Watch Team Trump's response to the Ukraine whistleblower crisis closely. It'll tell you what you need to know

Trump’s post-crisis news cycles are hugely enlightening — and today's shows just how much the Republican Party is in bed with the president

This week has been a bad week for the Trump administration, even by its usual standards. Besides the usual racism and corruption allegations came the news of a whistleblower, someone who considered the president’s behavior so deeply disturbing that they had to come forward.

All of this was made slightly more amazing due to the fact that Rudy Giuliani actually admitted to meddling in May in the New York Times when he told Ken Vogal, “We’re not meddling in an election; we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do.” So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised that the foreign government the whistleblower was whistleblowing about was Ukraine.

Like with any crisis in Trumpworld, the Trump Mobius strip of propaganda rolled out a rapid and slightly insane response. Trump’s propagandists met yet another allegation of presidential malfeasance with a smorgasbord of obfuscation, confession, deflection, confusion, and unbridled hostility.

The morning after the whistleblower’s allegations came to light, the president’s favorite breakfast show cheerfully explained to its viewers that what looked like potential treason was in fact merely “the art of the deal.” Yes, possible corruption was actually just deal-making! Geraldo Rivera chimed in to call out the whistleblower for being “annoying, this is a punk, a punk who's snitching out the president's phone calls to a foreign leader”. Newt Gingrich volunteered an “executive powers” defense. Gingrich has himself been plagued by ethics scandals, so perhaps he’s the perfect person to defend such an ethically challenged president.

But Fox is just one of the many arms in the president’s propaganda octopus. The Gateway Pundit asked: “What would a Deep State hit be without Hillary Clinton, the most crooked woman in Washington DC?” Wait, what? Yes, this publication managed to spin the whistleblower allegation into an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Another Trumpy news site called Amgreatness argued that the president can do whatever he wants because of the constitution. I'm not a constitutional scholar but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say: no, no he can’t.

But no one shills for the president quite like the members of his own party, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is always happy to go on Fox News and blame “another deep state attack” on whatever’s got the president into trouble this time. Likewise, Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn blamed the Democrats for the whistleblower, saying, "You will never see the attacks stopped. The left will not give up because they cannot even accept the fact that they lost." All of this is made sillier by the fact that none of these people know who the whistleblower is.

But perhaps the strangest moment of Trump-defending came from John McCain’s daughter. John McCain, of course, is well-known as the one member of the Republican Party who stood up to Trump before he died of brain cancer. His daughter, Meghan, has been somewhat critical of the president — but not today. Today she somehow conflated Assange and the whistleblower by making an odd defensive argument in favor of Trump. Specifically, she said: “There are liberals who were fine with Assange’s leaks but are screaming bloody murder right now about this whistleblower.” It’s not clear what the connection is between this whistleblower and WikiLeaks (unless Meghan McCain knows something the rest of us don’t) but it sure functioned as another valiant attempt to shift blame away from the president of the United States.

Trump’s post-crisis news cycles are in some ways the most enlightening: they show us just how in bed the Republican Party is with him. The president’s defenders will die on all the hills for their leader, and the strategies are becoming wearingly obvious. First, they will start by denying or ignoring something, or by saying that the president was just joking and you’re not supposed to take him literally or figuratively or in whatever way you did. Then, sooner or later, they almost always get around to the defense that if a crime is committed by the president of the United States, it’s not really a crime at all (this rationale was also used by Nixon.)

The idea that the president gets a pass to commit crimes because he’s the president or because they aren’t really crimes when he does them is some really impressive thought jujitsu. But the even more impressive fact is that we barely know anything about the whistleblower and already Team Trump is committed to discrediting them.

If none of this means anything, than why is Team Trump working so hard?