In a series of “I was wrong about” op-eds, New York Times’ columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote about her being wrong to condemn Al Franken in an essay all about why she wasn’t really wrong. Another columnist, never-Trump conservative Bret Stephens had his own mea culpa essay.
The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
Others might say “deplorable,” but potato, tomato. I share his disdain for Trump, but not necessarily for his supporters, even if they’re sus.
What were they seeing that I wasn’t?
That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.
Much as I despised Trump, I understood that others didn’t hear what I heard, see what I saw. Not that I shared their capacity to ignore his being a vulgar, amoral, narcissistic, deceiving ignoramus, but that he was their change agent of discontent against a “swamp” of comfortable elistists who hated them, their life, their children and their world.
And to add insult to injury, I knew smart people who supported Trump, and even smart people who wanted to work in the administration. Neither cared much for the man. No one with a brain could possibly find anything admirable about his bloat, but they saw what he was doing as the antidote to the destruction of the economic and moral fabric of a nation. This doesn’t mean they were right, but that they were not malevolent even if the left hated them for siding with Trump. After all, he was evil, so therefore anyone associated with him had to desire to be evil as no decent and moral person would have anything to do with Trump.
And so the circle returns to Goldberg.
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.
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.
Not that she’s entirely wrong, that Trump’s apologists and enablers who had no issue with his daily offenses had a sudden crisis of conscience when he sicced the weak boys on the Capitol in the most inane attempt to salvage his humiliation of being the biggest loser. Ever.
But Goldberg drew no fine distinction. Anyone and everyone who served during the Trump administration was, by definition, evil and never to be absolved of their guilt for being Trumpian in the first degree.
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.
Goldberg concedes one woman, but only one, and only a woman, might be considered for eventual redemption because she uttered the only words a deplorable in the service of Trump should say, “I believe that I was part of something unusually evil.” Even so, the best she gets is life without parole while all others get death, a brutal, painful death. Because even if they are now pretending to be the good Trumpers on Team Normal by coming forward, admitting to what Trump was doing with his insurrection of the overweight and finding themselves at a bridge so far they will not cross, they were still, up to now, Trumpers.
“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.
Goldberg isn’t wrong to be unwilling to completely “forgive and forget.” A good deed doesn’t mean the bad deeds that preceded it never happened. But at the same time, much of what Goldberg perceives as evil is nothing more than association with Trump, which in itself is a taint she and her ilk can never forgive. She hates Trump, and so she hates anyone who was connected to Trump. But this isn’t about what they did, but who she hates. In her woke view, her hate can never be wrong and those she hates need never be forgiven.
Will she write a “things I was wrong about” essay ten years from now about this? If she does, it will be no more insightful than her self-serving rationalization and homage to her emotional intolerance.
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