They knew exactly who Trump was

By Gloria Borger, CNN Chief Political Analyst

It’s hard, of course, to choose among the striking revelations in the last episode of season one of the January 6 hearings, but how about this: Top staffers knew exactly who Donald Trump was, and decided to remain anyway.

It’s an argument we heard over and over again throughout recent years: Yeah, I coulda left this guy, but I thought it was better to stay so I could be part of the guardrails around Trump.

But here’s what we learned during these hearings: There were no guardrails around the then-President, and certainly none strong enough to contain his election fraud mania. In fact, Trump busted through them with great regularity. And when he didn’t (as in deciding not to fire his deputy attorney general and replace him with an election denier), it was only because he was told it would look bad for him if his entire Justice Department resigned.

So what we saw instead was a group of people dealing with a man they knew to be morally, intellectually and emotionally unfit for the office.

Even those who working for his reelection effort knew their guy. Texts between Tim Murtaugh, the lead spokesman of Trump’s 2020 campaign, and Matthew Wolking, his deputy, following the January 6, 2021, insurrection are a case in point:

Murtaugh: Also shitty not to have even acknowledged the death of the Capitol Police officer. [Murtaugh was referring to Brian Sicknick, the US Capitol Police officer who died a day after responding to the insurrection.]

Wolking: That is enraging to me. Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie

Murtaugh: If he acknowledged the dead cop, he’d be implicitly faulting the mob. And he won’t do that because they’re his people. …

Bingo. They knew exactly who he was. But he was their man in 2020.

So what if, way back when, some of these folks had actually — publicly — banded together to tell the truth to the American public. Folks like former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (who privately called Trump a moron), former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former White House chief of staff John Kelly. What if they had publicly said the emperor has no clothes or principles? I mean, wasn’t his reaction to Charlottesville, when he tried to blame “both sides” after a woman died when White nationalists descended on the Virginia city, a big hint of things to come?

Nah. Although they all left eventually, they convinced themselves that staying had been for the greater good. The President turned out to be Teflon anyway, so why risk the wrath of Trump’s thumbs on the keyboard and his followers?

As it turns out, what they said was their sacrifice didn’t matter. What the January 6 hearings showed is that Trump’s narcissism and his need for adulation outweighed everything else. No adviser could match the affection of his diehard supporters. The mob was beautiful because it loved him and listened to him. Most everyone else—especially then-Vice President Mike Pence— was his enemy.

In the end, his only compatriots were the conspiracy theorists and hangers-on looking for Trump’s approval. What they ended up getting was a ticket to infamy — and maybe prosecution.

Remember that anonymous op-ed in 2018 (which we now know that former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor penned)? He wrote that he and his colleagues stayed to save Trump from himself. The internal resistance, he said, was “working from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and worst inclinations. … But we believe our first duty is to this country and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

Well, the hearings showed us that no high-minded devotion to the nation’s health could stop this leader intent on overturning an election. No one could tell him, “How about checking in on your vice president?” Pence was in danger at the Capitol, but, as we learned, Trump thought that was fine since Pence had the audacity to abide by the constitution instead of Trump. What’s more, there were no presidential calls to the Defense Secretary, the Department of Homeland Security or the National Guard. (But he did speak with Rudy Giuliani.)

At least the Secret Service prevented Trump from heading to the Capitol — but even that did not come without a fight.

So maybe next time a public official decides to protect a president gone wild, think again. If you know who you’re dealing with— and it’s bad — the public deserves to know, too. That’s the greater good.

The-CNN-Wire
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