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      Battle for the Soul: can Joe Biden beat Trump’s Republicans in the war of words?

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      Joe BidenBattle for the Soul: can Joe Biden beat Trump’s Republicans in the war of words? The president appeals to the ‘civil religion’ of Washington and Kennedy. His opponents use weasel words and seek to limit democracy. The stakes could not be higherMichael CornfieldSun 8 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTJoe Biden declared his third candidacy for president on 25 April 2019 in a three-and-a-half minute video. The format was new, but for Biden relied on an old-fashioned conception of masculinity.Want to make Jim Jordan sing about the Capitol attack? Ask Jefferson Davis | Sidney BlumenthalRead moreHe talked about the 12 August 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, about which Donald Trump (in)famously said there were “very fine people on both sides”. The incident provided Biden with a good vs evil story frame, which he entered as a sort of superhero.“At that moment,” Biden intoned, as viewers saw white supremacists marching with torches, “I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.”
      I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.
      If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.
      The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake.
      Captain America, out of retirement and to the rescue. The Charlottesville setting, adjacent to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, supplied Biden with a pretext to quote the Declaration of Independence. And the video displayed, in colonial cursive font, passages many Americans could recite from memory.The “battle for the soul of America” narrative frame served Biden well. It helped differentiate Biden’s criticism of Trump, as both personal and constitutional. It converted his age into a campaign asset: a man with historic consciousness would be a good choice for Democrats, a party that usually opted for youth. And it ennobled his call for unity as the solution to Trump’s divisiveness. A Biden victory would win the battle for the soul through an appeal to transcendent patriotic values.Two men, longtime adviser Mike Donilon and the historian Jon Meacham, have worked on Biden’s speeches and the “soul” verbiage. But regardless of the authorial division of labor, it has been Biden’s sign-off, delivery, and persona which give the phrase its public meaning.During the campaign, Biden repeated his theme in speeches on national holidays and historic anniversaries, often in Pennsylvania: at an 18 May 2019 campaign kick-off rally at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia; in a 2 June 2020 speech at Philadelphia City Hall (commenting on the eruption of protest for the George Floyd death and the president’s use of tear gas at Lafayette Square in Washington); and on 6 October 2020 at the Gettysburg battlefield:
      You and I are part of a covenant, a common story of divisions overcome and hope renewed. If we do our part, if we stand together, if we keep faith with the past and with each other, then the divisions of our time will give way to the dreams of a brighter, better future. This is our work. This is our pledge. This is our mission.
      Pennsylvania is both the state where Biden was born and a perennial swing state. As the city where America’s foundational documents were written and signed, Philadelphia stands out in the national imagination as the Jerusalem of what sociologist Robert Bellah termed the “civil religion”. In his 1966 analysis of inaugural addresses from Washington to Kennedy, Bellah noted that presidents up to the incumbent at that time, Lyndon Baines Johnson, enlarged and deepened their rhetoric by invoking God. It was neither the God of any particular denomination nor a perfunctory bow to the religiosity of the American people. Rather, such references to God legitimated political authority by “supplying moral consensus amidst continuous political change”. Invocations of the civil religion reassure and integrate the disparate members of a pluralistic capitalist society.Biden relied more on the word “soul” than “God” but the functionality was the same. “Soul” is also a word with extensive philosophical and religious lineage. It denotes the essence of a being (or nation, or people). It connotes reason, feeling, presence, expressivity, depth, the substance of a style. In running for president, Biden was embarked on a moral crusade. He was battling, as he put it in another frequently used phrase, for “hope over fear, unity over division, and truth over lies”.And “the idea of America” at the seat of the civil religion was not an empty notion. Jill Lepore’s 2018 one-volume history of the US identified “These Truths” as the nation’s core values: political equality, natural rights, popular sovereignty and the meta-truth that they are “self-evident”, Benjamin Franklin’s Enlightenment amendment to Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable”.Like most campaign slogans, “battle for the soul of America” was an expedient coinage, tinged in this case with a touch of bravado. Yet it has become uncannily apt. Some Americans continue to resist “these truths” and others. And so Biden has justly continued to use the phrase as president.In his inaugural address two weeks after the assault on the Capitol and Congress he quoted Abraham Lincoln’s attestation that “my whole soul is in it” as he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and reiterated his claim that national unity was essential “to restore the soul and to secure the future of America”. On Memorial Day, at Arlington National Cemetery:
      The soul of America is animated by the perennial battle between our worst instincts – which we’ve seen of late – and our better angels. Between “Me first” and “We the People”. Between greed and generosity, cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom.
      These Truths review: Jill Lepore’s Lincolnian American historyRead moreOn 13 July, back at the National Constitution Center, Biden zeroed in on the opposition:
      It’s no longer just about who gets to vote or making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote – who gets to count whether or not your vote counted at all. It’s about moving from independent election administrators who work for the people to polarized state legislatures and partisan actors who work for political parties.
      To me, this is simple: This is election subversion. It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history …
      We have to ask: Are you on the side of truth or lies; fact or fiction; justice or injustice; democracy or autocracy? That’s what it’s coming down to …
      The Republicans on the other side peddle disinformation and bank on partisan polarization. They seek to negate the truth of the 2020 election results and tilt the certification process against a reoccurrence in 2024. Under the banners of a “stolen” and “rigged” election and a vastly exaggerated claim of election “fraud”, they are conducting feckless audits and enacting voter suppression laws in battleground states, including Pennsylvania. They blocked the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the riot on the day they voted to decertify the election. Biden also cited Jim Crow in view of the racial dimensions of the soul battle. The opposition has launched a coded attack on a misappropriated academic term, “Critical Race Theory”.The soul battle is distinct from the programmatic initiatives and negotiations being conducted under another Biden slogan, “Build Back Better”. In that political domain differences can be monetized and split without recourse to dire dichotomies. However, the emotions summoned over voting cannot be easily compartmentalized and hived off from the dollar figures.Wake review: a must-read graphic history of women-led slave revoltsRead moreThe soul battle also bears on the effort to persuade Americans to get vaccinated, both in Biden’s exhortations to get the shot which appeal to patriotic duty and the opposition’s efforts to brand resistance to vaccination as a stand for freedom against the government. Analyzing that argumentation requires an essay unto itself, although I note in passing that Biden’s rhetorical approach has eschewed the designation of a “czar” to coordinate the administration’s public appeals and briefings, which would put distance between the soul battle and the urgent project of pandemic mitigation. As it is, government messaging on Covid runs through the president and state governors. And it is certainly valid to see the battle against the virus as a test of the force of reason in politics.Occasions for more soul speechmaking dot the national calendar. A rally in Washington DC on 28 August will commemorate Dr Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” address, which the president will probably recognize but not attend. The 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks will necessarily reference the pullout of troops from Afghanistan, but Biden could also validate the House inquiry into the Capitol riot as being in the spirit of the 9/11 Commission. Thanksgiving is the quintessential holiday of the American civil religion. More occasions will crop up after congressional voting on the For the People and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts.But before any of those holidays or events surface on the civil religion calendar there is next Thursday, 12 August, the fourth anniversary of the battle that marked Biden’s starting point. He might do well to travel to Charlottesville and speak at the downtown spot vacated by the 10 July removal of the Robert E Lee statue that sparked the Unite the Right rally. It would be a sign that the mostly nonviolent but deeply conflicted war over the idea of America – for that is what a series of battles amounts to – is being won.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansUS voting rightsProtestfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republicans treated Covid like a bioweapon. Then it turned against them | Rebecca Solnit

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      OpinionUS politicsRepublicans treated Covid like a bioweapon. Then it turned against themRebecca SolnitTrump’s team reportedly believed that coronavirus would hurt Democratic states – and Democratic governors – worse. But the virus does not discriminate Sat 7 Aug 2021 06.24 EDTLast modified on Sat 7 Aug 2021 17.28 EDTSome of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.Call Jared Kushner the spiritual heir of the army besieging the city of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, which, according to a contemporaneous account, catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls. This is sometimes said to be how the Black Death came to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions of people – a third of the European population – over the next 15 years. A Business Insider article from a year ago noted: “Kushner’s coronavirus team shied away from a national strategy, believing that the virus was hitting Democratic states hardest and that they could blame governors.” An administration more committed to saving lives than scoring points could have contained the pandemic rather than made the US the worst-hit nation in the world. Illnesses and casualties could have been far lower, and we could have been better protected against the Delta variant.At the outset of the pandemic, as Seattle and New York City became hard hit, Republicans apparently imagined that the pandemic would strike Democratic states and cities first, and certainly in 2020 Black, Latinx and indigenous people were disproportionately affected. To put it clearly, Republicans enabled a campaign of mass death and disablement, thinking it would be primarily mean death and illness for those they regarded as opponents.Nevertheless, Democratic governors, Native nations and people with moderate-to-leftwing views have done a better job of protecting against this scourge. The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”Call Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham the spiritual heirs of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British military commander who in 1763 wrote to an underling, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?” As the New York Times put it with characteristic mildness, “Mr Carlson, Ms Ingraham and guests on their programs have said on the air that the vaccines could be dangerous; that people are justified in refusing them; and that public authorities have overstepped in their attempts to deliver them.” Newsweek was more blunt, quoting Ingraham herself saying that the vaccine was an attempt to push an “experimental drug on Americans against their will – threatening them, threatening to deprive them of basic liberties, if they don’t comply.” The goal was to rile up the audience – and prevent them from getting vaccinated, while the evidence was clear that the vaccines prevent both disease in the vaccinated and the spread of disease. Vaccines are, incidentally, how smallpox was eliminated worldwide.There is of course another angle to the conservative response to the pandemic. In far-right ideology, freedom – for white men especially – is an absolute goal. Even recognizing the systems in which we are all enmeshed might burden the free person with obligations to others and to the whole. Science itself is a series of descriptions of our enmeshedness: of how pesticides travel beyond the crops they’re sprayed on, of the way that fossil fuel emissions contribute to health problems and climate change, of how the spread of disease can be prevented by collective action. Rightwing ideology, after all, has emphasised the right to own and carry a gun over the right to be free of being menaced or murdered by guns, as thousands are in the US every year.But just as the right to brandish guns is defended in the face of those gun deaths, so the right to contract and spread a sometimes lethal and often debilitating disease is defended as the antithesis of the responsibility not to do so. It’s safe to assume that the Republican leadership knows better, and that some of their followers do and some don’t. Some have chosen to engage in biological warfare; some are merely tools being used in that warfare. That is, some of them are unwitting corpses being catapulted over the walls, unconscious smallpox blankets; some of them are Amherst in spirit. Those using fake vaccine cards – as college students, and two recent travelers from the US to Canada have – are definitely Amhersts.Covid-19 is far from the first time people have decided to profit from promoting the death of others: the fossil fuel industry plunging ahead while fully aware that climate catastrophe was the consequence of its product is the most extreme example. Manufacturers of guns and prescription opiates have done so as well. But it might be the first time that a new threat has been so dramatically increased not by direct profiteers but by those selling ideology and sowing division.Measuring the impact of the pandemic by its death toll leaves out other impacts that matter: millions of schoolchildren isolated and undereducated, millions of parents exhausted by double duty, millions of small businesses shuttered, millions unemployed and impoverished, their dreams crushed, millions isolated and anxious, millions grieving the dead. Medical workers who were selflessly heroic the first time around are demoralized now that the hospitalised are so often people who could have been vaccinated, could have been careful, but chose not to. The poison runs through everything. Some of it was spread on purpose.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence
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      Trump may be fading away, but Trumpism is now in the American bloodstream | Jonathan Freeland

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      OpinionDonald TrumpTrump may be fading away, but Trumpism is now in the American bloodstreamJonathan FreedlandHe left in disgrace, yet all signs point to a third presidential run. And his disdain for facts is now an article of Republican faith Fri 6 Aug 2021 09.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 6 Aug 2021 12.53 EDTWe have so much to worry about, it’s a relief that at least one big source of angst is no longer there to keep us up at night. Given how much psychic energy so many – inside the US and out – once devoted to him, how he came to invade even our dreams, there is solace in the fact that these days we need pay no more attention to Donald Trump. Right? I’m afraid not.True, the great orange spectre has disappeared from the social media timelines, exiled by the emperors of Facebook and Twitter, reduced to starting his own blog to get around the ban – an effort that, like so many Trump enterprises before it, was quietly abandoned in failure. It lasted a month.So each morning no longer begins with a peek through splayed fingers at the phone to see what fresh horror Trump has committed. But just because he is out of daily sight does not mean he should be out of mind. Tragically, to the world’s most powerful democracy and all those who, for better or worse, are tugged like the tides by its lunar pull, Trump still matters. He cannot yet be consigned to the past, because he is affecting the present and looms over the future.The clearest evidence is the expectation that he will win the Republican presidential nomination for a third time and be the party’s next choice for the White House. You need only take a look at admittedly premature polls of the putative Republican field for the next election: he’s at the top, every time, with 76% of Republicans viewing him favourably. It was scarcely a shock when the Trump-backed candidate beat better-qualified rivals to win a Republican congressional primary in Ohio this week. Not for nothing does the former Bush speechwriter David Frum say of Trump, “Unless he’s dead or otherwise unable by then, he’s the likeliest 2024 nominee.”At the risk of haunting your dreams all over again, that is a daunting prospect. For election day 2024 will be just a few days shy of Joe Biden’s 82nd birthday. If the president runs, he would be asking to remain in the Oval Office until he is 86. Many Americans would hesitate before granting that request. (At a mere 78, Trump will be able to run as the youth candidate.) But if it’s not Biden, if it’s Kamala Harris – or, frankly, almost any other Democrat – Trump will be able to hum the familiar culture-war tunes that brought him victory in 2016 and took him perilously close in 2020.But let’s say that scenario is both too distant and too gloomy. Let’s say that, for whatever reason, it pans out differently. Even then, there is little scope to relax. Because even if Trump never returns, Trumpism is already in the American bloodstream.Some hoped that the 6 January attempted insurrection might finally break the spell, disenchanting those Republicans who had remained loyal to Trump in the belief that, even if he was gross, crude and bigoted, extravagantly selfish and self-regarding, he was ultimately harmless. The optimists reckoned that the sight of the head of the US government rousing a mob to storm the US Capitol – a mob bent on using force to overturn the results of a democratic election – would finally persuade most Republicans that on this critical point their political opponents were right: Trump did, after all, pose a grave threat to the republic.But it has not worked out that way. Republicans in the House voted against impeaching Trump for his crime, while Republicans in the Senate voted to acquit him of it. Dissenters have been ostracised. Even her pedigree as the daughter of a conservative hardliner has not protected Liz Cheney, expelled from the House leadership for standing against the great leader. Riding high instead are the conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene and her comrade Matt Gaetz, the latter reportedly under investigation for sex trafficking, because they pass the only litmus test that matters: loyalty to Trump.Jared Kushner’s hidden genius? To make terrible decisions – yet keep failing upwards | Arwa MahdawiRead moreThe baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, that Donald Trump remains the true president and that Biden is a usurper, was once merely the stuff of Trump’s fever dreams, a psychological mechanism to protect his ego from the truth of defeat. But “Stop the Steal” is now an article of Republican faith. Nine months on, a majority of Republicans believe Trump won and Biden lost, against all the evidence and a string of court judgments finding every claim of voter fraud to be groundless.It seems nothing will shift the conviction of the faithful, not even the latest confirmation that it was Trump, not Biden, who was determined to rob the people of their democratic will: “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me,” Trump told his acting attorney general last December, according to a newly released note taken by the latter’s deputy. Meanwhile, an Arizona state senator has called for election officials to be held in solitary confinement. The Republican tribe cleave loyally to the other defining feature of 2020 Trumpism: the refusal to believe in the reality of Covid and to do what’s needed to thwart the virus. And so the single greatest predictor of whether an American has been vaccinated or not is whether they voted for Biden or Trump last November. As of last month, 86% of Democrats had received at least one shot; among Republicans it was only 45%.That’s no surprise when Republican politicians compare the vaccination drive to the Nazi persecution of the Jews or to the KGB knock on the door and when Republicans at state level have forced out public health officials for pushing the vaccine too energetically.Of course, these twin tenets of Trumpism are conjoined. What they share is disdain for expertise and contempt for facts, whether the experts be scientists or election officials and whether the facts relate to the nature of a virus or the sum total of votes cast last November. Trumpism demands instead that the facts bend the knee before the mighty helmsman. It is truth that must defer to the ruler, not the other way around.Occasionally, you see a Republican who understands what’s happened to their party. There’s a snippet of video in which it pays to watch the face of the governor of Arkansas as an anti-vaxx heckler shouts down a briefing from a state medical official. In that moment, the governor seems to know that his party no longer believes in science or democracy, that the virus of Trumpism has infected its every organ. Whether or not Trump himself returns is almost secondary. The disease has already devoured the political party that constitutes half of America’s body politic – and it’s not done yet.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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      The Republicans confusing the vaccine effort: Politics Weekly Extra

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      Jessica Glenza and Jonathan Freedland discuss how party politics is playing a role in helping – and hindering – public health messaging

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      This week the US reached the milestone of having at least 70% of adults receive at least one Covid-19 vaccination shot. Joe Biden had hoped to achieve this by 4 July, but the vaccine programme has stalled over the summer. The resurgence of the pandemic, owing to the much more transmissible Delta variant, has convinced many people who were once hesitant to get the jab. However, some are blaming mixed messages from Republican lawmakers for causing confusion and apathy. So what should local and state politicians be doing? Jessica Glenza talks to Jonathan Freedland. For the other big news of the week, make sure to listen back to our episode about the Andrew Cuomo scandal and why the New York State governor is facing calls to resign. Archive: ABC News, CNN, LiveNOW Watch This Body – a Guardian documentary Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Top Republicans move to protect Trump from Capitol attack fallout

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      US Capitol attackTop Republicans move to protect Trump from Capitol attack falloutSome party leaders blamed the former president in the charged moments after the insurrection – but are now embarking on a campaign of revisionism Hugo Lowell in WashingtonThu 5 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 5 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTTop Republicans in Congress are embarking on a new campaign of revisionism seven months after the attack on the Capitol, absolving Donald Trump of responsibility and blaming the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, for the 6 January insurrection perpetrated by a mob of Trump supporters.A Trump bombshell quietly dropped last week. And it should shock us all | Robert ReichRead moreSome House and Senate Republican leaders stated in the charged moments immediately following the attack that Trump was squarely to blame, and amid blood and shattered glass at the US Capitol, some even considered his removal.“The president bears responsibility,” the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, said of Trump at the time, demanding that he “accept his share of responsibility”.But after nearly 200 House Republicans voted to clear Trump in his unprecedented second impeachment and Senate Republicans scuttled a 9/11-style commission to investigate the events of 6 January, the Republican party made a call to shift all blame away from Trump.The move to protect Trump from the fallout of the Capitol attack, at any cost, reflects the party leaders loyalty to a defeated former president, as well as the political self-interest of Republicans desperate to distance themselves from an insurrection they helped stoke with lies of a stolen election.The Republicans’ journey into a universe of alternate facts became virtually complete last week after House Republican leadership, days after the harrowing testimony of police officers deployed to tackle the rioters shocked Congress once more, spun a new lie about the deadly attack.No longer satisfied to simply pardon Trump for inciting his supporters to unlawfully stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, the No 3 House Republican, Elise Stefanik, blamed Pelosi – a target of the mob – for the violence on 6 January.“The American people deserve to know the truth: that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility, as speaker of the House, for the tragedy that occurred on January 6,” Stefanik said falsely from the steps of the Capitol.Pelosi is not responsible for security – a duty that lies with US Capitol police – but the baseless claim promulgated by Stefanik amounted to the party leadership’s latest disinformation campaign they hope will give them political cover as the 2022 midterm elections near.There remains a deep fear among Republicans that any scrutiny into 6 January could expose their role in amplifying Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election – the root cause of the insurrection – which could be used as a cudgel by Democrats at the ballot box.Some congressional Republicans privately acknowledge the fallacious logic of blaming Pelosi for the Capitol attack, but not the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, her then opposite number in the Senate.But in a sign of the ambition and self-preservation guiding Republican revisionism over the Capitol attack, they also suggest that they are willing for McCarthy to indulge Trump’s claims should it help Republicans capture the House. And with Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, vowing to subpoena anyone who spoke with Trump on 6 January, they note a counter-narrative takes on the added effect of undercutting the politically bruising inquiry.The revisionism over the Capitol attack heralds what some experts see as a dangerous new era in American politics: even with Trump out of the White House, Republicans advancing demonstrably false narratives to safeguard their political survival.“The GOP is thinking enough time has passed to somehow rewrite the history of events,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former top White House Russia expert who testified at Trump’s first impeachment inquiry.“They’re hoping that it gets into the record, even if it’s pointed out that it doesn’t correlate with the facts, because once their version is out there in the media, then that’s sufficient for it to become the raw material for shaping how history recounts things later on,” Hill said.In the days after the attack, McCarthy, joined Democrats in condemning Trump and urging Congress to establish a fact-finding commission, having already called the former president and demanded he call off his rioters.McCarthy at one stage even fact-checked the former president. “Some say the riots were caused by Antifa. There is absolutely no evidence of that,” he said on the House floor. “Conservatives should be the first to say so.”But that initial resolve was quickly replaced with a renewed fealty to Trump, who demanded that Pelosi “investigate herself”, as he again falsely suggested that it was Antifa, rather than his own supporters, who perpetrated the Capitol attack.Republicans have seized on that messaging, but none more so than McCarthy, who has repeated Trump’s debunked claims and taken trips to Mar-a-Lago to ingratiate himself with Trump, whose support he considers essential for his ambitions to become Speaker in 2022.Such endeavors to placate Trump took on heightened significance last week for McCarthy, after he pulled all five of his picks for the House select committee in a moment of frustration and inadvertently left Trump without defenders on the panel.And as two US Capitol police and two DC Metropolitan police officers for hours testified to the select committee how Trump, described as a “hit man”, sent his supporters to attack the Capitol, an alarmed McCarthy moved to shift the pressure from Trump to Pelosi.“If there is a responsibility for this Capitol, on this side, it rests with the Speaker,” McCarthy said.Stefanik, who replaced Liz Cheney as Republican conference chair after her ouster in May for taking aim at Trump’s conduct and rhetoric once too often, went further, and proclaimed that the House speaker was in fact to blame for the insurrection.The political calculus of the House Republican leadership extended for the first time last week to McConnell – once fiercely critical of Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection, but now content to avoid the topic he considers a political loser.Hill told the Guardian that Republican revisionism revisionism mirrors the playbook adopted by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and an array of other autocratic leaders needing to sanitize their roles in politically embarrassing events.“You can see this over and over again in pretty much every authoritarian setting,” Hill said. “It’s fundamentally not about politics. It’s nothing more than a massive con job, a scam, concocted to keep their own personal and collective power. There’s no end other than that.It is a disinformation effort also co-opted by rank and file Republicans, who have increasingly tried to rewrite the reality of what transpired on 6 January, from claiming no rioter was armed (at least one was), to comparing the attack to a “normal tourist visit”.Standing outside the justice department last week, a group of Trump’s most vociferous defenders on Capitol Hill denounced the indictments brought against nearly 600 Capitol rioters and accused prosecutors of holding them as political prisoners.Urged on by Trump, the lawmakers falsely characterized Ashli Babbitt, an insurrectionist who was shot and killed as she tried to breach a secure area of the Capitol adjacent to the House chamber, as a patriotic martyr whose death was planned by Democrats.The fiction pushed by Stefanik drew a rebuke from at least one Republican. “All Donald Trump needs to see is that you’re making a defense, no matter how nonsensical that defense is,” Congressman Adam Kinzinger said on ABC, but not before members of his own party called for his expulsion.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansDonald TrumpUS CongressUS politicsNancy PelosifeaturesReuse this content More