YOU KNOW THAT THE "NAÏVETÉ DEFENSE" IS A DOG WHISTLE TO THE GOP VOTER BASE, RIGHT?

You probably know that Paul Ryan's defense of President Trump is that he's too dumb/naïve/incompetent to have known what he was doing in those conversations with James Comey:

“Of course there needs to be a degree of independence” between federal law enforcement and the White House, Ryan said. But he added, “The president’s new at this. He’s new to government, and so he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between [the Justice Department], FBI and White House. He’s just new to this.”

Ryan later made clear that he was “not saying it’s an acceptable excuse” and that his remark was “just my observation.” But he was one of many GOP lawmakers willing to minimize Trump’s alleged meddling and demands for loyalty as the fumblings of a political tyro....

But that's not just a strained effort to exonerate Trump. It's a way of giving him what Republican voters will regard as high praise.

Trump doesn't understand the ways of Washington? Washington is awful! Washington is evil! It's good that Trump doesn't know the horrible ways of that disgusting city! That was the whole point of electing him -- to send in an outsider, because the people who've been there all these years do everything wrong! He's there to shake things up! You can't do that if you're an insider!

Another defender goes Ryan one better:

“It has to still be legal and right and all that, but I think a lot of it is — he’s used to being the CEO,” Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), an early Trump endorser, said Wednesday after Comey’s preliminary statement was published.

The CEO! Even though Trump's base includes of lot of working-class voters, whom you'd expect to have some vague form of class consciousness, there's no one who is more exalted in their eyes (and in the eyes of long-time white-collar suburbanite Republican voters) than a CEO. A CEO is a job creator! A CEO is someone who creates wealth! The only thing those evil politicians do is take, take, take! A CEO is what every human aspires to be!

This is "Nothing to see here -- move on," but it's also "Republicans, starting with the president, are a people's insurgency, not a D.C. political party." The message is similar to "The media is a liberal conspiracy, but Fox, Breitbart, and talk radio aren't the media."

Years from now, if he's still in office, Republicans will still be saying that it's a good thing Trump hasn't learned how to do his job -- it's a sign of his outsider purity and his preference for the much nobler CEO role.