Tapper interviews Youngkin...
On Monday CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Virginia’s GOP governor if he supported Trump’s comments about using the military against American citizens and people he described as “radical left lunatics.”
Here’s how it went — as Youngkin tried desperately to sanewash Trump’s latest foray into fascist cosplay.
Youngkin repeatedly tried to claim Trump was referring to undocumented migrants. Tapper, though, pushed back multiple times, noting how Trump had actually named one of the so-called “lunatics” as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
“I’m just reading you his quote,” Tapper told Youngkin.
Youngkin claimed Tapper was “misinterpreting and misrepresenting his thoughts.”
“I’m literally reading his quotes,” Tapper said. “I’m literally reading his quotes to you and I played them earlier so you could hear that they were not made up by me. He’s literally talking about, quote, ‘radical left lunatics,’ and then one of those ‘lunatics’ he mentioned was Congressman Adam Schiff.”
“I don’t believe that’s what he’s saying,” Youngkin countered in defense of Trump.
“I played the quote and I read it to you,” Tapper said at another point. “You can wish that he weren’t saying that, but that’s what he said.”
Tapper later said Youngkin didn’t “want to accept those quotes.”
Over at the Atlantic, Tom Nichols put this embarrassing pratfall into context. “At least cowards run away,” he wrote. “The GOP elected officials who cross the street against the light just to get away from the reporters are at least showing a tiny, molecular awareness of shame. Youngkin, however, smiled and dissembled and excused Trump’s hideousness with a kind of folksy shamelessness that made cowardice seem noble by comparison.”
Some of the people who watched Youngkin’s appalling dishonesty immediately thought of one of the most famous passages from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told him to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
But this interpretation gives Youngkin too much credit. Orwell’s dictators were able to terrify people with torture and deprivation into accepting the government’s lies. Youngkin, however, is not a terrified subject of an authoritarian regime: He’s just an opportunist.
Like J. D. Vance, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Youngkin is demanding that everyone else play along and pretend that Trump is just a misunderstood immigration hawk, and then move on—all so that Youngkin can later say that he was a loyal Republican when he contends for the leadership of the GOP after Trump is either defeated, retired, or long gone.
In this, Youngkin joins a long list of utterly dishonorable people, including Nikki Haley, who ran against Trump with energy and honesty and then bowed and scraped after she was defeated.
The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes
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