'Trumpwashing': the danger of turning the Republican resistance into liberal heroes

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/19/trumpwashing-republican-resistance-trump-dangers-history


As figures once reviled by the left are hailed for their opposition to Trump, critics warn against forgetting the past

David Smith in Washington

The empire strikes back. At late senator John McCain’s funeral earlier this month, the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas sat side by side in the front pew along with the former vice-presidents Dick Cheney and Al Gore and Cheney’s wife, Lynne. A clip of the former president George W Bush handing a sweet to ex-first lady Michelle Obama went viral.

Among the distinguished speakers at the Washington National Cathedral: Henry Kissinger, now a venerable 95. Among the most quoted lines: “America was always great”, from McCain’s 33-year-old daughter Meghan. It was an imperious rebuke from America’s political establishment to the absent Donald Trump. McCain, no doubt, would have been delighted – but so too were many on the liberal left.

John McCain was a paradox. There's no one like him left in Congress

Not so long ago, the idea of liberals hankering nostalgically for Bush, hanging on Kissinger’s words or cheering assertions of American exceptionalism would have been unthinkable. Likewise the idea of rooting for the rightwing attorney general Jeff Sessions, the former FBI director and registered Republican Robert Mueller, and other mandarins of the so-called “deep state”. Yet old certainties have been shaken, roles reversed and loyalties scrambled by Trump’s profoundly unorthodox presidency.

According to Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labour lawyer and adjunct law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the liberal left was already in ideological confusion when Trump turbo-charged the process. “In short, liberals have decided that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, especially when ‘my enemy’ is Donald J Trump,” he wrote via email.

“And so, bizarrely, liberals have decided that the CIA and FBI – despite their well-known history of suppressing civil liberties and civil rights in this country and abroad – are now noble institutions which should be believed and respected. This is because the CIA and FBI have largely taken an oppositional stance towards Trump.”

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