By Chris Satullo
So much losing. So much losing.
Rather than admit they’ve lost the White House, a raft of court cases and any shred of integrity, Trumpists will now do what they do best:
Pivot to a new fantasy. Find a way to keep painting their hero and themselves as victims abused by godless, evil liberals who’ll stop at nothing to win.
Follow along with me as conservative pundit Byron York of the Washington Examiner unspools this new narrative. (Thanks to my friend Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, for flagging this piffle for us liberals.)
York recently wrote:
President Trump’s defenders have pointed out many times, correctly, that he has every right to pursue legal challenges to election results in states he lost narrowly. Going to court is not staging a coup or plotting to destroy democracy, as some of Trump’s adversaries have charged.
Sure, fine, go to court. Every dog should have his day. But perhaps leave out the part where you assert massive fraud and a stolen election, inciting your followers to violence – without ever once, in the four dozen failed suits you filed, actually producing serious evidence or making a coherent legal argument. (And…”narrowly”? The margins for Biden in Pennsylvania and Michigan each were larger than Trump’s 2016 combined margin in those two plus Wisconsin. Yet Hillary Clinton conceded on Election Night.)
I struggle to think of anyone in my lifetime who’s done remotely as much damage to democracy as Trump and his sycophants have these last six weeks. Not even Tricky Dick.
Now, watch as York executes the pivot – away from cries of a stolen election to claims that Democrats were just so darned unfair to the Great Orange One that it removes all obligation to be fair-minded, respectful or, heaven forbid, cooperative with Joe Biden:
[Trump] faced terrible headwinds all year. The [election] result was not outside the range of reasonable probability – especially after Trump endured four years of 24/7 beating from the resistance, NeverTrumpers, elements inside his own government, and many of the nation’s largest media organizations.
So, Byron, let me see if I have this right:
- On the one hand, Trump was right not to concede or cooperate in a normal transition, right to whip up his followers and clog the courts with baseless claims of fraud – all justified by the notion he couldn’t possibly have lost fair and square.
- Yet, on the other hand, Trump losing was a “reasonable probability” all along.
Well, yeah, I’d say it was probable, given that in mid-October the nation’s most reliable pollsters had Biden up by at least twice the comfortable margin he eventually won by. (If anybody had cause to be baffled by the tallies in some states and to suspect hijinks, it was a Democrat.)
By “headwinds,” does York mean any of these things?
- How Trump botched pandemic response, personally leading to thousands of deaths.
- How he racked up the worst jobs record of any president in 70 years, while seeing the trade deficit, national deficit, social polarization and racist violence all grow on his watch.
- How he played footsie with Putin and other dictators.
- How he will be in the top tier in any ranking of Most Corrupt Presidents of All Time.
Those are some “headwinds,” for sure. The mystery is that he didn’t get whomped much harder.
But, no, that’s not what York means by “headwinds” at all. No, sirree-Bob:
[This], in the end, was the real election interference, and Trump supporters have every reason to be angry for a long time. The effort to remove the president from office began before he even took office.
An alliance of Trump antagonists in federal law enforcement, intelligence, and the media sought to undermine him from the first moment. From the slick maneuver to publicize the slanders of the Steele dossier to the effort to nail Gen. Michael Flynn to James Comey’s game of assuring Trump he was not under investigation while leaving the public impression that he was, and then, to the years-long Mueller investigation, in which the special counsel discovered early on that the collusion accusation could not be confirmed yet allowed the investigation to go on and on — through all that, Trump faced unprecedented efforts to cripple his presidency and make sure he would not be reelected. In late 2019, House Democrats even impeached the president specifically in hopes that it would weaken him so much that he could not have a second term.
Ah, so many distortions, so little time.
Alliance? Or was it that a variety of patriotic actors with expertise and access to information became similarly but independently alarmed about Trump and Russia? Do we really want FBI agents and intelligence professionals who see signs that a presidential campaign is courting help from one of our chief enemies just to shrug and don their MAGA hats?
The Steele dossier. Publication of this red herring by BuzzFeed did not happen before the election, but admittedly it did occur a few days before Inauguration – then was roundly criticized by many in the supposedly lockstep “liberal media.”
James Comey. I have no words for how he fouled everything up, but anyone who thinks he did more damage to Trump than to Clinton during the election needs a refresher course in logic.
“The effort to nail Gen. Flynn.” Who pleaded guilty.
The Mueller Report. Those who actually read the reportknow it indicates the Trump campaign was eager to collude with Russians offering help. But the campaign was basically too incompetent to pull it off. Those who read it also understand that Mueller wasn’t able to get to the bottom of what happened re: Russia in 2016 in part because of criminal obstruction of justice that denied him witnesses and evidence. Also, in part because, straight arrow to a fault, Mueller hewed to restrictions on where he could take the investigation imposed by Trump’s Justice Department. The second half of his report lays out a strong case on crimes of obstruction, which Mueller didn’t pursue because (again, straight arrow) he chose to comply with a Watergate-era Justice Department memo which says that sitting presidents can’t be charged.
Impeachment. The claim that pursuing impeachment was a political winner for Democrats is dubious at best. The GOP’s impeachment crusade vs. Bill Clinton (who did do bad things) earned the Democrats big gains in the 1998 midterms and boosted the Comeback Kid’s popularity. This time, impeachment was a known dead end given the trial would be held in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. Leading House Democrats were motivated, I believe, by constitutional duty as well as, yes, a desire to put some of Trump’s crimes on the public record. Plenty within the party, however, urged passing on the whole idea, precisely because they thought it would help Trump get re-elected.
Cripple his presidency. Trump, from his Cabinet picks to his dark inaugural address to his Muslim travel ban, came out of the box being precisely as bad as Democrats feared. He never even feinted at outreach or cooperation. So they responded in kind, with resistance. Moreover, Trump, his family and his Cabinet did so much terrible stuff so quickly that the opposition didn’t have to waste energy hyping phony scandals like, say, the White House Travel Office, Vince Foster’s “murder,” Whitewater or a minor Agriculture department official’s speech.
In some ways, these pesky details are not the point, despite my old-fogey belief that the precise facts of a situation should matter more than what’s fun to say on Twitter.
Best to understand what York is up to – along with many other now-scrambling Trump apologists – as just another deployment of a familiar conservative arsenal:
Projection: Castigate the other side loudly for precisely the sins your team has committed. As a Philadelphian, I won’t pretend Democrats never commit funny business in elections. But no one has explained to me why in 2020 the side that was up by double-digits in the polls, with demographic trends going its way, would feel any need to cheat. It’s the Republicans who have the shrinking base and a recent record of undermining “one-person, one-vote” through grotesque gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics such as ID laws, targeted purging of voter rolls, closing of poll locations in Democratic areas and so on. I guess it’s easy for Republicans to assume that Democrats are bending the rules to win elections because that’s precisely what they’ve been doing for years.
What-about-ism: This goes hand in hand with projection. No matter what you get caught doing, point with loud voice and wildly wagging finger at an example of someone, anyone on the liberal side doing something that vaguely resembles your behavior. So, right now, a couple of progressive congresspeople registering symbolic protests at the certification of Trump’s election in January 2017 gets equated to 126 GOP House members signing onto a lawsuit to toss out the electoral votes of four states. Sometimes the bad behavior on the left is pretty bad; sometimes it’s trivial. To the what-about-ist, the distinction doesn’t matter. The point is the volume of outrage and the number of repetitions; whatever it takes to distract attention.
Treating all opposition as illegitimate: Portray even principled opposition to a president’s deeds and words as illegitimate, unpatriotic disloyalty, not the normal exercise of First Amendment rights and democratic debate. Ignore utterly that you did the same, and worse, to Clinton and Obama.
Blaming the media: It’s amazing how often people who are in the business of media – perhaps a partisan, captive version, but nonetheless – echo politicians’ efforts to scorch “The Media” for doing precisely what journalism is supposed to do: report or comment on the news. All presidents get mad at journalists and seek to restrain them. (Barack Obama’s record here was not great.) But no one, not even Nixon, has ever gone to the toxic lengths that Donald Trump has to poison the wells, to seek a world where no one knows what’s true, no one knows what to believe and, as Hannah Arendt cautioned so wisely, eventually no one even bothers to care.
As Arendt warned, that is the soil in which tyranny flourishes. Trump wants to keep tilling that ground. His enablers seem willing to get inventive at rewriting history to help him. Don’t fall for it.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.