After Capitol attack, Republicans are again whitewashing Trump’s behavior

“They beat him up before he got into office. They’re beating him up after he leaves office,” she added. “I mean, at some point — I mean, give the man a break. I mean, move on.”

Over and over for the past four years, this has been the pattern. Trump does something which steps well beyond the bounds of normal political activity or past broadly agreed-upon moral boundaries, and he faces quick, bipartisan blowback. But in short order, facing annoyance from Trump’s base of support and criticism from the conservative media eager to endear itself to that base, Republicans slowly begin stepping back and recontextualizing what happened. Generally, that includes the determination that fault, at least in part, lay elsewhere.

“I said, I thought the president had some responsibility when it came to the response,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an interview over the weekend about his brief condemnation of Trump’s role in what happened. But: “If you listen to what the president said at the rally, he said, ‘demonstrate peacefully.’ And then I got a question later about whether did he incite them.”

“I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility,” he added.

That’s the chain: Trump did something that, yeah, was not great. But then, what even is “great”? It’s like a college freshman in his first philosophy course realizing that he can suddenly generate a cloud of subjectivity around anything.

One of the media’s broad failures over the past four years was not pushing back harder on the effort to similarly whitewash the results of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. By now, there are very few Republicans and fewer Trump supporters who accept the events that led up to Trump’s election as aberrant or worrisome, perhaps because they haven’t been exposed to detailed reporting about them. Instead, there’s been a very effective counternarrative which slowly accreted in the conservative media and on Trump’s Twitter feed, one which holds that the wrongdoing was centralized in government agents hostile to the former president.

Let’s embark on a tired thought experiment, but a still-useful one. Consider this paragraph:

Imagine if, during the 2020 election, Joe Biden repeatedly expressed an unusual amount of latitude for the anti-democratic behavior of a foreign power. Members of his campaign had known ties to that power, with a senior adviser being paid to promote the foreign country’s state-run television network the prior year, another adviser traveling to the nation during the campaign and his campaign manager having overtly worked for a foreign political party linked to that power. During the campaign, the same foreign power hacked the campaign of Biden’s opponent and released a wide range of documents through WikiLeaks muddying the final weeks of the campaign to Biden’s advantage. We later learn that a longtime Biden adviser had claimed — and appeared to have — links to WikiLeaks, including awareness of upcoming releases. Another adviser had been told by a man linked to the foreign country that it was in possession of material related to Biden’s opponent before any such material was presented. A bipartisan Senate committee later established that a close business partner of Biden’s campaign manager had links to the foreign country’s intelligence agencies and that the campaign manager had, during the campaign, passed proprietary polling information from the campaign to this person — even as the foreign power was actively buying ads on social media meant to influence political activity in the United States. In the summer, agents of the foreign power promised the Biden campaign negative material about his opponent which Biden’s son welcomed. He and the campaign manager, among others, then met with agents of the foreign power in the building that also served as Biden’s home. That meeting happened shortly after Biden himself had, in a speech, promised he would soon release incriminating information about his opponent. Imagine if, asked about all of this, Biden refused to talk to investigators but, instead, released a number of statements in which he repeatedly claimed not to remember what had occurred.

Consider the response were you to take that paragraph and present it to a Trump supporter or a Fox News anchor. Would they suggest that this was an unfair targeting of Biden or a demonstration of bias on the part of the investigators who uncovered this information? Reader, I propose that they would not.

All of that occurred in the context of Trump’s 2016 campaign and is well documented. Yes, there were investigations into the campaign’s interactions with Russia which didn’t establish enough evidence to support bringing criminal conspiracy charges. But it occurred as written.

Now imagine step two: Biden supporters dismissing the paragraph above because they learned that the FBI investigator who launched the initial probe had disparaged Biden during the campaign, though an internal investigation later found no evidence that bias spurred the probe. Imagine those same supporters also dismissing that paragraph because a warrant obtained against one of those involved — the adviser who traveled to the foreign power — after he’d left the campaign was obtained in part on the basis of dubious information.

You can generate a cloud of subjectivity around anything.

This is not simply an academic exercise. That the probe into Trump’s 2016 campaign team yielded so many questionable — and largely still unresolved — interactions has all been rolled up into a neat ball of “they’re out to get Trump.” And that ball is shorthanded as “the Russia hoax,” a descriptor used to wave away any questions about Trump: oh, it’s just the Russia hoax all over again. As we’ve noted before, Trump was referring to the Russia investigation as a hoax in March 2017, well before those dismissals had emerged. The story was that it was a hoax before the rationale for calling it a hoax was retrofitted into the narrative.

It’s worth reiterating this point: All of the questions about Trump and Russia were minimized and an alternate scenario where he’s the victim generated — and that was all packaged together to serve as a “they’re always out to get him!” get-out-of-trouble-free card for the duration of his presidency. The country watched as the investigation into Russian interference and Trump’s campaign was minimized. We failed at preventing it from slowly transforming into a rhetorical hall pass for Trump’s behavior.

That is a central lesson for the moment. There is an effort underway to minimize what happened Jan. 6, not only in defense of Trump but in defense of those Republican officials — such as McCarthy — who tacitly or explicitly supported the dishonest claims of election fraud that undergirded the day’s violence. There is an effort to dismiss the violence as aberrant or as the sort of bad which makes it comparable to things such as shutting down Twitter accounts. There will be a strong temptation among those who bear responsibility for the attempted insurrection to cast their involvement as necessary or right and to reframe the intent of the attempted insurrection itself.

What we can’t do is let it get Russia-hoaxed. What happened is obvious: Months of rhetoric from the former president amplified and encouraged by his party and supportive members of the media led to a massive protest from which thousands of people emerged feeling justified in interrupting Congress by force.

“Not great” is an unacceptable understatement and should not become the norm.