ON JANUARY 6, TRUMP WAS JUST BEING A PLUCKY OPTIMIST!

Christopher Caldwell, a preppy right-wing hack and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, tells us in the Times that the January 6 committee has been a failure because it hasn't changed public opinion about the insurrection. He blames the members of the committee for their inability to distinguish the rioters from poor, innocent Donald Trump:

There are two parties to Jan. 6 that the committee has had a hard time keeping distinct: the crowd and Mr. Trump. What the crowd did — to obstruct, through physical intimidation, the counting of votes — was a constitutional trespass of maximum gravity, for which the instigators deserve punishment.

But who were the instigators? The committee has focused on extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that played an outsize role in storming the Capitol. But their violence, coordination and resolution were not typical of the broader crowd. No firearms were found on those who invaded the Capitol.

So pay no attention to the bear spray and the heavy objects used to bash police officers' heads.

It was not a coup attempt. And even if you believe it was, Mr. Trump was not leading it.

For someone supposedly bent on overthrowing the government, Mr. Trump did an awful lot of television-watching and surprisingly little seizing of broadcast centers, mobilizing of commando units and issuing of emergency decrees. He certainly demeaned the office, embarrassed the country and behaved irresponsibly on Jan. 6. But to focus on that day distracts from his less dramatic but more consequential misdeeds.

So I guess if a jailed organized crime boss orders a hit on a cop from prison and doesn't also order his people to blow up a few police stations and seize City Hall, then it's not really an assault on government agents. Why even charge the boss with a crime?

Besides, Trump wasn't trying to subvert democracy. He was just being a plucky optimist:

Elections require of candidates a never-say-die optimism that can lead even levelheaded people to make bold claims. After the German national election of 2002, the conservative candidate Edmund Stoiber walked onstage as his prospects of winning dwindled, and announced, with a thrilled smile, “We have won the election.” In 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico City’s head of government, refused to accept the official tally showing him the loser in a national presidential race, camped out in the city’s central square and drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to the city, where they battled the police.

Everybody who loses leads riots -- or at least one guy I just mentioned did! So what's your problem?

Mr. Trump’s loss was razor thin: A shift of fewer than 80,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin would have given him the victory. But his loss is different from the near misses to which it is sometimes compared. For one thing, Mr. Trump was an incumbent. While Samuel Tilden in 1876, Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000 each lost the presidency by a whisker, they weren’t in the Oval Office and suffered no demotion in dignity.

So if you're an incumbent and you lose a close election, I guess you get a special dispensation to subvert the democratic process. (I wonder if Caldwell would say the same thing about Joe Biden if he loses in 2024 and behaves the way Trump did two years ago -- although we know he won't.)

Caldwell isn't an election denialist -- he's really denialism-adjacent. He says the courts were right to rule against every Trump election appeal:

In the judicial context, those judges who ruled against more than 60 Trump-initiated and Trump-linked lawsuits to reopen vote counts and reverse election results did exactly the right thing.

But there's an asterisk:

A courtroom is the wrong place to reward doubts about the legitimacy of elections. Overruling elections from the bench would undermine democracy and provide tomorrow’s lawyers with incentives to undermine it further.

So Trump might have had a point, but courts shouldn't say so? That appears to be what Caldwell is arguing.

In fact, everyone who wants to litigate the 2020 election endlessly should just keep doing so, according to Caldwell, even if they're prominent government officials, and possibly future presidents. The bad guys are the people who are upset about that:

... in a civic context, matters are different. Citizens have a right to examine the matter as freely and doggedly as they wish.

The committee jumbles all these contexts together. [Liz] Cheney recently complained that Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, “is, right now, campaigning for election deniers.” She went on: “Either you fundamentally believe in and will support our constitutional structure or you don’t.” But, of course, it is not unconstitutional to question the integrity of an election, and a person who does so is not necessarily an enemy of democracy.

It's not unconstitutional, but it matters if you continue to undermine trust in the electoral system and you're a prominent public official. But to Caldwell, Ron DeSantis's denialism is no more of a concern than denialism on the part of your Fox-watching uncle who occasionally comments at Breitbart as KidRockFan1776.

Certainly there were constitutional crimes that day.

It's really big of Caldwell to admit this.

But the committee members have been too inclined to look at the Republican Party as a nest of subversives, much as certain anti-Communists did the Democrats at some of the colder points in the Cold War.

Nearly every Republican elected official and operative in America sees the Democrats this way right now.

Any reader of Michael Wolff’s book “Landslide,” about the final days of the Trump presidency, will see that his unsuitability is a matter of psychology, not ideology — of character, not politics. He’s George III, not Hitler.

Because it's either/or. You can't be unsuitable in both ways, according to Caldwell -- it's not allowed. Hitler was bad politically, but otherwise he was a totally chill guy.

This is setting up Caldwell's final salvo:

After his defeat in November 2020, Mr. Trump began working the last available pressure point in the system — the Electoral College, as it turned out — to see if he could somehow lawyer and cajole his way to an alternative outcome. That a president would try such a thing required not just effrontery but also a colossal collapse in standards, integrity and public trust. But the requisite collapse had already taken place, by 2016 at the latest.

I know where Caldwell is going with this, though he doesn't come out and say it: Trump happened because you hippie liberals destroyed all cultural norms starting in the sixties. Caldwell's admirers presumably don't need him to spell this out.

Caldwell, by the way, is also a Muslim basher. A New York Times review of his 2009 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West summed up the book's message:

Through decades of mass immigration to Europe's hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are "patiently conquering Europe's cities, street by street."

This is indistinguishable from the Great Replacement Theory that Tucker Carlson regularly peddles today. Why does The New York Times employ this man?