincoln Project (disaffected Republicans who ran ads attacking Trump) and Republican Voters Against Trump as “money-grubbing pieces of shit.”

As for Joe Biden, he “has Lewy body dementia,” Johnson claimed.

All this would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

“Conspiracies and alternate realities are causing our society to crumble. We can’t move forward together when we acknowledge reality in private and then peddle falsehoods in public,” Becker writes. “Our elected officials… are servants… not just of one party, but of all their constituents. They owe us more.”

But not according to Republicans like Johnson. To Wisconsin’s senior senator, it seems, you are only a patriot if you support Trump and the Republicans aligned with him. Which rules out the majority of voters, the more than 80 million who supported Biden. They don’t love America.