'Morally perverse': Inside the 'shocking' way Trump 'minions' are trying to rewrite history
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt holds a press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 29, 2025. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
Attorney General Pam Bondi may have been a "repellant snit" at last week's Senate Judiciary Hearing, writes the New York Times' Frank Bruni, but more disturbing than that was the behavior of Republican senators demanding Democrats answer for their conduct in regards to the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the United States Capitol.
"'Insurrection,' 'invasion' — call it what you will, it was terrifying and unconscionable either way. And in a sane democracy, it would have ended Trump’s political career as Republican lawmakers barred the doors forevermore," Bruni says.
Republicans, Bruni says, used Bondi's hearing to prop President Donald Trump up, and to "pretty him up, to pamper and to please him, by misrepresenting federal investigators’ apparent examination of Republican lawmakers’ phone records from the period around Jan. 6 as the real scandal."
The campaign to rewrite history, Bruni says, is the most disturbing. "That morally perverse switcheroo was no accident and no one-off. It belongs to an audacious mission to turn Jan. 6 on its head — to erase the shame of it by interring the truth of it," he adds.
Trump's inability to "quit his victimhood," and his "justification for his vendettas," has, Bruni says, caused "his Republican abettors and the MAGA faithful to think and talk differently about Jan. 6"
"Sure, the rioters spun out of control, but can you blame them? Thieving Democrats and a cabal of their co-conspirators had usurped voters’ will," Bruni says.
Trump, he writes, is aware of his "complicity in the violence of Jan 6.," which was "more damning than any of his other transgressions," and Republicans "in the recesses of their dormant consciences" do, too, but it doesn't matter.
"Trump and the Republicans who’ve hitched their political fates to him must defuse it, confuse it, make it go away," Bruni says, "And to a shocking degree, they’ve succeeded."
Despite Trump's outward complicity in ordering Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to “find 11,780 votes” to change the outcome of the electiom, focus centered instead on Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis’s professional conduct, her personal life, and "about minutiae whose significance paled beside Trump’s intimidation tactics."
"That was the handiwork of Trump and his minions," Bruni says. "That was the plan."
Trump's vindictiveness, his attacks on judges, his impugning of the "integrity of [special prosecutor]Jack Smith, were all part of the plan, Bruni says.
"He combined all of that into a narrative of political persecution fashioned precisely for our tribal times, and he did that so relentlessly and so operatically — he was a bona fide martyr! — that it thickened the fog and no doubt left many Americans less and less sure about the actual facts, the real culprits," he writes.
Add to that Trump's pardoning of over 1,500 in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, the firing of federal prosecutors who pursued cases against them, and, Trump's latest, most preposterous claim that President Joe Biden, who was not president at that time, sent FBI agents into the crowd, and the fog gets even thicker, he says.
"But Republicans generally never correct Trump. They coddle him. Exonerate him. Which is what the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee did when Bondi dropped by," he says.
"The tangent that they went on was no tangent at all. It was a purposeful, cynical distraction in the service of their irascible overlord and his biggest, most enduring lie," Bruni says.