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This next year is going to be a big challenge for the media and for the Democrats. There will be an attempt by Republicans to distance themselves from Donald Trump and rehabilitate their tattered “conservative”brand in order to sabotage Joe Biden’s presidency. The temptation to allow them to do it will be great, since the media wants to prove itself to be “fair and balanced” and will likely jump at the opportunity to let the GOP off the hook since they’ve been so hard on Trump. And the Democrats will be twisted into pretzels, as usual, by the traps they have laid for themselves over the past few years.
You see, Republicans have a very clever way of inoculating themselves from accountability by turning the Democrats’ own ethics against them. For instance, Trump spent the last four years incessantly threatening to jail his political opponents, even strutting around the stage like an orange Mussolini as his ecstatic followers gleefully chanted “lock her up!” at political rallie. Liberal pundits wrote essays decrying this practice as something worthy of a tinpot dictator in a banana republic and Democratic politicians took to the floor of congress and the TV cameras decrying these threats as assaults on our democratic system. “We don’t do that in America!” they cried.
Unfortunately, that gave the Republicans a weapon to wield against them if they wanted to pursue justice in the case of the most corrupt, perfidious president in American history, Donald Trump himself. Imagine the Republican high dudgeon if a Biden department of Justice were to pursue criminal charges against Trump for any of the myriad of corrupt acts he committed while in office?. You can believe they will throw that “we don’t do that in America” in Democrats’ faces, barely able to contain their smirks, and Democrats will trip over themselves trying to explain why they aren’t hypocrites.
You can already see this happening in small ways. One hopes that Democrats and the press do not fall into old traps and allow the Republicans to pretend that they are ethical after all they’ve done or allow them to turn minor Democratic infractions into Trump-level scandals. I’ll just remind you of one famous example of how that works:
Here’s a small example of what I’m talking about from this week:
And, here’s the media and unnamed Democrats taking the bait. Soon, her (accurate) comment will be considered a major gaffe that caused the Republicans to refuse to work with the Biden administration because they are so personally offended. The same Republicans who have collaborated with Donald Trump and covered for his worst crimes.
This dynamic is a problem when it comes to GOP accountability. Being utterly shameless as Marco Rubio shows in that tweet makes the media’s job easy and the Democrats queasy. And it simply cannot be allowed to happen this time around.
Greg Sargent wrote about this today, from a different angle and he’s right about that too. He says;
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 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.
Sargent is right. NO ONE SHOULD BE FOOLED. This is their game and it’s important to be strong and resist these bad faith attempts to rehab their brand and sabotage the Democrats. It’s not going to be easy. But if we let this one go, we will be sorry. They have activated a right wing faction in this country that is addicted to conspiracy theories and believes they are entitled to win by any means necessary. It won’t end well.
I’ve been writing about this phenomenon for a very long time. It’s one of the reasons I got into this blogging thing way back when. The right’s assault on democracy and its propagandistic manipulation of our politics has been a long term, systematic project going back decades and it’s finally succeeded in completely radicalizing its followers. Getting rid of Trump was job one, but the threat is far from over.
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Happy Hollandaise.
cheers,
digby