For over a year now erstwhile enablers of former President Donald Trump have tried to save themselves. Save themselves from the judgement of history.
There’s been a slew of them – Trump toadies who while he was president went along with everything he said and did. Only recently to come out of the cold to turn on him and, or, to justify their behavior.
In my book, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, I define enablers as “followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.” Additionally, I name names. The book has a large cast of characters, men and women who performed the part of enabler to a fault. Literally.
Most of Trump’s enablers have stayed silent. Maybe because they remain true believers. Maybe because they fear his wrath. Or maybe because they think they’re better off shutting up and leaving the national stage.
But some of Trump’s enablers have sought to redeem themselves. They have tried publicly to justify why they served a leader who so obviously was bad. Misguided and malignant, and completely corrupt.
Former Attorney General William Barr, for instance, wrote a book titled, One Damn Thing After Another. In his memoir cum self-serving case for the defense Barr describes himself as serving not just Trump but also the American people. How exactly? Because he took on militant secularists, left-wing agitators, and members of the “Maoist left.” Barr moreover went further. In his zeal to rehabilitate his reputation he testified for public consumption that Trump’s claims of election fraud were “bullshit.”
Ivanka Trump, the fabled first daughter, has also backtracked, in public. In The Enablers I describe Ivanka as the one person on planet earth who seemed, on occasion, to reach President Trump. He adored her. First and foremost, her beauty. But he also “extolled how she behaved and what she accomplished and thought her future limitless.” He called Ivanka “Baby” in official meetings, described her as “unique,” and insisted that if she ever ran for president, “she’d be very, very hard to beat.’” In return, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, were among President Trump’s most loyal allies and advisors, members not only of his family but of his inner circle. Still, when it came her turn to testify about Trump’s Big Lie, that he won not lost the 2020 presidential election, she did. Her voice was faint, and her words brief, but she said for the record that she believed William Barr, that her father’s claims of election fraud were “nonsense.” Why did Ivanka Trump turn on Donald Trump? To create distance between her and her father – to rehabilitate herself.
Final case in point (here) of an enabler seeking to be saved, Dr. Deborah Birx. After Trump was out of the White House Birx wrote a book, Silent Invasion, that centered on her role as Coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She, and Doctors Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield were Trump’s main medical advisors during his last year in office, which coincided with the first year of the Covid crisis. In Silent Invasion Birx describes her White House tenure as excruciating. Still, she stayed, apparently reasoning that leaving her post would be more hurtful than helpful. “I am not a quitter,” she wrote in her book. It was what one reviewer called “one of her many self-testimonials with which she bolsters herself throughout the book.” Bolsters herself because she wants to justify herself. Too late though. Before 2020 was over Birx’s credibility was shot. As I wrote in The Enablers, her willingness “to forgive her boss his numberless lies,” and her readiness to “heap on her boss the flattery he craved,” makes her redemption impossible.
No one can ever undo what was done. An enabler who enabled a very, very bad leader can never be saved. Redeemed perhaps, but not saved.