Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a joint statement that was stunning in its hypocrisy. The odd couple condemned Kamala Harris labeling Donald Trump a “fascist”. Such “irresponsible rhetoric,” they warned, escalated the likelihood of further attempts to assassinate the former president.

Johnson himself had been the House point man for Team Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. I Oath and honor, Liz Cheney’s powerful exposé of the Republican Party’s capitulation to Donald Trump, she tells how on January 5, 2021, Mike Johnson used scare tactics to get 125 members of the House Republican Caucus to sign a Trump-generated amicus brief supporting the bogus lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Even after his most unlikely elevation to the podium, Johnson continued to be a crucial purveyor of Trump’s lies and smears. After Trump was indicted by state and federal prosecutors for business fraud as well as for his role in the 2020-2021 coup attempt, Johnson announced that the House would hold hearings on the government’s illegal deployment of the courts against the former president, who, Johnson stressed, had “done nothing wrong . . . All these cases must be closed.” It was amazing gas lighting.

Unlike Johnson, McConnell has not always been a mouthpiece for Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. When the Senate convened on January 6, 2021 to certify Joe Biden’s election, McConnell told his fellow senators that the upcoming vote would be the most important he had taken in his 36 years in the body. Those protesting the results were engaged in nothing less than an assault on our democratic process and the Constitution itself. It would not be the last time McConnell denounced Trump’s fascism. In the aftermath of the Senate’s failure to convict Trump of effectively inciting a rebellion, McConnell called on the justice system to hold Trump fully accountable for his crimes.

At the time, McConnell still believed January 6 had been Trump’s Waterloo. He soon found it necessary, as he always has, to take hold of the prevailing winds in the Republican party, even if they were in a direction he would not have chosen. So in the past week, when previously secret comments from McConnell revealed his disdain for Trump as “a despicable human being” unfit for office, the minority leader aptly responded that many other Republicans had said worse about Trump. “We’re all on the same team now,” he declared, tacitly acknowledging that in McConnell World, party takes precedence over everything else, even democracy.

Last week, the Herald-Leader also carried the story about “the rising tide of threats against poll workers and political activists” in swing states. A survey of election workers by the Brennan Center found that nearly 40% of them had been the target of threats or harassment. A third of workers reported knowing someone who had quit because of the threats. Nothing has been heard from Johnson or McConnell about such threats. Just as they have been silent about the threats against judges, prosecutors, court staff, jurors and the families of all of the above – all prompted by Donald Trump’s rhetoric of such an irresponsible magnitude that several judges issued gag orders against the former president.

Nor are Johnson and McConnell bothered by Trump’s inflammatory rants at his rallies, during which Trump conjures up a dystopian America, “occupied” by murderous illegal immigrants brought in by a criminal Democratic regime and defended by a “fake news” industry that wants destroy the country’s economy, Christianity and white supremacy. This “enemy within” Trump gleefully assures that he will eliminate with mass roundups, prisons, deportations and selective executions needed to make America great again.

Sunday night’s reenactment of Nuremberg at Madison Square Garden was a sickening display of the baseless demonization and toxic rhetoric that has become the lingua franca of the Republican Party. Every Trump rally, every interview, every tweet in the middle of the night provides new evidence of his fascism. If someone sounds like a fascist, and acts like a fascist, you can rightly conclude that he is a fascist. It would be a grave dereliction of one’s civic duty not to call Trump out for who he is. Nothing less than the fate of this nation is at stake.

Robert Emmett Curran is a professor of history emeritus at Georgetown University who lives in Richmond.