[ A central theme of the Jan. 6 hearings has been Republican
redemption. A parade of Republican witnesses has testified to being
pushed beyond the limits of their loyalty to Donald Trump.]
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THE MYTH OF THE GOOD TRUMP OFFICIAL  
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Michelle Goldberg
July 22, 2022
New York Times
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_ A central theme of the Jan. 6 hearings has been Republican
redemption. A parade of Republican witnesses has testified to being
pushed beyond the limits of their loyalty to Donald Trump. _

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), photo credit:
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters // National Review

 

For some, the breaking point came when he tried to enlist them in a
scheme to overturn state elections. Others revolted at the former
president’s attempts to corrupt the Justice Department, or at his
role in inciting an insurrection. A rioter, awakened to Trump’s
lies, testified about being misled; in a poignant moment after the
seventh hearing, he apologized to the Capitol Police.

Republican Representative Liz Cheney, the Jan. 6 committee’s vice
chair, has been perhaps its most prominent voice. At Thursday’s
prime-time hearing, the last until September, she painted die-hard
believers in Trump’s big lie as noble victims. “Donald Trump knows
that millions of Americans who supported him would stand up and defend
our nation were it threatened,” said Cheney. “They would put their
lives and their freedom at stake to protect her. And he is preying on
their patriotism. He is preying on their sense of justice. And on Jan.
6, Donald Trump turned their love of country into a weapon against our
Capitol and our Constitution.”

It is a sign of the committee Democrats’ love of country that they
have allowed the hearings to proceed this way. They are crafting a
story about Jan. 6 as a battle between Republican heroism and
Republican villainy. It seems intended to create a permission
structure for Trump supporters to move on without having to disavow
everything they loved about his presidency, or to admit that Jan. 6
was the logical culmination of his sadistic politics.

IIf you believe, as I do, that Trump’s sociopathy makes him a unique
threat to this country’s future, it makes sense to try to lure
Republicans away from him rather than damn them for their complicity.
There is a difference, however, between a smart narrative and an
accurate one. In truth, you can’t cleave Trump and his most
shameless antidemocratic enablers off from the rest of the Republican
Party, because the party has been remade in his image. Plenty of
ex-Trump officials have come off well in the hearings, including the
former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, the former
acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and, in video testimony, the
former White House counsel Pat Cipollone. That shouldn’t erase the
ignominy of having served Trump in the first place.
 

An image of Senator Josh Hawley gesturing to insurrectionists on Jan.
6. (Credit: Jordan Gale for The New York Times)
I have a lot of respect for Cheney, who is likely sacrificing her
future in Republican politics in her attempt to hold Trump
accountable, and for the bravery of witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson,
who testified despite the Trump camp’s reported attempt
to intimidate her
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But whatever they say now, the witnesses who worked for Trump enabled
his mounting authoritarianism. Each contributed, in his or her own
way, not just to Jan. 6, but also to eroding our democracy so that
Jan. 6 may be just a prequel. Each helped bring us to a point where,
according to a recent survey
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more than half of Americans believe a civil war will erupt in the
United States in the near future.

“It was a privilege to serve in the White House,” Pottinger said
during his testimony on Thursday. “I’m also very proud of
President Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments.”

Pottinger worked for the Trump administration from its beginning until
Jan. 7, 2021. He was one of many who didn’t resign over Trump’s
defense of the rioters in Charlottesville, Va., his attempted
extortion of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his claims to
have won an election he clearly lost, to cite just a few milestones.
During Pottinger’s testimony, he said
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“emboldened our enemies by helping give them ammunition to feed a
narrative that our system of government doesn’t work, that the
United States is in decline.” But there’s no way to separate that
from the rest of Trump’s legacy, or from Pottinger’s own. He
shouldn’t be proud.

One of the few Trumpists who seems to have really reckoned with what
she participated in is Stephanie Grisham, who is Trump’s former
press secretary, though she never held a news conference. “I don’t
think I can rebrand; I think this will follow me forever,” she told
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York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi last year. “I believe that I was part
of something unusually evil.”

 

They all were, everyone who kept that catastrophic administration
functioning at a minimal level while Trump built the cult of
personality that made Jan. 6 possible. It’s important to remember
their culpability because Trump is probably going to run for president
again, and he could win. If he does, Republicans who like to think of
themselves as good people, who don’t want to spend their lives in
the right-wing fever swamps, will be faced with the question of
whether to serve him. They will see the former Trump officials
who _were_ able to rebrand despite sticking with him almost to the
end, and they might think there’s not much to lose.

In his bracing book, “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the
Republican Road to Hell
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Tim Miller, a former Republican National Committee spokesman, tries to
understand why friends and associates who once hated Trump eventually
submitted to him. “There were thousands of people who at some level
complied with Trump who weighed the costs,” he wrote. “Who knew
the dangers,” who might have chosen a different path if “they
could have imagined a different, more fulfilling future for
themselves.” The Jan. 6 committee is trying, against the suck of
Trump’s dark gravity, to point the way to such a future. To do that,
it has been liberal with absolution. That doesn’t mean absolution is
deserved.

_[MICHELLE GOLDBERG has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is
the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s
rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual
harassment. @michelleinbklyn [[link removed]]]_

* Donald Trump
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* Jan. 06
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* Capitol coup
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* Coup attempt
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* Fascism
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* transfer of power
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* Insurrection
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* US Rule of Law
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* democracy
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* 2020 elections
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* January 6 committee
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* GOP
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* Republican Party
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* MAGA
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* Trump Administration
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