Lisa Murkowski finally says the quiet part out loud

18 April

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) walks to the chamber as senators grapple with making a deal to fund the U.S. government and avert a shutdown, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 14, 2025.

In a week of yet more horrific bombshell stories out of Washington, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s admission that she feared retaliation from the anti-American Trump Administration for speaking out against any of scores of appalling assaults to our well-being should have produced the loudest bang.

In remarks made in a room full of Alaska nonprofit leaders Monday, and first reported by the Anchorage Daily News, Murkowski laid bare her fears of legislating under what is fast becoming a very dangerous and fascist Republican regime:

“We are all afraid … We’re in a time and place where — I don’t know, I certainly have not — I have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real. And that’s not right. But that’s what you’ve asked me to do and so I’m going to use my voice to the best of my ability.”

Murkowski made many eye-opening comments like this one in the story above, and when you are done here, I encourage you to take a look at them.

I will not go as hard on Murkowski as others have, who have found her brush with candor to be far too little far too late, and woefully short on meaningful action — though I completely get that response.

To her credit, the senior U.S. Senator from Alaska has been one of the very few Republicans who have pushed back at all during the repulsive Trump’s two reigns of terror. If every Republican senator had shown even half as much backbone as she has, we might be in a very different place right now.

However, I will say this to her in earnest:

There are two directions you can go right now, Ms. Murkowski: You can quit, go quietly into the night, and live with yourself in disgrace, or you can do what you know is right, and lead from the front, stand up for America, and provide safe haven for Americans who are under severe duress.
But you can no longer feign ignorance.
The genie is out of the bottle. We know you know. We sympathize with your fears, but we will not sympathize with any further inaction.

By showing uncommon honesty for a politician in her repulsive party, Murkowski has now punctured the veneer of being quietly on the inside and knowing something is desperately wrong, and publicly standing up and actually DOING something about it on the outside.

Murkowski is hardly the only Republican lawmaker who knows that the violent, destructive Trump is dangerous as hell. Now she must lead and bring along as many of these Republicans with her as possible. This is how tyranny ends. This is how evil is stopped dead in its tracks.

And if this fails, then bare minimum, she should abandon a party that has so clearly abandoned her, and everything and everybody she claims to believe in.

Now, Senator.

RIGHT NOW.

NOW READ: There’s a new dress code in Trump’s DC — and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

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