Republicans Rehabilitating the Participants in Trump’s Coup

Last week, the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee published their report on new revelations into Donald Trump’s efforts to discard the election results and remain in power. The important takeaway, Republicans conclude, is that Trump’s interest in using the Justice Department to secure an unelected second term was based on “legitimate complaints and reports of crimes.” And anyway, he decided not to go through with the full Saturday Night Massacre coup plan that Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark had urged upon him.

Conservative pundits have embraced this happy-ending interpretation. “The story of Trump and the Justice Department, then, is not one of the president’s relentless pressure campaign on the nation’s top lawyers. It is, rather, a story of the president taking those lawyers’ advice — and then, tragically, turning elsewhere,” argues Byron York. “Trump decided against it,” insists Brit Hume. “It is not to his credit that he even considered it, but his rejection should be part of any story on it.”

That Trump decided against Clark’s plan is certainly part of the story. But is it the important part of the story? That depends on his reasons for rejecting the plan. It would be one thing if Trump rejected the proposal on moral grounds — but not even a Byron York could manage to type the words “Donald Trump” and “moral” in the same sentence. Instead, he simply judged the plan unlikely to succeed, much like a bank robber deciding not to crack a vault because its security system is too tough.

The important issue going forward is what Republicans will decide about the idea of overturning Democratic election victories. Here, the evidence is overwhelmingly negative. The Republican impulse is to rehabilitate all the participants in Trump’s attempted coup.

An instructive episode is the protective cordon forming around John Eastman, the lawyer whose memo gave Trump his step-by-step playbook for using Mike Pence to discard the election results on January 6. Eastman’s plan hinged on an extremely tenuous constitutional argument that the vice-president has unilateral power to discard any election result he decides is wrong, and throw the election to the House, which would decide the result on the basis of which party controlled the most state delegations. Even if Eastman’s argument was valid — and hardly any scholars take it seriously — it would mean he had discovered a loophole that would allow the president’s party to retain power forever.

Eatman’s effort to end American democracy has resulted in some professional blowback. If conservatives wanted to prove that the real takeaway from Trump’s coup is that he decided against it, they would cut Eastman loose. Instead, they are rallying to his defense.

The Claremont Institute, a formerly highbrow cog in the conservative movement, defended Eastman against what it called “a recent combined…