IT WILL SHOCK YOU HOW MUCH IT HAPPENED

David Frum tweeted this today:

During a talk today, I was asked how Republicans will process their memory of the Trump years. I answered by quoting Don Draper's cynical remark from Mad Men Season 1: "It never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened." https://t.co/c6Lb1DnBY2

— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 1, 2020

Which prompted a response from Driftglass, who tirelessly reminds us that he's called Republicans on their crimes in real time for many years, only to watch those crimes slip down the memory hole:

Fun Fact: "It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened" was the title of a post I wrote in 2014 about how effectively the memory of the Bush Administration had been obliterated.

Can I haz my own @TheAtlantic byline now?https://t.co/jpEszWoyg9

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) December 1, 2020

In that 2014 post, Driftglass wrote:

The American Conquest and Occupation of Iraq took place 11 years ago, over a eight-and-a-half year period between March 2003 and December 2011 and it laid bare a massive rift in American society....

And yet, a mere three years after the last American troops rolled out of Iraq, the Elite American Media has succeeded in pounding out and sanding over the most infamous and tragic milestones of that war.

... the treasonous history of the Bush Administration and the eager participation of its tens of millions of collaborators -- our political Chernobyl -- now lies buried beneath vast, thick sarcophagus of money, media and willful Strategic Forgettery.

Remember, Wingnuts. It. Never. Happened. You were never there. You never said what you said or did what you did. Just stick to the fucking story and you'll be fine.

But the difference between that era and this one can be summed up in one graph:

According to FiveThirtyEight, when George W. Bush left office, he had a job approval rating of 30.4%. For most of his last year in office, his rating was mired in the 20s.

By contrast, Donald Trump's job approval rating -- shown in green above -- is currently 44%. As we learned four weeks ago, he's more popular than we thought he was.

If Trump had lost the Electoral College by a two-to-one margin and lost the popular vote by nine or ten points, and if Democrats had taken the Senate and won a couple of state legislative houses back from the Republicans, then, sure, Republicans would be working hard to rebrand the GOP as a party that never really fell for all that silly old Trumpism. The mainstream media would absolutely be helping Republicans whitewash the past.

But Trump voters love Trump -- still. And there are 74 million of them. He won't be memory-holed because his voters won't allow that to happen.

We're going to have a different problem. We'll be living in a world much like the one we're living in now, where Trump did all those things and nearly half the country believes they were perfectly fine, while GOP officeholders and officials brainstorm ways of leveraging that rage without setting off as much anger on our side as Trump did.

They won't do it by making us forget what Trump did. They'll do it by trying to make us forget that what Trump did was ever controversial. That might be worse.