Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) made news this week after he reportedly refused to shake the hand of D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who was injured protecting the U.S. Capitol from a mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
Clyde, who has made public statements downplaying the Capitol riot, claimed he didn't shake Fanone's hand because he didn't know his identity. But according to The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, Fanone is demonstrating "that at a basic level, a large swath of Republicans, in aligning themselves with Trump's efforts to overturn the election, also aligned themselves with lawlessness and civic breakdown, against democratic stability and the rule of law."
Sargent concedes that there are plenty of Republicans who haven't stooped to Clyde's level, but says that Clyde's posture is "widely shared among Republicans in a more fundamental sense."
"Like Clyde, a very large number of Republicans are devoted to maintaining the impression that it's not all that crazy for GOP voters to believe there just might be something suspect about the 2020 results," Sargent writes.
In other words, very much like Clyde, much of the GOP "not only actively fed the belief that a grand injustice had been done, which helped inspire the attack on the Capitol; they want those pathologies in some sense to live on."
Read the full op-ed over at The Washington Post.
