Donald Trump supporters concoct their own James Comey story
Instead of seeing Trump for who he is, his supporters create an imaginary figure who does no wrong.
When former FBI Director James Comey's prepared congressional testimony hit the internet on Wednesday, President Donald Trump's supporters rejoiced. In the statement, Comey admitted that he told Trump on three separate occasions that Trump wasn't personally under investigation by the FBI in connection with potential Russian interference in the 2016 election.
This is a point Trump had made upon firing Comey in May, and this week Trump enthusiasts were happy to declare the president clear of any wrongdoing now that Comey had corroborated it. Yet this is an example of how far we've sunk – the U.S president is now getting credit for having managed not to lie to the American people.
Let the canonization process begin.
In fact, Comey's written and verbal testimony on Thursday would provide so very much more. In it, Comey accuses the President of the United States of trying to pressure him into an inappropriate relationship, demanding "loyalty" of the FBI director and urging him to shut down an active investigation.
To say that Comey's testimony "vindicates" Trump in any way ignores giant swaths of what the former FBI director actually said — it's like leaving the theater after seeing Wonder Woman and telling people it's a World War I documentary.
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This is the place where Trump's supporters exist: rather than seeing the president for who he clearly is, they construct an entirely different Trump in the negative space around him. If Comey accuses the president of obstructing an FBI investigation, they will say, "but look at all the laws Comey didn't charge Trump with breaking!" If Comey says Trump lied, they'll say "according to Comey's own admission, here's an instance where Trump told the truth!"
Given that the Trump we know often behaves indefensibly, his supporters simply build a more tolerable version of Trump, the one they see in the blank spaces around him. They view Trump as free-form jazz: his strength is in the things he doesn't say. Even if he actually says them.
Yet the first step in creating a new, more palatable Trump is never admitting he said things he actually said. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump expressed support for the operation; in presidential debate after presidential debate in 2016, he lied, claiming he never had supported the war. Trump knew that if he just kept saying it, his supporters would somehow wish it true. Score one for Imaginary Trump.
For #AlwaysTrumpers, it is also important to concoct fictions about Trump and never back down from them. Trump supporters are required to pretend, for instance, that the president is a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense negotiator who will only get us the best deals – yet the briefest of trips through his Twitter timeline reveals a thin-skinned moral adolescent obsessed with settling scores and being well-liked.
The most common trick in defending imaginary Trump, however, is the practice of "whataboutism" — or complaining about the outrage over Trump's actions when there was a lack of concern over a previous president's similar actions.
Comey says Trump tried to pressure him to end the investigation? What about the time Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac while Lynch was supposedly investigating Hillary Clinton?
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Trump shared classified information with Russia during an impromptu conversation? What about the time Barack Obama shared information with Cuba?
Trump doesn't know why the Civil War was fought? What about the time when President Obama said there were 57 states?
On and on it goes, poisoning the reputation of Republicans that would normally recognize that pointing to a past event doesn't excuse a current one. But for those unwilling to defend the indefensible, they cling to such misdirection even if the comparison between the two events is specious.
Sometimes, Trump's attempts to benefit from things he didn't do have been explicit. During one presidential debate, Trump tried to take credit for his choice not to bring up Bill Clinton's marital infidelities. "I was going to say something extremely rough, to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, I can't do it,” Trump said. “I just can't do it. It's inappropriate. It's not nice."
Get that? He's a good guy – just think of all the terrible things he could do that he chooses not to!
Trump is, as our parents all once warned us, the "eat your meatloaf because there are starving kids in China" president – he may be awful, but we should accept our fate because the alternative would leave us starving in the streets. (Like the Chinese kids who probably all have jobs making Trump's ties.)
Focusing only on select parts of Comey's testimony allows Trump's backers to fill in the empty space with a fiction more favorable to the president. However, they would be better off focusing on the president that actually stands before them rather than the one they wish they had.
Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Follow him on Twitter @Schneider_CM.
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