Michael Flynn, and Trump’s lasting elevation of the fringe - The Washington Post

Then-President Donald Trump’s 2017 decision to elevate Michael Flynn to White House national security adviser, in many other contexts, would have made lots of sense. Flynn was a military general. He had even been nominated by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, to head the Defense Intelligence Agency.

But there were also plenty of known red flags. Flynn was cast aside by the Obama administration over alleged management problems. He had also been making appearances on the Russian propaganda outlet RT. He delivered a paid speech to it and attended an anniversary celebration at which he was seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And he was one of the earliest adopters among Trump’s 2016 surrogates of the “lock her up” mantra for Hillary Clinton — conduct far removed from what we would expect from a military figure.

In the end, those red flags proved to be giant red alarms. Flynn was fired within a month of Trump’s inauguration for lying to the White House about his pre-presidency interactions with Russia’s ambassador. He later pleaded guilty to also lying to the FBI about it. But his efforts to remain loyal to Trump and Trump-adjacent conspiracy theories ultimately paid off, earning him a pardon after Trump lost reelection.

Today, Flynn continues to exploit the public profile all of this has afforded him to promote even more conspiratorial theories like QAnon and to toy with far-flung ideas to return Trump to power like overturning the 2020 election, martial law and even, this weekend, a military coup to reinstall Trump.

One of the undersold aspects of the Trump presidency isn’t so much what he did while in office, but how much he elevated fringe figures like Flynn who would never have set foot inside virtually any other president’s orbit. With Trump now out of office, those figures’ continued drift toward the fringe and the credibility Trump lent to them is surely one of the lasting impacts of his presidency.

A prominent example is another speaker at the QAnon-themed conference at which Flynn spoke this weekend. Sidney Powell was first and foremost in spewing baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud and voting machines after the 2020 election. She even — like Flynn — parlayed this into briefly working for Trump in an official capacity before being cast aside when she apparently went too far even for Trump’s team. Powell’s tenure was even shorter than Flynn’s, having been announced as a member of Trump’s legal team only about a week before her departure.

Powell’s ally, L. Lin Wood, never officially served on Trump’s legal team. But Trump at times spoke about him as if he had, and he endorsed Wood’s efforts. Wood has since used that profile to suggest execution for former vice president Mike Pence, claim that Trump is still somehow serving as president and that President Biden is actually dead, and to promote QAnon. (At least in his case, the Trump-era GOP declined to elevate him, recently turning aside his challenge to the South Carolina Republican Party chairman.)

Bundy, today, is ramping up for a run for the GOP nomination for governor of Idaho. It’s a campaign for which he’s struggling to qualify for the ballot and which he’d surely struggle to win. But as the Daily Beast reported Thursday, it’s easy to undersell the implications of such a campaign in today’s environment, given the reach of ideologies like Bundy’s in the West and his storming of the Idaho Capitol last summer, which turned out to be something of a precursor to Jan. 6. And Trump, again, fed into such things more than other presidents would have.

Again, these have been and will apparently remain fringe figures in the Republican Party. But we’ve also seen what a motivated fringe can do, particularly on Jan. 6.

Whether their elevation is because more establishment-oriented Republicans were unwilling to work for Trump or it was Trump’s actual intention to elevate the fringes, the effect is the same. Politicians and presidents will generally be very careful about whom they hire and ally with because they worry about it blowing back on them. (They might even worry about the implications for the country.)

Trump demonstrated very little due diligence in or compunction about hiring and promoting such people. (And in two cases, he was apparently prevailed upon to dispatch them rather quickly.) While it’s perhaps possible to overstate the actual implications for the future of the GOP, those figures seem to be intent upon pulling it further to the extreme in ways that Trump’s party now has to deal with — from figures with something of a presidential seal of approval.

And if the most recent exploits from the likes of Flynn, Powell, Bundy et. al. tell us anything, it’s that they’ll probably keep pushing the bounds.

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Michael Flynn, and Trump’s lasting elevation of the fringe - The Washington Post
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