The Coming Republican Amnesia

Read: The bitter reality of the post-Trump GOP

People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to “fiscal responsibility” and “limited government” will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. 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.

When I asked Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist, how his party will remember the Trump years, he responded with a litany of episodes to memory-hole. “Republicans will want to forget the constant chaos, the lies, the double-dealing, the hiring of family, and the escalating rhetoric that incited hate for four years [and] directly led to what happened at the Capitol,” he told me. “Basically, any of those things that we never would have let an Obama or Clinton get away with, but constantly justified to ourselves in the name of judges.”

But while some Republicans might be eager to “walk away from Trump,” Heye added, “many will continue talking about the things in the administration they supported”—from tax cuts and deregulation to flooding the judiciary with conservatives.

Indeed, the narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments 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.

Alyssa Farah, who worked for more than three years in the Trump White House as a communications adviser, resigned last month after the president refused to concede the election. She’s spent the past couple of weeks condemning Trump’s conspiracy theories and distancing herself from the havoc they’ve wrought. Still, when we spoke, Farah was eager to highlight America’s booming pre-coronavirus economy as proof of concept for traditional conservative policies. She lamented that Trump’s legacy might be defined by “the final days of it”—that is, the violent insurrection he incited and the re-impeachment it provoked—but she told me that Republicans shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Hoping to provoke a slightly more introspective assessment of the president she served, I asked Farah how she thought the Trump era would be written about in history books. After thinking for a moment, she suggested that this period might not be remembered for Trump at all, but rather for the “once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic” that happened to occur on his watch.