Monday, December 21, 2020

The GOP whitewashing of the Trump stain has quietly begun

 

The GOP whitewashing of the Trump stain has quietly begun

 

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

Dec. 21, 2020 at 9:34 a.m. CST

 

Listen closely, and you can already discern how leading Republicans will attempt to expunge the massive black stain of Trumpism from their party.

 

Prepare for a set of rhetorical tricks. Republicans will portray President Trump’s degradations as a matter of tone and personal conduct. They will depict themselves as having been discomfited bystanders to his ugly comportment. And they will carefully sever their own governing ideology from any role in the legacies of destruction he unleashed on the nation.

 

The embryo of this effort can be found in this big New York Times piece about GOP maneuvering over Trump’s rage about his loss. Trump is MIA as president, mostly ignoring the vaccine rollout and refusing to condemn Russia’s massive cyberattack, instead focusing on overturning the election.

 

But, the Times reports, some Republicans profess to see an “upside” in Trump’s disinterest in specifics and in his coming absence:

 

They believe the president’s departure might allow Republicans to return to some of the themes that proved effective in down-ballot races last month, while also depriving Democrats of their most dependable boogeyman.

Going forward, Republicans believe Trump’s “focus will never linger on one matter for long,” the Times notes, and they can get back to elevating the “perceived excesses of the left”:

 

“When Trump is no longer in office there’s going to be less focus on personality and ‘What did he tweet today, what did he say today?’” predicted Senator John Cornyn of Texas, adding, hopefully, that Democrats would soon struggle with internal divisions in a “Tea Party moment” akin to what Republicans faced a decade ago.

 

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (LADY LINDSEY IS A COMPLICIT PIG AND HYPOCRITE) was even more succinct, arguing that the Democrats’ left wing would alienate moderate voters.

 

“Our problem is tone, their problem is policy,” Mr. Graham said of the two parties.

“We’ve both got to overcome problems, but I like our chances better because we can act better and it’s harder for them to legislate differently.”

 

Spot the trick? Cornyn and Graham are professing relief that we won’t have to focus on Trump’s “tweets” and his “tone” anymore. This is supposed to look as if Republicans are criticizing Trump’s excesses while wistfully wanting to get back to substantive arguments over the nation’s direction with “the left.” You can almost see them admiring their halos in the mirror.

 

But no one should be fooled by this game, especially when you hear a lot more of it. Trump’s destruction went far beyond tone, and it continues right now. Many Republicans were active collaborators in much of that destruction. And the destructive influence of both that collaboration and the role of their ideology in facilitating it will continue for the foreseeable future.

 

Trump plays footsie with ‘martial law’

 

We just learned from the Times that Trump privately asked advisers about a supporter’s suggestion that martial law be imposed to “rerun” the election. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani pushed for the state to seize voting machines as part of his effort to invalidate countless votes.

 

Those ideas were shot down. But the damage from Trump’s active efforts to overturn the election is ongoing. As Rosie Gray’s reporting demonstrates, Trump is potentially creating a mass of followers behind the idea that election outcomes are only legitimate when they get their way, and that overturning hated results is not just acceptable, but is correct.

 

Cornyn and his ilk will soon piously insist Trump’s electoral subversion amounted to a few “tweets.” They will pretend they merely wanted to let Trump and his voters down easy, because Trump was “in denial” and his voters “actually believed” Trump won, leaving them in a “difficult” spot.

 

But once again, Trump and his supporters do not actually believe Joe Biden didn’t win. They want to invalidate a legitimate election, because they lost it. As Tom Nichols says, it’s time to stop treating these “feelings” as vaguely legitimate. These folks are angry not that democracy failed, but that it worked, and they claim the right to reverse this.

 

That is what many Republicans actively validated, by backing up Trump in his refusal to admit his loss for weeks. Though there were notable exceptions, very few condemned his actual tactic of trying to get state legislatures to subvert millions of votes, which will be attempted again.

 

We simply don’t know how vast the damage will prove in the future, now that millions have bought into this understanding. Republicans actively collaborated in creating the conditions for this.

 

Insulating right-wing ideology

 

Meanwhile, Congress has reached a deal for a $900 billion stimulus package. That’s great, but it comes only as GOP leaders fear losing the Georgia runoffs, and after months of resisting stimulus checks. All this strongly suggests Republicans will do little to alleviate economic misery next year.

 

Conservatives can claim opposition to more government assistance next year on grounds of principle, of course. But the suddenly discovered concern about deficits that will fake-justify this is pure fraudulence.

 

It is true that Democratic governors posted serious virus-related failures. But as Brian Beutler points out, conservative Republican disdain for government action — in the face of coronavirus and the resulting economic calamity — will be in no small part responsible for the extensive and continuing national damage we’ll see next year.

 

Trump added his own species of malignant illiberalism to this mix, making it even more destructive. But as Beutler notes, any reckoning with this “catastrophe” must assign a central role to “right-wing ideology.”

 

If vaccine distribution goes well, and the economy bounces back, Republicans eyeing the 2022 midterms will need to instill mass amnesia about the wreckage unleashed in part by their ideology, and by the still-undertheorized fact that it so easily melded with Trump’s toxic illiberalism to create one of the biggest governing disasters in modern times.

 

We know how they’ll do this. As the Times piece notes, Republicans want to get past Trump, to get back to attacking “the most extreme ideas on the left.” This is a polite way of saying that Republicans want to get back to conventional GOP plutocratic economic orthodoxy, advanced under cover of fictions about Democratic extremism.

 

And as Republicans are already showing, they will also do this by claiming Trump’s degradations were merely about “tweets” and “tone.”

 

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