MICHELLE COTTLE: There are no winners on Team Chicken
Wednesday, June 15, 2022 -- Herein lies the rot at the heart of Team Chicken. These normies found Donald Trump's lying and plotting disturbing enough to want to avoid standing too close, lest they get spattered. But they don't care enough to take a strong, sustained stand in defense of democracy -- to make clear that the former president's ongoing efforts to defraud the American people and his assault on our electoral system are unacceptable.
Posted — Updated“Team Normal” and “Rudy’s Team.” This is how Bill Stepien, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, categorized the two camps of advisers swirling around Trump in the chaotic days after the 2020 election.
By contrast, Team Rudy, captained by an increasingly erratic Rudy Giuliani, was stocked with the Trumpworld players who were either untethered from or unwilling to bow to reality. These dead-enders — people like attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood and Trump adviser Peter Navarro — were committed to peddling the defeated president’s voter fraud BS, no matter the cost.
“Stepping away” from Trumpworld’s dishonesty and lack of professionalism. Well, that is certainly one way to spin Stepien’s behavior.
Stepien may have tried to separate himself from the shadier schemes being pushed by Team Bonkers — er, Team Rudy. But he is apparently cool with Trump’s basic plan to burn down the nation by advancing conspiracy theories about a rigged election.
Team Normal? More like Team Chicken.
But let’s not pick on Stepien. His tale is sadly similar to those of so many other Trump courtiers. These are the people who could distinguish reality from delusion; they just chose not to do all that much about it. Some of them tried to privately nudge Trump in the right direction. But when that failed, most were far too frightened to kick up a fuss and risk ruining their special relationships with Trump. Many still haven’t totally abandoned him, even as he continues to spread the election-fraud lies eating away at the heart of American democracy.
The most notable and most galling member of Team Chicken — its MVP — is Bill Barr, who became Trump’s attorney general in early 2019. Barr made more of an effort to push back against the big lie than most, going so far as to tell the president that the election-fraud claims not only were “crazy stuff” and “bullshit” but also were doing “a great, great disservice to the country,” as he testified.
Barr stressed to the committee how frustrating he found his former boss’s powers of denial and delusion. The second you finished debunking one ridiculous claim, he recalled, Trump would simply move on to the next. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” he said, noting that he became “somewhat demoralized” by Trump’s behavior, thinking that “if he really believes this stuff,” then “he has become detached from reality.”
And herein lies the rot at the heart of Team Chicken. These normies found Trump’s lying and plotting disturbing enough to want to avoid standing too close, lest they get spattered. But they don’t care enough to take a strong, sustained stand in defense of democracy — to make clear that the former president’s ongoing efforts to defraud the American people and his assault on our electoral system are unacceptable. Not unacceptable in a mealy-mouthed, “Oh, well, I’d prefer that someone else lead the party, but I’ll support him if it comes down to it” way but genuinely unacceptable, as in, “I have seen this man up close, and he should be disqualified from holding high office again. Ever.”
Barr, Stepien and their ilk recognize that they set their professional and ethical reputations aflame by joining Trump’s circus. They are now looking to rehabilitate their brands. They want credit, perhaps even thanks, for having refused to cross certain lines. And yet too many remain willing to support Trump and his corrosive brand of politics, enabling and emboldening him to blow past even more frightening lines in the future.
This, apparently, is what constitutes “normal” in today’s Republican Party. No member of any team should feel good about that.
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