There Were NO Good Trump Administration Officials!

The following is part of an op-ed in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg:

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. 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. . . .

If 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.

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. 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, more than half of Americans believe a civil war will erupt in the United States in the near future. . . .

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 New 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,” 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.