Quick Hit: The National Archives Reverse Course
About that altered Women’s March photograph…
This affirms my suspicion that it was about pre-emptive headache avoidance than out of a desire to actively push the White House agenda. They ran into a bigger headache than they expected because of it.
Which, again, is not a defense. The rooms where decisions are made throughout our federal government and military apparatus are full of people who are making decisions on the basis of what is least likely to provoke the beast, which amounts to advancing his agenda even if their motivation is to be allowed to continue their actual mission in peace.
With everything else going on right now, I’m not sure if this is going to be on Donald’s radar unless someone close to him decides to use it to rile him up or distract him. It will be interesting to see if he mentions it, or how he characterizes it.
If he does bring it up, I give it about a one-third chance he claims that Democrats threatened the National Archives until they added nasty things about him to a photograph, or something like that.
Slightly more likely is he or his proxies saying that Democrats claimed to be offended by his language and then lobbied the National Archives to put it on display. Trying to pretend that the response to his Access Hollywood audio was about language and civility is a tradition that dates back at least as far as the Women’s March itself, when they were going, “You were offended by ‘grab them by the pussy’ and now you’re wearing ‘pussy hats’? Hypocrites!”