BRENDAN O’NEILL: The Political Class’s Anti-Trump Hysteria Is Actually A Means Of Self-Whitewashing.

Let’s leave to one side how implicitly anti-democratic is this haughty refusal to confer legitimacy on Trump. How it demeans, not only Trump (which is fine — demean away), but also the 62 million people who voted for him. After all, what is their desire to have Trump run their republic in comparison with the insistence of the more switched-on that he isn’t fit for that job? More importantly is what this de-normalisation drive does for other politicians. It absolves them. It flatters them. It tells them that what they have done — the destabilisation of nations, the destruction of lives — was normal, at least in comparison to this. The left’s arrogant, aristocratic withholding of legitimacy from Trump by extension legitimises his predecessors, including those who did far worse things than Trump has even countenanced.

This is why some pretty unpleasant politicians have been able to rehabilitate themselves via the anti-Trump hysteria. Consider Madeleine Albright. She won heaps of Twitter praise last week when she said she might register as a Muslim in protest against Trump’s travel order. This is the same Madeleine Albright who in 1996, as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, was asked if the surplus deaths of Iraqi children following America’s imposition of sanctions was a price worth paying for weakening Saddam’s rule. Her reply? ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.’

Just think about this. Let it sink into your head. A woman who apologised for, and who was in an administration that was responsible for, great suffering among Muslims can now get brownie points for saying she will register as a Muslim. In what sort of moral universe is it considered worse to restrict the freedom of movement of the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries than it is to participate in the near-destruction of a Muslim country? In the warped moral universe of anti-Trump hysteria. In the historically illiterate world that has been fashioned by the protesters against him, who tell us he is abnormal and therefore the rest of them are normal; that Trump is evil and therefore others, Albright, were good, or at least better.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton, who was retweeted tens of thousands of times for saying of Trump’s order: ‘This is not who we are.’ But it is who she is. This is the woman who spearheaded the bombing of Libya, helping to plunge that nation into mayhem and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees in the process.

Indeed.