This is an opinion column.

Here is my advice for everyone trying to make sense of Katie Britt’s disastrous performance last week: Believe what you saw.

Her political pals will soon lock arms around her. They’ll say she’s being persecuted. And they’ll tell you that what you saw wasn’t real, that it was all a liberal media hit job, that Hollywood know-it-alls are trying to brainwash you.

The same folks who will look you in the eye and say January 6 was a peaceful capitol tour are about to tell you that Britt did a good job.

It’s already happening.

“Katie Britt was a GREAT contrast to an Angry, and obviously very Disturbed, ‘President,’” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. “She was compassionate and caring, especially concerning Women and Women’s Issues. Her conversation on Migrant Crime was powerful and insightful. Great job Katie!”

We now know Britt’s “conversation on Migrant Crime” was not everything she said it was, and the only Women’s Issues that Mr. Access Hollywood cares about involve civil judgments he has to pay.

But that’s missing the more dangerous hazard here. The spin police are coming and they want to mess with your memory.

“On Thursday night, we, as a nation, saw a glimpse of hope for the first time in a very long time,” Alabama House majority leader Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle, wrote in an op-ed this weekend. “We witnessed true leadership and a dose of truth that the American people needed to hear.”

Uh-huh.

You saw it. And I saw it.

Believe what you saw.

We’ve been through this sort of thing before. Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood debacle is a good example. January 6 is a better one. Those events are instructive. These things play out in stages: Shock first, then spin, and if the spin doesn’t work, then outright lies.

The shock affects most folks similarly. In the early hours, no one is playing off a script. There are no talking points yet, no tweets to take direction from, no partisan groupthink — just the early naked individual impressions of what took place.

It’s then that you might see genuine reactions, when partisans are most likely to say things they’ll try to claw back later. This is when officials will say the GOP nominee should drop out for candid recorded comments about groping women, only to say it was “locker room talk” a day later.

Take the other person on Trump’s VP shortlist, Elise Stefanik, as an example. On January 6, she called the mob that ransacked the capitol “perpetrators of violence,” and from the House floor, she called for them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

It takes time to get everybody back in line, and there are always a few folks who will mistake this as an opportunity to break for freedom.

But give it time for the political anesthetic to set in, and they’ll get back to the party line, like how Stefanik now calls the mob she wanted prosecuted “January 6 hostages.”

Making Katie Britt out to be Patrick Henry will be a cinch after that, and Britt is already doing her part. Over the weekend, she began the one-stop image rehab tour on Fox News Sunday, where she defended her speech and denied she had misled anyone.

You don’t have to question your own mind. The simple explanation is the correct one.

Katie Britt was badly prepared. She went on national television to tell the president of the United States he was full of it and she forgot to check her own britches first. She wanted to make a good impression because she had bigger political ambitions, but she wasn’t as good at this as she thought she was, and she overdid it. She fudged the place and time of a sex crime in another country to make the president look bad and now the victim says she doesn’t appreciate her story being used that way.

Compared to accidentally confessing to sexual assault on an entertainment news show or ransacking the capitol while trying to lynch a vice president, Britt’s doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

For politicians, lying gets easier with practice. And our minds get more vulnerable every time we let this go.

The truth matters, and we have to hold on to it.

You saw it. I saw it.

Believe what you saw.

Kyle Whitmire is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. You can follow him on Threads here and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Alabamafication.