What the people who now want us to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment are arguing is that certain aspects of the Constitution ought to be nullified merely by their unpopularity—not even necessarily among a majority of voters but among a subset of extra-special voters. This is not a standard applied to any other aspect of the American Constitution in any other circumstance. It is an entirely novel standard invented for the benefit of Donald Trump. In effect, they are arguing for a set of unwritten Trump Rules that would exempt the former president from broadly applicable standards.
Many still didn’t believe that they were in the wrong. They shed some crocodile tears and moved on.
Honestly I dont think this is really surprising. At some level, just about all humans want to think of themselves as being good people, or at least not horrible. Accepting that one has done something that heinous is such a horrible truth that it isnt hard to imagine some people just refusing to accept it no matter what they are shown, and if denial that the crime happened is no longer available, because the evidence is right in front of one’s face, some of those people will go to any absurd length to believe that it was justified somehow, or that they were somehow innocent of it. This isnt a defense or excuse for those people of course, those people deserved none, just a statement that it isnt really unexpected that some would act that way given the circumstances.
Wasn’t this a precedent set after the Civil War?
Well, the slavers didn’t bother with the crocodile tears.
Not really. Johnson totally screwed up Reconstruction, because he was a Confederate supporter.