Grassley’s glory diminished
A Letter from Iowan Michael Judge
This originally appeared on Michael Judge’s Substack, The First Person with Michael Judge, and is reprinted with permission.
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Of all the folksy things Chuck Grassley has said in his 43 years as a U.S. senator from Iowa, the one that will likely define him was spoken alongside Donald Trump in October 2021 among hundreds of ecstatic Iowans, many holding “Save America” placards, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines.
“I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night,” the then 88-year-old Grassley, who was seeking and won an eighth term in 2022, said after being endorsed by Trump and called up on stage. “If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91% of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart.”
Smart is not the word that comes to mind. What does come to mind is a quote from Cicero, the great Roman orator and senator who understood the difference between mere popularity and the public good. “I have always been of the opinion that unpopularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all, but glory,” he told his fellow senators when denouncing Catiline, a spoiled aristocrat who’d conspired to assassinate Roman senators, burn the city, and seize control with the help of an angry mob.
Sound familiar? True, Grassley did, for a while at least, denounce the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by throngs of radicalized Trump supporters who believed the president’s repeated lies that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that he, not Joe Biden, was the winner. In a statement released on Jan. 6, Grassley rightly condemned the attack on the Capitol as “an attack on American democracy itself.”
As for Trump’s role in that attack? On Feb. 13, 2021, while shamelessly voting to acquit the former president for inciting an insurrection, he conceded that, “President Trump continued to argue that the election had been stolen even though the courts didn’t back up his claims. He belittled and harassed elected officials across the country to get his way. He encouraged his own, loyal vice president, Mike Pence, to take extraordinary and unconstitutional actions during the Electoral College count.” There was, he said, “no doubt” in his mind “that President Trump’s language was extreme, aggressive, and irresponsible.”
So, how does one square Grassley’s condemnation of Trump’s “extreme, aggressive, and irresponsible” language — which fueled an insurrectionist mob whose violent storming of the Capitol resulted in the death of at least one police officer and sent lawmakers, Grassley included, running for safety — with his enthusiastic acceptance of the man’s endorsement?
The answer is apparent, and comes straight from the mouth of Grassley himself. “If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91% of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart.”
In other words, principles be damned: If kissing Trump’s ring, no matter how tarnished, will help Grassley cling to office, even in his 90th year, he sees that as the “smart” move.
The senator’s outrage over Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts — calling the trial a “political lynching” and the jury’s ruling “political persecution” — is further proof of his toeing the Trump line. Like so many GOP leaders, Grassley has abandoned his principles for Trump’s endorsement, and in so doing forfeited what Cicero called the “glory” of “doing what is right.”
Why, at the end of a 65-year political career that began in the Iowa House of Representatives in 1959, would Grassley not take the high road? Pulitzer Prize-winning Iowa journalist Art Cullen has a theory. As he wrote back in 2021 in The Washington Post, before Grassley and Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds both won reelection in 2022, “Grassley might hang around a while, then retire to his New Hartford farm, allowing Reynolds to appoint the senator’s grandson, Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley, to replace him.”
Perhaps that’s true. Or maybe Grassley believes that, as Trump tightens his grip on the throat of the Republican Party, Iowa and the nation need someone with his experience and influence in Washington to curb Trump’s worst instincts. Or maybe it’s all about keeping the pork flowing back to Iowa in the form of ethanol and agriculture subsidies.
Who knows, maybe Grassley no longer considers Trump’s claims that the election was fraudulent to be “extreme, aggressive, and irresponsible.” Maybe he no longer thinks Trump pressured Pence to take “extraordinary and unconstitutional actions” to overturn a lawful election. In any case, Cicero would have seen the time-worn senator’s embrace of Trump — particularly after Jan. 6 and the former president’s recent felony conviction — as an inglorious betrayal of his principles and what he knows to be right.
Michael Judge
Iowa City, Iowa
Has our Senator ever explained his changes in opinion as publicly stated immediately after Jan. 6?
The prospective coming from a Roman Senator plays well as an example of what history does provide for the future generations to learn and appreciate the lessons history has to share. Well done!