They'll rehabilitate Donald Trump, too

The liberal lovefest for Bush alumni is a glimpse into the future.

Yes, they call him a fascist. An authoritarian and would-be tyrant with no committment to democracy. Yes, he shredded the Constitution, demolished longstanding humanitarian norms, and used his position in the White House to help his business cronies profiteer at the expense of Americans. Yes, he was historically unpopular — but I promise you that sooner or later Democrats are going to rehabilitate Dick Cheney.

That’s the paragraph I should have written nearly two decades ago when it was obvious that this was going to happen. Back then the rehabilitation of Ronald Reagan was in full swing: Obama loved to compare him favorably to Bush on the campaign trail. Before Reagan’s rehabilitation it was generally held among liberals that he was not just a political adversary — he was a disaster of a president, a traitor, and an incompetent grandpa who probably had Alzheimer’s. Today you never hear Democrats talk about changing Reagan National Airport’s name back to Washington National Airport anymore; you just hear “even Reagan talked to our enemies” type rhetoric or weirdly euphemistic praise about how “transformational” he was.

That was Obama’s favorite adjective for him, too. I remember watching Obama speak in Northern Virginia, and when he started praising Reagan you could just feel the smug self-congratulation radiating from his soberly nodding fans. What greater proof of a liberal’s high-mindedness, his refusal to get mired in petty partisanship, his patriotic love of all Americans — what greater proof of all of this could there be than praising Ronald Reagan? I saw Democrats just eating the line up, and it was then that I suddenly realized: they’re going to do this with Dick Cheney, too.

I desperately wish I had written about this in 2008, so I’m not going to make the same mistake again. Today they call Donald Trump a fascist, an authoritarian, and a would-be tyrant — but I promise you that sooner or later Democrats are going to rehabilitate him.

***

Alberto Gonzales is a war criminal. He played a crucial role under George W. Bush in the normalization of torture — yet another barbaric relic of the past, along with monarchism and race science, that has come roaring back in the 21st century. It was Gonzales who infamously argued that “the Geneva Conventions…are out of date,” a position that would soon be echoed in the conduct of Russia in Ukraine and Israel in Palestine. It was Gonzales who laid the legal framework that allowed Bush’s administration to get away with it. When Gonzels finally resigned, then-Senator Obama went out of his way to bury him in a statement: “I have long believed that Alberto Gonzales subverted justice to promote a political agenda, and so I am pleased that he has finally resigned today.”

Dick Cheney, absent any credible evidence and in the face of multiple intelligence reports to the contrary — from the NIE, the Pentagon, State, and the DoE — repeatedly told Americans that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that it had links to Al Qaeda. He profiteered through a revolving-door-relationship with Halliburton, handing them government contracts and then returning to the private sector and reaping millions upon millions of dollars. He supported radical expansions of executive power including the mass surveillance of Americans; when he resigned from office he had a 13% approval rating.

It would be an understatement to say that these men were loathed when they left office. Hatred of Cheney in particular was a lot like the hatred of Trump: it was a hatred you could build your whole political identity around. You could go to protests about literally anything and find pictures of Cheney with a Hitler moustache simply because any time was a good time to take a shot at him. The idea of a Democrat “you’ve got to hand it to him”ing Cheney was exactly as unimaginable in 2008 as a Democrat doing so with Trump today; when he left office, his approval rating among Democrats (12%) was only 6 points higher than Trump’s is (6%).

So you think that Democrats will never rehabilitate Trump? Here’s Kamala Harris just a few nights ago:

I actually have the endorsement of 200 Republicans who have formally worked with President Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain including the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney…

And here’s how former California Democratic Party chair Bill Press responded in a gushing opinion piece:

I never dreamed, figuratively speaking, I’d ever crawl in bed with Dick Cheney. But I happily did so this week when the former vice president announced he would not only not vote for Donald Trump but cast his vote for Kamala Harris. Cheney is my new BFF. 

Here, meanwhile, is the completely unprompted tangent Joe Scarborough went on in response to Alberto Gonzales’ endorsement:

If you look at what George W. Bush did, obviously villified by a lot of people on the left… you know there’s been such a dramatic reassessment of George W. Bush…I know a lot of people would hope [he] would reconsider standing on the sidelines…[because] conservative leaders over the past 30 years are not standing on the sidelines.

That Joe Biden’s favorite pundit is fantasizing about a Bush endorsement despite the former president’s repeated insistance that he will not be making any is as good a sign as any that these reaction are not just liberals opportunistically welcoming new allies. Scarborough’s dream scenario is one where Democrats and Republicans alike rally around their shared opposition to the Trump — and to those nasty “villifiers” on the left.

***

So here’s how it will happen. 2028 will be too soon, and it’s hard to say where the party will be at by 2032. But by 2036, Trump, at 90 years old, will presumably be gone from the political stage. And by then it will be at least 8 years since his last term, and that’s all it will take.

Obama praises Reagan, Kamala brags about Cheney, and by 2036 the Democratic candidate will be waxing nostalgic about old Donald Trump.

He was controversial, to be sure. January 6 was unforgiveable. All those indictments and guilty verdicts can’t be swept under the rug. But say what you will about Donald Trump, the man loved his country. The left never gave him enough credit for that.