Trump’s enemies have memory-holed the ways they have caused the behavior they denounce: the unfounded abuse they hurl at him, the myriad ways they have corrupted our institutions to undermine him, the chaos they have unleashed because of their hatred of him. They want us to forget that they:
- Cast him as a Russian agent who colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election.
- Branded him a racist by falsely claiming he praised white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.
- Portrayed him as a nincompoop by insisting that he had instructed Americans to inject bleach to fight COVID.
- Helped swing the 2020 election by enabling Joe Biden and 51 former high-ranking intelligence officials to dismiss the evidence of his son Hunter’s shady foreign business dealings as likely “Russian disinformation.”
The calumny did not stop when Trump left office. They call him a criminal because highly partisan prosecutors, some of whom ran on the promise to “get Trump,” have brought 91 felony indictments against him while other states are working to keep him off the ballot. They call him a kleptocrat because foreigners stayed at his family’s hotels while he was president.
None of these efforts – and there are plenty more examples – were grounded in reality; all were demonstrable falsehoods. Yet when Trump responded to their baseless depiction of him as a treasonous, racist thief, they cited it as proof that he is unfit for high office.
What does this say about them? That is the question that is almost never asked. Neither is the great what-if: What would a Trump presidency have been like if his enemies had not engaged in relentless personal attacks against him? Trump is no Reagan; he is not sunshine and hope but preternaturally combative and often insulting. Still, we don’t know what aspects of Trump’s character would have come to the fore absent the daily bludgeoning. They never gave him a chance. Would Trump and his supporters have been so aggrieved by his 2020 loss if the establishment hadn’t spent four years using every dirty trick in the book to deny him power – and spent the five months before the election justifying the political violence of the BLM-inspired riots?