The Chronicles of Strategic Forgettery: Prey With Me Jared

From Axios:

Trump turns on everyone

President Trump, in his final days, is turning bitterly on virtually every person around him, griping about anyone who refuses to indulge conspiracy theories or hopeless bids to overturn the election, several top officials tell Axios...

This is Trump in the here-and-now: a cornered, raging madman stalking the hall of the White House, looking for some way to claw himself out of a pit that he dug for himself.  And the very worst of the hateful, remorseless, paranoid inner gears and mainsprings that have driven him his entire life -- that his defenders swore were never there at all -- now spilling uncontrollably out into the open.

This is Trump in the here-and-now.  But what about a year from now?  Two years from now?  History provides us with some clues.

Here is New York Times op-ed columnist William Safire in 1976 working hard to bulldoze the history of Nixon and Watergate down the memory hole using some of the Right's most time-honored tactics which are passed down from one generation of amoral Republican hacks to the next like hemophilia,.  

First, state as a matter-of-fact that Nixon's critics are money-grubbing, hate-deranged Leftist liars who made stuff up for profit:

Nixon‐hatred, that most profitable of media exploitations, reaches a crescendo this week with (1) the glorification on film of reporters‐turned‐mindreaders Woodward and Bernstein, and (2) the publication Of their latest journafiction, which purports to be an account of the fallen President's last days in the White House.

What motivates such outpourings of vitriol? “We had to make a lot of it up, but there's two million bucks in it,” said one of the writers. (Actually, I doubt whether either of them said that, but somebody once told me that he overheard somebody else say that Woodstein said something remotely like that at a party, which—by the new Pest‐Newsweek reportorial standards —means it can be turned into direct quotation and be accepted as true.)

Second, Both Sides Do It and Democrats are worse!

More important, why is there such a ready market for even the most specious guesswork that Richard Nixon was a drunken, carpet‐pounding maniac toward the end bf‐ his term? The answer is the need of many people to cover up their guilt feelings. Now that the nation has learned that the power‐abuses of the KennedyJohnson era were greater both in scope and intensity than even the worst excesses of the Nixon years—and now that there is evidence that the Democratic National Committee knew of plans for the Watergate break‐in six weeks in advance—there is a requirement for a heavy dose of reassurance that it was right strike Nixon down. To anesthetize their consciences they have to keep telling each other that he was Evil Incarnate. They have to insist he was dangerously demented.

After all Nixon was a righteous man of god while his enemies are godless Georgetown elitists, which is why they see the simple act of prayer by  Nixon -- "the target of more intense and extended abuse than any American in this century" -- as a sign of madness.

Consider the moment that the PostNewsweek set believes proves beyond doubt that President Nixon had gone bananas. In the small Lincoln sitting room, alone with Henry Kissinger, the embattled President is reported to have said: “Henry, you are not a very orthodox Jew, and I am not an orthodox Quaker, but we need to pray.” And then, according to this report, “Nixon got down on his knees. Kissinger felt he had no alternative but to kneel down, too.”

How square. How cloyingly pious. How insufferably un‐Georgetown. Can you imagine any person in his right mind, the target of more intense and extended abuse than any American in this century, turning to prayer?

And then the crescendo.  Who are the real sickos here?  The humble man-of-god or the liars and hypocrites who conspired to make themselves rich by dragging down the decent, noble, Richard Milhous Nixon?

Who is really sick in this situation? Is it the writers squeezing their last few million dollars out of Watergate, who make a mockery of historical reporting by putting quotation marks around remarks that their secondary sources never heard spoken?

Is it the reader or viewer, uncomfortable with the mounting evidence that a moral double standard kissed one Presidency and killed another, who desperately seeks a fix in film and print to get those hatred‐juices flowing?

Or was it the imperfect man who was President, trusting in the decency and discretion of his closest adviser, who fell to his knees and humbled himself before God—and, tears in his eyes, cried out for some answer to why he could not be allowed to fulfill his dream of being the world's peacemaker?

The minute Donald Trump is removed from office is the minute the rewriting of his years in office will begin in earnest.

Just wait and see.  

 Update:  It has already begun.  From Greg Sargent at The Washington Post:

The GOP whitewashing of the Trump stain has quietly begun

Listen closely, and you can already discern how leading Republicans will attempt to expunge the massive black stain of Trumpism from their party...

No Half Measures