This story was originally published by Dermot Cole, Reporting for Alaska.
If you are going to compare a court proceeding in the United States to the regime of murderous dictator Joseph Stalin, you need to be careful or you will expose your ignorance of history.
Sen. Dan Sullivan is a case in point, now claiming that Trump’s trial is “eerily similar to the show trials Stalin launched against his political opponents.”
Sullivan’s claims are eerily similar to those made by all the GOP handmaids debasing themselves in the obsequious Trump sweepstakes, all clad in blue suits and red ties.
The Stalin show trials featured physical torture, forced confessions, preordained guilty verdicts, lies manufactured by the secret police and executions.
The Trump trial features falsified business records that portrayed hush money to a porn star as payment for legal services. There is no preordained guilty verdict of Trump. A jury will decide if Trump, who has fallen asleep in court numerous times, is guilty.
Sycophant Sullivan is parroting the claims of Trump that this is all a sham.
Questioned by CNN in April about whether he was concerned with the alleged conduct of Trump that led to the trial, Sullivan said: “Not really, because it doesn’t seem to be a factor for a lot of people.”
After a New York grand jury indicted Trump on March 30, 2023, Sullivan did not deal with the substance of the case and the falsified documents, but claimed our country was in “banana republic territory.”
Sullivan had not read the indictment, because it was still sealed, but he denounced it, claiming he had read “numerous press reports” and had all the information he needed.
Sullivan reached the same verdict before reading the second Trump indictment, about the mishandling of secret documents, and had his office denounce the contents sight unseen.
Questioned in Juneau shortly afterwards, Sullivan said he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the charges because he hadn’t read the indictment.
“You’ve got my statement and that’s what I’m sticking with,” Sullivan told the Alaska Beacon last June.
Sullivan tried to perfect this clumsy “I haven’t read it” move when Trump was president.
The junior senator spent the entire Trump administration pretending he couldn’t comment on this or that because he had not read, seen or heard of whatever Trump outrage he was being questioned about.
Let’s recap some highlights.
In 2019, when Sullivan was asked about Trump’s perfect phone call pressuring the president of Ukraine to help Trump by investigating Joe Biden, Sullivan said he couldn’t say anything based on press reports.
“I have no comment on that until I see what the facts are,” he said of that Trump scandal. “I’m not going to learn the facts from reading it in the press.”
In 2018, when former Trump attorney Michael Cohen made the allegations of campaign finance violations that started the chain of events connected to the current Trump trial, Sullivan said he hadn’t had time to think.
Questioned by reporters on Aug. 22, 2018, Sullivan claimed to have been so interested in an Alaska primary the day before — he wasn’t on the ballot — that “I haven’t thought about” whether the Cohen claims deserved a Senate investigation.
Before the 2016 election, Sullivan refused three times to say on MSNBC that racist comments by Trump were racist. Sullivan agreed they were racist only when asked a fourth time.
Sullivan said he did not vote for Trump in 2016 because the Access Hollywood tape showed Trump to be unfit for office.
After the 2016 election, Sullivan became a loyal member of the Trump party, never criticizing Trump.
In June 2020, Trump made up a story that a 75-year-old Buffalo protester knocked down by police could have been an “ANTIFA provocateur.”
A reporter tried to show Sullivan the Trump tweet and the senator said, “I don’t want to comment right now. I’m on my way to a meeting. I’ll see it when I see it.”
Another moment when Sullivan had nothing to say took place shortly before the 2020 election. It was after Trump refused to condemn white supremacy in a debate with Joe Biden.
“Senator, should the president have condemned white supremacy at the debate the other night?” CNN reporter Ted Barrett asked Sullivan as they walked along.
Hard to imagine an easier question. But Sullivan didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m not commenting. I didn’t see the debate,” Sullivan said.
“You didn’t see the debate?” Barrett said.
“I didn’t. I was doing another event, for myself,” Sullivan said.
“Certainly you’ve heard about it. Do you think it was mishandled?”
“Does it hurt your race, him saying things like that?” Barrett asked.
Sullivan “stared at the reporter silently for about 8 seconds before a Senate subway door closed, and whisked him away,” the CNN reporter said.
The most serious Sullivan silence of his Senate career came when he refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the election and refused to say a thing about Trump’s repeated election lies.
Then, as now, Sullivan put allegiance to Trump ahead of defending important American institutions under attack by Trump.
As I wrote here on Jan. 10, 2021, it had been obvious to Murkowski the preceding November that Trump had lost. It was obvious to everyone who was not in the Trump cult.
The failure to produce any winning legal arguments should have ended this, but Senate Republicans encouraged Trump with their support or silence and Trump continued to lie from the highest office in the land.
As late as Monday, Jan. 4, 2021, Sullivan refused to comment on the GOP coup proposed by radical members of Congress who didn’t want to accept the election results.
On Thursday, Jan. 7, Sullivan claimed to the Daily News he had “decided a number of days ago” to oppose the coup and accept the election results. Sullivan had claimed on Dec. 14 that he had personally accepted Biden’s win, but he never called on Trump to stop lying.
“I think had the president accepted the election results earlier and repudiated the mob violence earlier and more forcefully, it could have had an impact yesterday,” Sullivan told the Daily News a day after the riots, rewriting history to portray himself as someone who wanted Trump to change his behavior.
In this post-riot 2,100-word term paper his office inflicted on Alaskans, Sullivan said, “I wish fervently that President Trump had accepted the results of the election. . .”
The truth is that Sullivan waited until after the insurrection to express his fervent wish. Before that he was giving it the Sullivan Pebble Mine treatment — fervently wishing to stay quiet in a corner, trying to ride out the election without crossing Trump or Trump voters.
We have now reached the point of the Trump campaign where Sullivan will do or say almost anything for Trump, ranging from saying Trump is mentally fit to be president, to the Trump-approved comparisons of a U.S. courtroom to the Stalin regime.
Dermot Cole has worked as a newspaper reporter, columnist and author in Alaska for more than 40 years. Support his work here.