Peter Wehner: Praising Trump With Faint Damnation

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/05/praising-trump-faint-damnation/678464/

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https://archive.li/289Y1

Franklin graham, one of America’s most well-known evangelicals, recently did what he has never done before: He offered a critical assessment of Donald Trump. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal not long ago, Graham conceded that Trump—twice impeached, thrice married, and four times indicted—at times uses “locker room” talkto

That’s right; that was it. And even Graham’s mildest of all possible criticisms of the former president was accompanied by a compliment: Trump may sound a bit bawdy at times, according to Graham, but at least he doesn’t hide it! Come now in praise of Donald Trump’s authenticity.

All of us, even Graham, know deep down that corruption pervades every aspect of Trump’s life—personal, political, and financial. Only a few months after having been found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming a woman, Trump is on trial in New York City, having been charged with falsifying 34 business records related to the reimbursement of a $130,000 hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who says she had a sexual encounter with him. Yet Graham, a right-wing culture warrior who throughout his life has obsessed over sexual sin, has given Trump a mulligan, time and time and time again. Despite all of Trump’s transgressions, Graham has campaigned for him, and insists he will go down “as one of the great presidents of our nation.”

The narrative that’s being pushed by Graham is that Trump’s “locker room” talk and “mean tweets” are his worst transgressionsand

This assertion is a lie, ignoble but in some respects understandable. After all, Trump supporters can’t defend who Trump really is, the awful things he does and says. They can’t defend his lawlessness and cruelty and crudity, the attempted coups and encouragement to his supporters to violently storm the Capitol and hang his vice president. They can’t defend his fraud and promiscuity, his love of conspiracy theories and affinity for dictators, his pathological lying and deranged rants, his misogyny and racism, his mocking of prisoners of war and those with disabilities. So they take his least problematic actions and pretend they’re his most problematic offenses. It’s the opposite of damning someone with faint praise; in this case, it’s praising Trump with faint damnation.

*snip*