Trump’s enablers want us to forget what they did. We can’t let that happen
Donald Trump made out like a bandit when he took office. According to a recent review of his financial disclosures, he pulled in $1.6bn from outside sources during his presidency. He wasn’t the only one to have profited, however. Trump’s political career has been terrible for the world, but it has been terrific for some of the world’s worst people. Many of the Republicans who helped produce the populist forces that got Trump elected have been raking in money while rehabilitating their images by opportunistically denouncing him. And, to a large extent, liberals are not just letting these people rewrite history; they are rewarding them for it.
Let’s start with John Boehner, the House speaker from 2011 to 2015. He is peddling a memoir about his political years which criticises the former president and complains that the Republican party has been taken over by “whack jobs”. Funnily enough, however, he avoids taking any responsibility for cultivating the extremism he condemns. Boehner was fine pandering to the rightwing Tea Party when it suited him. In 2011, for example, he refused to denounce the racist “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s citizenship. “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think,” he said. He seems happy to do that now that he has a book to sell.
Boehner is not the only retired Republican with a self-serving new book. George W Bush is releasing a series of portraits of American immigrants later this month. The guy who spearheaded the illegal invasion of Iraq and instigated a racist “war on terror” wants to preach unity and decency. The guy who helped demonise immigrants by creating a department called Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was folded into Homeland Security – before 9/11, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was an agency of the Department of Justice – now wants us to think he’s an advocate for immigrants.
We should be rolling our eyes at this. But, thanks to the Trump effect, liberals have been rapidly rehabilitating Bush. Earlier this year, CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote: “Bush’s version of what it means to be a Republican is unrecognisable from where the GOP stands today.” Are you kidding me? Bush helped to pave the way for Trump. It may be comforting to think that Trump appeared out of thin air, but he did not. If we want to avoid repeating history, it is imperative that we hold his enablers to account.
Those enablers included the liberal darlings John and Cindy McCain. In 2008, the late Republican senator chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the presidential election, opening “the Pandora’s box of populism”. McCain later came to regret this decision, but it does not take away from the fact that he put his personal advancement over ethics – just like Trump.
While Cindy McCain was not responsible for picking her husband’s running mate, she spent years defending Palin. In 2008, she defended her lack of political experience by claiming that, because Palin was from Alaska, which is close to Russia, she understood “what’s at stake here”. In 2012, she objected to Palin’s portrayal in an HBO movie, saying she was a “strong and independent woman”.
There is, as Obama has noted, a “straight line” from the announcement of Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to the election of Trump. Yet liberals are booking Cindy McCain for TV interviews in which she waxes lyrical about how much “anger and hate” there is in the Republican party. Joe Biden is reportedly preparing to appoint McCain to the coveted position of US ambassador to the UN World Food Programme. She has been rude about Trump, you see; that seems to be what is most important these days.
I can’t stress it enough: Trump was not an aberration; he was the culmination of years of Republican extremism. A bunch of feckless Frankensteins are trying to pretend they have no responsibility for the monster they created. It is time we started to hold these people to account.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist