"How will the GOP recover from the complicity and corruption of the Trump era?" The Atlantic's McKay Coppins has been asking around, and the answer is all too GOPesque: Pretend it never happened….
"The narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments" — tax cuts, deregulation, reactionary judges — "thanks to the wisdom and guidance of the Republicans in his orbit. In these accounts, Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies—not to mention his attempts to overturn an election—are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features…. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of 'healing' and 'moving forward,' but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory."
Alongside promoting President Biden's aggressive agenda, Democrats and others of conscience must just as aggressively remind voters time and again of the GOP's bloodguilt, its slavishness to an ignorant chief executive and its cowardice before an imperiously naked insurrectionist.
Biden will take heat for this, but he'll needs distance himself from such recriminations, as he tries to assert common cause with handfuls of these lawmaking creeps.
Hence the party as a whole will also be burdened with a frightful balancing act — one nevertheless unambiguous in its condemnations. As Republicans pretend all the ghastliness of Trumpism never happened, Democrats must make plentiful deposits in the otherwise depleting memory banks of voters. I'm just glad I'm not a White House communications staffer.