Elephants in the Room: Trump’s New Sycophants Were Right the First Time Around, by Jeff Robbins

Since the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, some have wondered whether it is necessary to qualify the truth about him in light of this horrific event.

This is not the case.

The obvious truth about the former president remains the same. And the phrase that best describes the truth about him is not “Trump derangement syndrome.”

It is “being awake”.

The most compelling witnesses to the catastrophe that would be Trump’s return to the Oval Office are not Democrats. They are the leading Republicans who jostled for favor at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, hoping to erase from the Big Guy’s memory what they had said about him on previous occasions.

Consider Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, for starters. “I’m a never-leave-Trump-behind-me kind of guy,” Vance said of his new best friend in 2016. “I never liked him.”

Want to know why? “My God, what an idiot,” Vance tweeted about his prospective running mate. “Mr. Trump is not fit to hold the highest office in our country,” he wrote in The New York Times. “I can’t stand Trump,” Vance told NPR at the time. “I think he’s toxic.”

And not just harmful. Vance sent a Facebook message to a former roommate wondering if Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

But hello.

Nikki Haley was also very clear about her opinion of Trump just a few months ago. Trump was “deeply mistaken” about the January 6, 2021 coup attempt, she said a few days later, and “we should not have followed him.” As for the Republicans who supported him, she said not long ago, “They know what a disaster he has been and will continue to be.” Last February, she diagnosed him as “completely deranged.”

Then there’s Sen. Marco Rubio, who took the stage in Milwaukee to kiss Trump’s ring. In 2016, Rubio told CNN, “In the years to come, a lot of people on the right, in the media and among voters in general, are going to have to explain and justify how they fell into the trap of supporting Donald Trump.” Rubio told an audience that Trump “fights for the little guy. But he’s spent his whole career going after the little guy… If you all have friends who are thinking about voting for Donald Trump, don’t let your friends vote for crooks.”

Also in Milwaukee was Sen. Lindsey Graham. He once called his party’s nominee “crazy,” “nuts” and “unfit for office,” before turning slavish. “The more you know about Donald Trump, the less likely you are to vote for him,” he said. “The more you know about his businesses, the less successful he seems.”

Just eight years ago, Senator Ted Cruz said of Trump: Trump, he said, was a “whiny coward,” a “bully,” a “small, mean-spirited man who is intimidated by strong women,” a “narcissist” who is “completely amoral,” a “pathological liar” who “lies with virtually every word that comes out of his mouth.”

But only “practically” every word.

Let’s not forget his former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, who said last October that Trump is “a person who thinks that those who defend their country in uniform, or who are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or who spend years being tortured as prisoners of war, are all ‘idiots’ because they have ‘nothing to gain.’” Asked whether Trump was already assured of the Republican nomination, Kelly had a three-word response: “God help us.” Trump, Kelly said, is “a person who has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.”

On the plus side, those who supported him in Milwaukee just before he took the stage to accept the nomination included such powerful validators as Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock. Jimmy Hoffa was conspicuously unavailable.

The assassination attempt on Trump is a scandal, an example of America’s instability. But sugarcoating Donald Trump is foolish. Just listen to the elephants in the room.

Jeff Robbins’ latest book, “Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad,” is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant U.S. attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, served as senior minority counsel to the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. A First Amendment lawyer, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, where he writes about politics, national security, human rights, and the Middle East.

Photo credit: Samuel Schroth on Unsplash