Betsy DeVos comes out in favor of another January 6th
The billionaire enemy of public education offers a tacit endorsement of another insurrection
On Thursday, January 7th, 2021, Betsy DeVos pretended she cared about the United States of America.
That’s when the billionaire donor, her one qualification for the job of Secretary of Education that Trump gave her as a sort of tote bag, and one of only six members of Trump’s cabinet who lasted Trump’s entire term resigned in response to January 6th and Trump’s “unconscionable” behavior.
“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” her letter released to the Wall Street Journal noted. She added sharply, “Impressionable children are watching all this, and they are learning from us.”
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, wife of Mitch McConnell, and Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former interim Chief of Staff and then special envoy to Northern Ireland, also offered their resignations.
Remembering these mostly empty protests in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s attempt to make himself a dictator is like a moment frozen in amber when the GOP elite thought they had rid themselves of Trump.
Now, the GOP elite like DeVos is all in on Trump again:
She has her conditions, namely working even harder to gut public education.
What’s even more notable is what she isn’t asking for.
She isn’t asking Trump to apologize or at least show some regret for January 6th. She isn’t asking Trump to stop vowing to pardon the worst of the January 6th insurrectionists and rioters. She isn’t asking Trump to stop positioning himself and his followers for another January 6th by taking extraordinary steps months out from the election to prevent the certification of a Trump loss.
She wants what she wants and is willing to end democracy to get it. In fact, at this point, ending democracy may be necessary to prevent the scourge of well-funded, thriving public schools. And if anyone gets that right-wing politics is ultimately a multilevel marketing scheme that requires you to get right behind whichever Ponzi is at the top of the pyramid, it’s this Amway heir.
DeVos, like so much of the GOP elite that ever showed any reluctance to Trump, has decided that children are watching and they need to be taught a lesson. That lesson is that power is its own defense and its own excuse. If democracy means accepting losing and what the majority wants, a dictator would be preferable.
