No. of Recommendations: 12
Another of Trump’s campaign aides, who supposedly spoke to the president on a daily basis, wrote in an email: “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”
Here is what I don’t understand: Why was this person willing to “hustle” and “help on all fronts” when he/she understood it was all “conspiracy shit”?
It’s nice that a couple people resigned from the Trump administration after January 6. But why weren’t there resignations before January 6 from people on the inside, who saw that he was trying to overturn a lawful election?
Why were so many of those people happy to “hustle” and “help” with what they knew to be an illegitimate attempt to subvert the democratic process?
The answer, of course, is that “guardrails” aren’t inanimate, incorruptible pieces of machinery.
Guardrails are just people. People who need jobs. Who have kids and mortgages, friend groups and professional networks.
One of the things we never really considered before Trump was the extent to which being a guardrail would require sacrifice. We would say, “Oh, there are checks and balances and the guardrails will keep him from doing anything too terrible.”
But we didn’t really play that scenario all the way through, did we?
