Trump Loyalists Will Turn Their Backs on McGahn

Source: National Review | April 26, 2019 | Jonah Goldberg

The president is calling McGahn a liar, and it looks as if a lot of people will throw the former White House counsel under the bus.

So Don McGahn is in the president’s crosshairs. Whose side are you on?

I ask because this is perhaps the perfect test for a special subgroup of Donald Trump supporters. Call them the “But Gorsuchers.”

At the beginning of the Trump administration, when things got off to a rocky start, the go-to response from many Trump boosters was some version of “Yes, but we got Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.” As things got more chaotic, it became a joke to say, “Yeah, but Gorsuch” after every embarrassing revelation or disturbing tweet.

But from a conservative perspective that places a high priority on the court, this was an utterly defensible point of view. Many Republicans who were reluctant to vote for Trump came around only after he promised to pick judges exclusively from a list vetted by the conservative Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. This reassured the voters who had taken Trump seriously when he talked about putting his sister on the Supreme Court.

If the opportunity to put a conservative on the court — or deny Hillary Clinton a chance to do so — was why you ultimately voted for him, then “But Gorsuch” was a fair retort.

…….

Which brings me to McGahn, who until recently was considered a widely respected, unimpeachably conservative lawyer. I have no idea what the former White House counsel’s personal views on Trump are. But based on his actions, he was at minimum a conservative transactionalist. He didn’t attack the president; he joined Trump’s team. It was McGahn’s job to shepherd Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and other judges through the confirmation process. By the time McGahn left the White House last year, not only had he scored two Supreme Court victories for the president, he’d been a sherpa to 59 other federal judgeships.

Also, according to the Mueller report, McGahn may well have saved the Trump presidency by refusing to follow the president’s orders to derail the Mueller probe.

McGahn cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. He didn’t want to; he was told to by Trump and his legal team.

Now, Trump is calling McGahn a liar. The president denies he told McGahn to fire Mueller. Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, have insinuated that McGahn’s handwritten notes from his conversations with the president are somehow fraudulent.

We’ll see how things unfold, but it looks as if a lot of people, when forced to choose, will opt to throw McGahn under the bus, because loyalty to the president is now the definition of what it means to be a Republican or a conservative. And saying “But Gorsuch” won’t help McGahn.

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