This piece by McCay Coppins on the Republicans’ plan to move past the Trump era is exactly right: they are going to try to pretend it never happened.
As Donald Trump lurches through the disastrous final days of his presidency, Republicans are just beginning to survey the wreckage of his reign. Their party has been gutted, their leader is reviled, and after four years of excusing every presidential affront to “conservative values,” their credibility is shot. How will the GOP recover from the complicity and corruption of the Trump era? To many Republicans, the answer is simple: Pretend it never happened.
“We’re about to see a whole political party do a large-scale version of ‘New phone, who dis?’” says Sarah Isgur, a former top spokesperson for the Trump Justice Department. “It will be like that boyfriend you should never have dated—the mistake that shall not be mentioned.”
The plan might seem implausible, but I’ve heard it floated repeatedly in recent days by Republican strategists who are counting down the minutes of the Trump presidency. The hardcore MAGA crowd will stay loyal, of course, and those few who have consistently opposed Trump will escape with their reputations intact. But for the majority of GOP officials, apparatchiks, and commentators who sacrificed their dignity at the altar of Trump, a collective case of amnesia seems destined to set in the moment he leaves office.
People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to “fiscal responsibility” and “limited government” will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of “healing” and “moving forward,” but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory.
When I asked Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist, how his party will remember the Trump years, he responded with a litany of episodes to memory-hole. “Republicans will want to forget the constant chaos, the lies, the double-dealing, the hiring of family, and the escalating rhetoric that incited hate for four years [and] directly led to what happened at the Capitol,” he told me. “Basically, any of those things that we never would have let an Obama or Clinton get away with, but constantly justified to ourselves in the name of judges.”
But while some Republicans might be eager to “walk away from Trump,” Heye added, “many will continue talking about the things in the administration they supported”—from tax cuts and deregulation to flooding the judiciary with conservatives.
Indeed, the narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments thanks to the wisdom and guidance of the Republicans in his orbit. In these accounts, Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies—not to mention his attempts to overturn an election—are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features.
Alyssa Farah, who worked for more than three years in the Trump White House as a communications adviser, resigned last month after the president refused to concede the election. She’s spent the past couple of weeks condemning Trump’s conspiracy theories and distancing herself from the havoc they’ve wrought. Still, when we spoke, Farah was eager to highlight America’s booming pre-coronavirus economy as proof of concept for traditional conservative policies. She lamented that Trump’s legacy might be defined by “the final days of it”—that is, the violent insurrection he incited and the re-impeachment it provoked—but she told me that Republicans shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Hoping to provoke a slightly more introspective assessment of the president she served, I asked Farah how she thought the Trump era would be written about in history books. After thinking for a moment, she suggested that this period might not be remembered for Trump at all, but rather for the “once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic” that happened to occur on his watch.
There’s no guarantee Trump will go along, of course.. He needs attention and lives for revenge. He may not be willing to let them move on even if they want to. But they will try. And if the media lets them get away with it, it will work too.
It’s happened in the past after all. Think about Mike Pence (Mike Pence!) carrying on about how Trump avoided wars after spending more than a decade pimping the war on terror. This is what they always do. Eventually they will disavow Trump too, although that will have to wait a bit to see where he ends up and how long it takes his cult members to deprogram. But you can bet their plan is to toss this whole ugly, UnAmerican nightmare down the memory hole.
Republicans will insist that any mention of their perfidy is “old news” and accuse those who bring it up of not wanting to move the country forward. They will turn on the sanctimony so hard it will give you a migraine.
One group that doesn’t seem ready to let these people rewrite their history is the Never Trumpers:
Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016, told me he was unimpressed by this sudden rush to righteous indignation. “The newfound outrage from former Trump supporters rings a bit hollow, given how quiet most were during Charlottesville and countless other escapades,” he said. “Forty-seven months of blind loyalty followed by one month of conscience doesn’t earn you much more than the Mick Mulvaney profile-in-courage award.”
Sullivan was less certain, though, about whether the revisionism would work. “I don’t expect the voters will treat them any more kindly than the historians—but I’ve been wrong before.” After all, some predicted that the Republicans who worked for George W. Bush, especially the architects of the Iraq War, would be shunned once he left office. Instead, many of them have settled into respectable—and lucrative—perches as commentators, lobbyists, and elder statesmen. As long as the cable-news bookers keep calling, redemption is always available.
That is a possibility. Consider that some of these networks kept some of these liars on the air all during the Trump years. (I’m looking at you Chuck Todd and your pal Hugh Hewitt.) People should scream about it on social media if they do it. It does bother them to be publicly chastised.
This is why it’s so important for there to be investigations and accountability for what has gone down these last four years. If they fail to do it, the Republicans will simply reset as if nothing happened … and then they’ll do it again. Why wouldn’t they?