Democrats react to Justice Department subpoena 4:12
(CNN) -
The Republican Party has turned another page in the authoritarian playbook while whitewashing the history of Donald Trump's presidency.
It's as if Vladimir Putin's adulation never happened.
Or that Trump's assurance that COVID-19 would simply "go away" never crossed his lips.
Meanwhile, Trump's acolytes have rebranded the worst assault on American democracy in modern times as a Jan. 6 sightseeing excursion as they seek to cleanse the reputation of the former president who told rioters to "fight like hell" and, months later, he still has enormous influence over the Republican Party.
Trump and the conservative propaganda outlets are also targeting Dr. Anthony Fauci to eliminate the former president's negligence of a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans under his command.
The attempt to reconfigure the often disastrous record of Trump's presidency comes as the former president anticipates a political comeback ahead of a new round of political demonstrations this summer that will kick off the 2022 primaries. And it takes place while much of it The Republican Party is involved in a crusade built on the former president's lies about voter fraud to make it harder for many Americans to vote and easier for Republican officials to interfere in free and fair elections.
Since the truth is too painful for Republicans and detrimental to their future political prospects, an alternative narrative must be constructed.
Geneva Summit: "Biden and Putin played high diplomacy and lectured"
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy engineered the GOP's latest hypocritical twist on Thursday by criticizing President Joe Biden's conduct at his summit with Russia's leader in Geneva on Wednesday.
The California Republican criticized Biden for not defending US national interests and failing to make it clear that the US "will hold Russia accountable for its long list of transgressions ... President Biden gave Vladimir Putin a free pass McCarthy wrote in a statement.
His main point was that Biden failed to get Moscow to pay a price for a series of ransomware attacks on US infrastructure believed to have originated on Russian soil.
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McCarthy did not name two Russian intelligence operations to meddle in the US election to help Trump win. He also failed to mention Trump's notorious press conference in Helsinki when the then-president threw US spy agencies under the bus on live television and embraced denials by Putin, a former KGB agent, about election interference. Trump's former senior adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, told CNN this week that she considered faking a medical emergency to stop the 2018 press conference as it was so excruciating and damaging to America's interests.
Trump, always the perpetrator of the most outrageous big lie, spoke Wednesday with one of his favorite interviewers, Fox's Sean Hannity, attacking Biden's handling of the summit.
"We got nothing, we gave Russia a great stage and we got nothing," Trump said, highlighting his own tendency to view diplomacy as a sequence of photographs with him as the star in criticizing Biden's "stage art" and saying that it was a "good day for Russia."
Trump's criticism of his successor was especially ironic, because the key criticism of his meetings with the tyrant Kim Jong Un was that he gave up the prize North Korean leaders have longed for decades: recognition on a platform alongside the US leader. while failing to slow down Pyongyang's nuclear program.
ANALYSIS |
Putin got exactly what he wanted from Biden in Geneva
Denying heroism
Republican seems to tell on video how to enter Capitol 2:42
In the most blatant example of historical revisionism, some Republican lawmakers are now actively denying the heroism of the agents who defended them from the insurgents on Capitol Hill.
And by refusing to investigate the invasion and by actively misrepresenting Trump's incitement to a mob attack on January 6, his allies are trying to clean up his reputation while he awaits a return.
The fury that led to the disgusting assault on Congress was sparked by Trump's baseless lies about voter fraud, which continue to wreak havoc on American democracy by inspiring restrictive voting bills in the states.
The former president dictated the new narrative himself in a political appearance in North Carolina earlier this month, with the most outrageous lie yet in his post-presidency era: "Remember, I'm not the one trying to undermine democracy. American.
I'm the one trying to save her.
The Republican effort to cover up the truth of Trump's attempt to disrupt the certification of Biden's victory began just hours after the Capitol uprising.
ANALYSIS |
Obama and Trump intensify their battle for democracy
Now it has reached absurd but also dangerous extremes.
Several Republicans have said the anti-Facist militant group antifa is to blame and not supporters of the former president with their "Make America Great Again" ("MAGA") hats waving Trump flags.
Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, a primiparous Republican, claimed the mob scenes were just "normal sightseeing."
A Washington Metropolitan Police officer who was stunned and beaten while trying to defend the Capitol on January 6 said Clyde had refused to shake his hand when they met on Capitol Hill this week.
But Michael Fanone vowed not to stop discrediting Republican historical revisionism by the attack.
"Your words have consequences, Congressman," Fanone said on CNN's "New Day" on Thursday.
"He is lying about what happened on January 6 and I will be there to confront anyone who lies about January 6."
Fanone spoke up when the Justice Department released gruesome new footage of the attack on the Capitol.
One sequence shows an accused troublemaker, Thomas Webster, among a large crowd of Trump fans, menacingly wielding a flagpole and finally running towards agents who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with him and other members of the mob.
Meanwhile, several Republican lawmakers who idolize Trump, including Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have amplified an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory highlighted by Fox News opinion anchor Tucker Carlson that the riot of the Capitol was a false flag conspiracy orchestrated by the FBI.
And earlier this week, more than 20 House Republicans voted against legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medal to agents who defended the Capitol, and some, like Greene, said they opposed the use of the word "insurrection" in legislation to describe what happened that day. That revisionism was undermined once again Thursday when the Justice Department accused a Capitol riot of carrying a pistol onto the Capitol grounds.
The attempt to make voters forget, or at least give Trump's base the cover of a more comforting alternate reality, is not just an attempt to cover up the shame or protect the reputation of Trump, who still wields great power. power within the Republican Party. There are also electoral considerations. Several Republican senators, for example, openly admitted that they opposed an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection, filibustered by the party in the Senate, because it would detract from an attempt to turn the midterm elections into a referendum on the Biden's presidency.
His decision not only deprived the country of a moment of catharsis after a national trauma and of recommendations that could prevent it from happening again.
It also meant that there will be no agreed contemporary historical record of a day of infamy in which five people died and democracy was desecrated.
"The truth of what happened that day is inconvenient for Republicans and is a disgrace, contradicts the political narrative that they believe is more favorable to them," former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told CNN on Thursday.
"They will continue to lie, they will continue to make ridiculous characterizations of what happened that day."
Heartbreaking new body camera footage of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Pandemic revisionism
Another deep stain on Trump's record is the pandemic that he denied, mishandled and politicized.
To make the country forget, Republicans have chosen Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease specialist, as a scapegoat to blame him on Trump.
The recent release of Fauci's government emails sparked a coordinated effort by former members of the Trump administration and the conservative media to blame him for the deadly march of the pandemic on American soil in early 2020.
Fauci, as a government official, deserves scrutiny. Some of their positions in the first months of the worst health crisis in a century, for example, that of the usefulness of the use of masks and the transmissibility of the disease, did evolve. However, unlike Trump's positions, they changed on the basis of new scientific evidence rather than on politics. The extreme nature of the attacks on Fauci suggests their true purpose: to take pressure off Trump. One of the world's most respected global public health officials has been criticized as an "activist scientist" and an arm of the Chinese propaganda machine. Fauci, who has said that he believes that natural transmission from animals to humans likely spread covid-19,he has also been accused of covering up for Beijing over claims that the virus escaped from an epidemiological laboratory in the city of Wuhan.
"He's been wrong on almost every issue and also in Wuhan and in the lab," Trump said in North Carolina earlier this month.
The Biden administration is still investigating the fateful genesis of the pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
But some Republicans have demanded that Fauci resign over the emails, seeking something that suggests a non-existent scandal but could serve to drain some of the blame from Trump.
The rewriting of the history of Trump's tumultuous one-term administration is perhaps not surprising, as lies and false realities were its most dominant feature from its earliest moments to the end.
In fact, the strategy, which has now resulted in tens of millions of Americans living in an alternate version of the truth approved by Trump, was outlined as early as 2018 in Kansas City, when he told his followers not to pay attention to the journalists who trace the true story of his presidency.
"Fauci was not elected by the Americans," says Taylor Greene of the infectologist
"What they are seeing and what they are reading is not what is happening."
The events of the past week show the extent to which the former president has succeeded in incorporating his party into his cheating methodology to such an extent that past events no longer hold up, raising real questions about how American democracy can function in the world. future.
It is a chilling reminder of how a totalitarian government rewrote all the books, changed the dates, and falsified all the records in George Orwell's novel '
1984
', to the point that 'history has stopped' and there is nothing but a present in which the Party is always right.
Donald Trump Republicans
