History may be written by the victors, but it is revised by them, too. And those in power—the ones who decide who will get second chances, and who, conversely, will not—are, on top of everything else, the stewards of the national memory. Hannah Arendt, considering the intersection of politics and language, was concerned not just for the fate of facts, but also for a broader possibility: that a “mixture of gullibility and cynicism” would make those facts—and collective memory itself—effectively irrelevant. People, she worried, might become so suspicious of each other that they would cease to accept the notion of meaningfully shared realities. Everything was possible and nothing was true.

Those fears are at play when Americans are constantly asked—constantly being primed—to look away, to be distracted, to cede attention, to forget. And when, whether through Sean Spicer and a revisionist publicity tour or through Donald Trump and a revisionist presidency, recency alone is presented as the salient fact of any matter. The new thing—the new book, the new job, the new scandal, the new tweet—becomes the thing. The shininess wins again. As when Sean Spicer tells an absurd lie on behalf of the brand-new Trump administration—and then, a little later, with the kind of impishness that so often accompanies impunity, treats that lie as a gauzy fact of a past that has been cheerfully overwritten. #Biggestcrowdever. #Period: It is no longer a great shame, Spicer is insisting, because it has been converted into a great joke.

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The revisionism is everywhere. New narratives arise to replace the old—#cantstopwontstop—with a striking frequency. The key word of the political discourse of last week, following the press conference (“disgraceful,” “disgusting,” “disturbing,” “nothing short of treasonous”) that found President Trump questioning the validity of U.S. intelligence findings in an apparent effort to capitulate to Vladimir Putin, was clarifications. He had said “would,” but meant “wouldn’t,” the president explained, reading from a prepared statement on Tuesday. Yes, but really no. Sort of a double negative. “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place,” Trump said, unable to resist a clarification of his own clarification: “Could be other people also. A lot of people out there.”

And so, “in the span of three days,” PolitiFact summed it up,

President Donald Trump said he didn’t see why Russia would interfere with the U.S. 2016 elections, then he said he didn’t see why it wouldn’t. He gave Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt, and then said he held him responsible for meddling. He said he thought Russia was no longer interfering with U.S. elections, then his press secretary said he hadn’t said that.

What was additionally striking about all this, however, was that the presidential whiplash was generally met, on the part of the president’s fellow leaders, with … relief. Acceptance. Acquiescence. Just kidding, the president had told the world, with his no-yeses and would-wouldn’ts and up-downs, as he suggested that the whole thing had been, somehow, a fever dream staged in the seventh circle of Helsinki—and his fellow power brokers chose to take him at his (latest) word. Senator Marco Rubio, relief-sighing in response to the presidential do-over: “I’m just glad he clarified it. I can’t read his intentions or what he meant to say at the time. Suffice it to say that for me as a policy-maker, what really matters is what we do moving forward.” Senator Rob Portman: “I’m glad he clarified his comments today. But I wish he had said it in front of President Putin and the world yesterday. I take him at his word if he said he misspoke, absolutely.”