A long time ago, in my student days at the University of Maryland in College Park, I took a Law of the Press course from an instructor named Lawrence Hogan, father of a future governor named Larry Hogan.
It was a pretty tough class, and so we laughingly called ourselves “Hogan’s Heroes,” after the TV sitcom of that era.
But we applied the nickname inaccurately. A few years after he taught this law course, the elder Hogan became a U.S. congressman. Here was real heroism. He was the first Republican to take a stand against Richard Nixon in the time of Watergate.
The son now matches his father’s courage. He dares to stand up to Donald Trump when so many Republicans, to their eternal shame, gave Trump a pass on his traitorous behavior in the sacking of the U.S. Capitol.
Over the past four years, Hogan has stood up to Trump repeatedly where others in his party have cowered. Now, on CNN Sunday, in the aftermath of the Senate’s impeachment acquittal, Hogan said Trump was guilty – and then he remembered his own father from a distance of nearly half a century.
“I’m so proud of my dad for that moment when he had the courage to stand up” against Nixon, Hogan told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “A lot of [Republicans] didn’t. It’s not easy to go against your party. It’s hard to do the right thing sometimes.”
Then, CNN ran a clip of the elder Hogan, some years after his Nixon vote.
“I lost a lot of friends, a lot of contributors, and lost the nomination for governor because of my vote against Nixon,” said Hogan, who passed away in 2017.
‘Twas ever thus.
Those 43 Republicans who declared Trump innocent in the rioting of Jan. 6 know better. They cover themselves not only in cowardice but in new depths of hypocrisy.
(Speaking of hypocrisy, could it get more naked than Fox News giving us a panel of three “experts” who decried the Trump impeachment proceedings – and one of them was Kenneth Starr, the chief prosecutor of Bill Clinton? Apparently, it’s alright to impeach a president for an extramarital affair but not for leading a murderous insurrection against the U.S. government.)
But then Sen. Mitch McConnell surely topped Starr. The Republican Senate leader voted to acquit Trump, and then gave a speech excoriating him, and said there was “no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible” for the rioting.
Actually, McConnell’s being kind of modest. Yes, Trump’s responsible for the riot, but so is McConnell. As the top Senate Republican, he spent four years putting up with Trump’s outrages. He knew better, but he looked the other way.
And that includes the first impeachment of Trump, when McConnell announced in advance that there was “zero chance” the Senate would convict the president.
Then, in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory, McConnell spent six weeks giving credence to Trump’s claims of election fraud.
As Adam Jentleson writes in his new book, “Kill Switch,” McConnell “offered legitimacy” to Trump’s lie that the Democrats rigged the election. “Other Republicans took their signals from McConnell and continued to fan the flames. You can blame the rioters, but the entire Republican Party was telling them their claims were legitimate,” writes Jentleson.
On Dec. 15, when McConnell finally admitted Trump had lost an honest election, “as many as 82 percent of Republican voters believed Trump’s false claims of fraud,” Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker, “and when his enraged supporters gathered on the National Mall, many of them were determined to use force to override the official election results.”
Sunday on CNN, asked about McConnell’s speech belatedly blasting Trump, Gov. Hogan said, “McConnell’s words were strong. But they didn’t match the way he voted.”
This is known as understatement.
Maybe McConnell thought he was offering a tiny gesture of heroism. He was wrong. For political heroism, look to Hogan, father and son.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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