In an appearance desired by no one and further cementing his reputation as an unparalleled hypocrite and right-wing boob, former congressman and Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney appeared to criticize former President Donald Trump in a CNN appearance last week — then quickly made clear that he would still support Trump if he were to be the 2024 GOP presidential candidate. Responding to comments by the former president that the January 6 insurrectionists had posed “zero threat,” Mulvaney remarked that, “I was surprised to hear the President say that. Clearly there were people who were behaving themselves, and then there were people who absolutely were not, but to come out and say that everyone was fine and there was no risk, that's just manifestly false -- people died, other people were severely injured.”
But by then making clear that he nonetheless views Trump as a viable presidential candidate for the Republican Party despite his role in an armed insurrection against the United States, Mulvaney showed that his aim was never to critique the act of insurrection or Trump’s role in it, but to offer guidance to the former president in how to talk about the Capitol attack so that he doesn’t alienate possible future voters who don’t happen to be hard-right Republicans. Mulvaney understands the indefensibility of pretending that the violence did not happen, and is simply acting in line with other pro-Trump politicians to steer a “middle course” that acknowledges the undeniable violence while pretending that the former president bears no responsibility for it.
To Mulvaney and others of his ilk, Trump does himself no favors by promoting an entirely alternate reality in which rioters were actually “hugging and kissing” police officers, as Trump said last week; such an obvious lie might fly with Trump die-hards, but not with other Republican voters less willing to deny the plentiful footage of right-wing extremists beating cops and sacking the Capitol building. Like other GOP politicians, Mulvaney is hedging his bets, pretending to critique the president while in actuality offering him advice so that he doesn’t totally destroy the party’s 2024 chances should he stage a comeback. As Mulvaney told CNN, Trump “is still a major player in the Republican Party — there's a lot of folks who were turned off by the last six weeks, and especially the riots, that he's going to have to do some work to sort of build bridges back with, if he wants to run again.” But any criticism of Donald Trump that doesn’t include the obvious addendum that he should never hold public office again is no criticism at all — it’s propaganda in service of a would-be authoritarian who ended his dark reign in office by making war on the United States. Attempts to deny or dilute this basic fact constitute complicity with the original act of insurrection.