Donald Trump has always been himself, but what hadn’t been made clear were the explicit political calculations and self-justifications of those who knew better but went along with it, writes bencjacobs
Photo-Illustration: Konstantin Sergeyev/Intelligencer. Photos: Getty Images There are relatively few sources for the last time a centuries-old republic decayed into autocracy. After all, Julius Caesar did not livetweet the crossing of the Rubicon, and the Gracchi did not rouse the Roman plebeians through viral videos.
While the usual suspects on the Twitter left have decried Martin and Burns for not sharing some of the details they had at the time, the broad outlines of a number of their most shocking revelations were not only known but printed in the Times. The details are shocking, but none of it should have been surprising. Donald Trump, at least, has always been himself.
The McCarthy approach is to simply surrender to Trump. While Martin and Burns drove headlines for their reporting that McCarthy explored asking Trump to resign in the immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021, they chronicle in detail how the House Republican leader mostly spent his time trying to appease the former president, who brushed off McCarthy as simply having “an inferiority complex.
The synthesis, of course, is McConnell. The Senate minority leader celebrated Trump’s apparent disgrace early on the morning of January 7 to one of the authors. The Kentucky Republican thought Trump had finally gone beyond the pale. “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have happened at a better time.” McConnell went on to describe himself, only hours after rioters had ransacked the Capitol, as “exhilarated” that Trump “finally totally discredited himself.
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