It’s a free country right? Especially with regard to free speech, and what lawyers say in a legal brief or in oral argument: other than insulting the judge and risking a contempt of court order, lawyers can just say the “darndest” things, recalling Art Linkletter’s wonderful interviews with so many little folks.
One of the “darndest” things in a U.S. court took place yesterday, when the attorney for Donald J. Trump told the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that a President, because of “immunity,” could not be criminally charged for any act, no matter how horrible or treacherous, unless the Congress had first impeached and convicted that President.
It had not occurred to me yesterday, but today we see the bizarre implications of that free, unfettered way of speaking. One of the judges asked Trump’s attorney this: if a President ordered a Navy Seal team to assassinate a political rival (by poison, if the President wanted to be like Putin), could the criminal justice system hold him (or her) accountable? No, said Attorney D. John Sauer, not unless the President had first been impeached and convicted. (That’s something, by the way, that has never happened: impeachment yes, but conviction? Not in U.S. history. Nixon probably would have been convicted, but resigned.)
Now, isn’t that the “darndest” thing? Several wags pointed out later that day that the “logic” of this argument is that Biden could now order Trump’s assassination and be free of any criminal proceedings, at least until Congress impeached and convicted him. But under impeachment rules from the U.S. Constitution, only 34 Senators are needed in Biden’s “camp” to protect him from conviction.
Leading to this query: might there even be some Republican Senators who would refuse to convict?
I used to work for a man who truly believed that if you weren’t a multi-millionaire you probably didn’t have much common sense. “ I can only learn from people who know how to make a lot of money,” he once told me. J. Baker McCullagh, bless his heart and may he rest in peace, was in a kind of “groupthink” mode with his millionaire buddies. For Baker, the government’s insistence that he re-hire one of his favorite employees after she had her baby was “communism.” That same attitude leads to a deep distrust of government, a hatred of taxes or public goods, and a steady belief that no regulation or less regulation is necessary to preserve their monetary “bottom lines.”
It’s the very same “thinking” that pushes many plutocrats into rejecting politicians from the Democratic party, and favoring the GOP. For many years, as Paul Krugman has pointed out today, there was a kind of truce between the very rich GOP donors and the GOP “base.” But increasingly, the GOP base is not wired into reality: most of them believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, that Trump is being persecuted by a weaponized Department of Justice, and more than a few are proud to be Q Anon believers that have become convinced of some truly bizarre conspiracy theories.
The Deep State: QAnon followers believe in the existence of a secretive and powerful “deep state” within the U.S. government and other global institutions. This deep state is often portrayed as a shadowy group working to undermine and control the government..
Satanic Ritual Abuse: Some QAnon adherents claim that a global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is involved in a vast network of child trafficking and abuse. This belief has led to unfounded accusations against various public figures and celebrities.
The Storm: QAnon followers anticipate an event known as “The Storm,” during which President Trump will reveal and arrest members of the alleged deep state, leading to a purge of corrupt elites.
JFK Jr. Is Alive: A fringe belief within QAnon is that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, faked his death and is secretly working with President Trump to expose the deep state.
Adrenochrome: Some QAnon adherents claim that a chemical called adrenochrome is harvested from the blood of abused children and consumed by elites for its supposed rejuvenating and mind-altering properties.
Global Conspiracy: QAnon expands its conspiracy theory to encompass a wide range of global events and organizations, including claims that COVID-19 is a hoax, that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, and that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of elites.
The Great Awakening: QAnon followers believe that their movement is part of a global awakening to the truth, and they view themselves as “digital soldiers” fighting against the forces of darkness.
Trump, as a candidate for President in 2024, has actually embraced Q Anon, and has not pulled any punches about what he would do in a second term. And there’s no other word for it but fascism.
In June, hours after pleading not guilty to federal charges of mishandling classified documents and conspiring to obstruct justice, Trump claimed that President Biden “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits, and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy.” He added, “If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me.”
Since then, Trump has routinely adopted this sort of language, occasionally adding the term “fascists” to his repertoire, perhaps as an effort to muddle the meaning of the word. At a speech in Miami on the eve of the 2023 elections, he urged the crowd to “crush the communists at the ballot box.”
In November, Trump said at a rally, “In honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country—that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible; they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and to destroy the American Dream.”
As Krugman points out, this should give plutocrats who depended on deregulation and lower taxes at least some serious pause. But, sadly, it does not.
Krugman writes:
“What’s so striking to me is the political obtuseness of big money. Any moderately well-informed observer could have told big bankers that a MAGAfied Republican Party isn’t going to nominate anyone who might make them comfortable. Someday, perhaps, reasonable people will once again have a role to play within the G.O.P. But that day is at least several election cycles away.”
A recent Washington Post poll revealed that as much as a quarter of the 1000 plus people surveyed believe that the FBI orchestrated the January 6 events at the Capitol. Yes, there is increased polarization in the U.S. politics, long-standing hostility to government programs and delegitimization of the federal government itself, the spread of false or misleading information, often through social media and other online platforms, and the fact that people often seek out information and engage with like-minded individuals, as Baker McCullagh did back in the 1970s and 1980s. Social media online echo chambers reinforcing people’s existing beliefs, making them less likely to critically evaluate information from alternative sources. Once someone is invested in a particular narrative or conspiracy theory, they can’t admit they were ever wrong.
Finally, there is clearly a lack of media literacy; people often cannot discern credible sources from unreliable ones. This can lead them to believe and share conspiracy theories without critically evaluating the information. Better public school education on critical thinking and media literacy might help, but as of now, that may be too “woke” to happen, and the hour is already late.
Democracy dies in darkness,” claims the Washington Post. It seems we are in a most un-enlightened, darkening period of time in the U.S. Of course, it’s perfectly legal to want lower taxes and less regulation, but the plutocrats that support fascist-leaning politicians are mistaken to think that undoing democracy will help them in the long-term, and could actually unsettle a stable legal environment for business.
“Witch hunt!” We’ve heard that phrase from Donald Trump as a stock response to any number of investigations, indictments, and impeachments. The Mueller investigation, both impeachment proceedings, the Georgia investigation (of a “perfect” phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State), and the “hoax” that was the E. Jean Carroll civil proceeding against Trump for assault and defamation.
Now, George Santos is using that familiar phrase to attack an indictment for several kinds of crimes. From the New York Times article on May 10, 2023:
Mr. Santos was also charged with three counts of money laundering in connection to a donor solicitation scheme.
Prosecutors charged the congressman with two more counts of wire fraud and one count of stealing public money in connection with what they said was another scheme to obtain unemployment benefits from New York beginning in June 2020. Mr. Santos was earning $120,000 a year through his employment at a Florida-based investment company, but prosecutors said he repeatedly told the state he had been unemployed since March 2020. He collected more than $24,000 in benefits.
Prosecutors further charged Mr. Santos with two counts of making false statements to the House of Representatives on personal financial disclosure reports.
So, just what is a “witch hunt?” For U.S. folks, witch hunts were made famous in Salem, Massachusetts, when women were tried and executed for practicing “witchcraft.” But witch hunts far predate the Salem witch trials. From the Britannica:
“The events in Salem in 1692 were but one chapter in a long story of witch hunts that began in Europe between 1300 and 1330 and ended in the late 18th century (with the last known execution for witchcraft taking place in Switzerland in 1782). The Salem trials occurred late in the sequence, after the abatement of the European witch-hunt fervor, which peaked from the 1580s and ’90s to the 1630s and ’40s. Some three-fourths of those European witch hunts took place in western Germany, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland. The number of trials and executions varied according to time and place, but it is generally believed that some 110,000 persons in total were tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 to 60,000 were executed.”
The problem, of course, is that those women were not witches ––actual witches did not exist. Thus, the “hunt” for witches was a trumped up charge (pardon the pun) that had no basis in fact.
In effect, by invoking “witch hunt,” Santos is saying there is no basis in fact for these prosecutions.
But he’s lucky he lives in “America,” (the U.S., that is, not Central or South America), where women are no longer accused and tried for witchcraft. But, in India, the witch hunts persist.
“….witchcraft accusations are now often simply a tool to oppress women, victims’ advocates say. The motives can be to grab land, to ostracize a woman to settle a score, or to justify violence.”
“In the Jharkhand case, the young woman who was attacked, Durga Mahato, said the trouble started when she refused the sexual advances of a prominent man in the village. He, his brother, his wife and their daughter then declared Ms. Mahato a witch before luring her to their home and attacking her.”
Even though women around the world are still subject to witch hunts, U.S. politicians (always men, it seems) have flipped the script; now it is only men who are “victims” of “witch hunts.”
But it seriously wrong to compare accountability for wrongdoing to the “persecution, torturing, and executions of innocent men and women for crimes that they could not have committed in an enchanted world most of us no longer believe in. Their deaths were among the darkest historical moments in Western civilisation.”
As “the Conversation” (above) notes, “It borders on the ludicrous to hear the US President, touted as the most powerful man in the world, complain of being persecuted like a witch. The deaths of those convicted of witchcraft should not be demeaned and belittled by irresponsible, inaccurate, and plainly ignorant statements.”
As of January 2020, Trump had tweeted the words “Witch Hunt” (always with or in capitals) 337 times, or roughly once every three days in his presidency.
Why anyone believes that either Trump or Santos tells the truth in claiming that pernicious public officials are out to get them is far from clear. Trump still gets applause and shouts of approval from his fans when he calls E. Jean Carroll a “wack job” and claims he never met her.
As they say, “It’s a free country.” Guilty people are free to claim “witch hunt,” and it’s perfectly legal to applaud them for their lies. Perfectly legal, in fact. But wrong.
Donald Trump’s judicial chickens have come home to roost, and they are laying some perfectly legal but horribly misshapen eggs. Trump, with the help of Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, and then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, approved a record number of federal judges, not only to the Supreme Court (Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett), but to federal circuit and district courts.
Trump departed from a long tradition of listening to the American Bar Association’s recommendations as to who is actually qualified for these demanding and intellectually rigorous judgeships. More than a few of his appointees were rated as unqualified by the ABA.
For a 2019 readout on a number of judges (and Justices) pushed through by Trump and McConnell, see this post from Huffington, Unqualified and Ideological: A Guide to Trump’s Worst Judges.
For individuals and organizations adamantly opposed to abortion of any kind, or to LGBTQ rights of any kind, one of the main “go to” judges is Matthew Kacsmaryk, the sole federal district court judge in Amarillo, Texas.
“Forum shopping” is a venerable tradition among lawyers representing plaintiffs in federal or state court; every plaintiff wants a judge that is “sympathetic” to their cause. The right wing has found that filing in Kacsmaryk’s court for any of its favorite causes is almost a sure-fire bet.
The impact of Kacsmaryk’s decision to ban mifepristone –– a drug long approved by the FDA for what might be called chemically induced abortions –– extends far beyond the borders of Texas, and has national effect, even in states where abortion remains legal. (Reminder: Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs, over-ruling Roe v. Wade, essentially claimed that the question of abortion would be left to the states. Evidently, not so much.)
As Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post observed,
“In an opinion released Friday, Kacsmaryk invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and, for good measure, found that abortion medications cannot be sent by mail or other delivery service under the terms of an 1873 anti-vice law.”
“Even in states where abortion remains legal. Even though study after study has shown the drug to be safe and effective — far safer, for instance, than over-the-counter Tylenol. Even though — or perhaps precisely because — more than half of abortions in the United States today are performed with abortion medication.”
The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine was formed in 2022 in Amarillo, presumably to bring lawsuits before Judge Kacsmaryk. But, given the Supreme Court’s fairly strict standards on “standing,” why would a non-profit organization be able to claim the kind of “tangible injury” that the Court has typically required to say that there is a “case or controversy” that needs judicial resolution?
As noted by Jonathan Adler in a blog on the Volokh Conspiracy, the standing issue is not the only procedural hurdle that Kacsmaryk let slide. As Adler notes, there are “at least four problems with the plaintiffs’ suit.”
The plaintiffs’ theory of standing is irreconcilable with Supreme Court precedent.
The statute of limitations has expired on plaintiffs’ challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. The plaintiffs claim that the FDA “constructively reopened” that approval in 2016, thus restarting the statute of limitations, but that’s clearly wrong.
The plaintiffs did not exhaust their claims, even though a regulation explicitly required them to do so.
Although the plaintiffs claim that the FDA’s actions are contrary to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), the plaintiffs have failed to identify any particular provision of the FDCA that the FDA has actually violated.
Kacsmaryk ignored all of that to get the result that he was chosen to deliver. Of course, the FDA can appeal Kacsmaryk’s ruling, but that just puts it in the hands of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. But that Court now has a growing reputation as the most “conservative” of the Circuit Courts.
Writing in The Guardian in 2021, David Smith noted that “one Fifth Circuit judge publicly mourned the “moral tragedy of abortion.” Another suggested that same-sex marriage “imperils civic peace”. A third tweeted negatively about Hillary Clinton using the hashtags #CrookedHillary, #basketofdeplorables and #Scandalabra.”
“James Ho, Stuart Kyle Duncan and Cory Wilson are among six judges appointed by former president Donald Trump to the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit, skewing one of the most conservative – and influential – courts in America even further to the right.”
If many U.S. citizens are concerned that the federal courts have become politicized, they have their poster children in Kacsmaryk and the Fifth Circuit.
God save this nation and restore honorable courts to be in session.
I really shouldn’t have, but I recently shared a “snarky” Facebook
post that said:
Trump’s daughter works at the White House
Her husband works at the White House
Rudy’s son works at the White House
Barr’s son in law works at the White House
Trump’s sons do foreign business
His daughter is getting Chinese patents
and Saudi grants.
But sure, let’s talk about Biden.
Mea culpa. I was hoping to “needle” some of my
Trumpian Facebook friends, and it worked.
They protested that Ivanka and Jared were doing “legitimate work” and
even “for free” –– while Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was doing nothing legitimate
for Burisma as a Board member, being paid $50,000 a month to do nothing but
provide access to his father, the Vice President. This right-wing narrative
suggests that “access” to then Vice President Biden was being bought by Burisma.
My two Facebook friends were declaring, in effect, that any nepotism around
President Trump was in no way corrupt, but that the Bidens were.
So, this rather lengthy post is about “merit,” “corruption,”
“access,” and “nepotism.” Hold on, dear
reader –– this is an interesting ride.
For the less patient among you, let’s note first that corruption has
many flavors, and that “corruption” is a vague and misunderstood term. Second, to preview the conclusion here, this
looks like another case of “the pot calling the kettle black” or, more
precisely, a pot posing as perfectly white calling out a pretty clean kettle
for being very black, indeed. As to the
Biden’s alleged corruption, it may turn out to be much ado about . . . .well,
not very much. (Since the GOP dominated Senate
is now bent on investigating the Bidens, presumably as “payback” for the House impeachment,
we may eventually know more facts than have been reported by FactCheck.org, but
likely not.) For the truly curious, the following link explains a lot.
The “we’re not corrupt but you are” is an old trope, for sure, and
is closely related to what I call “false moral equivalence” and “moral
misdirection,” where an individual, firm, or political party Tweets and
expounds on the moral misdeeds of others to draw attention away from
their own wrongdoing. Here are three
points to help dispel confusion and illusion about corruption and nepotism.
Point (1) is that paying for access to the politically
powerful is certainly legal, but is morally questionable. Lots of people and firms in the U.S. have
been paying big money to politicians’ campaigns in order to get “access” to
them. Bill Clinton’s use of the Lincoln
Bedroom to get donations for access was (and should have been) controversial:
using public property for private gain. That
Trump repeatedly uses the public budget and his “bully pulpit” in many ways
that benefit him personally does not alter the shady ethics of “pay for play”;
but it’s wrong to conclude that
“everyone’s doing it so there’s nothing to worry about here, folks.” It
would be closer to the truth to say that corruption wears many hats, that
“everyone’s doing it” is no excuse for bad behavior, and that some people are
so corrupt they don’t even see it as corruption.
Below the Presidential level, campaign contributions to politicians
in both parties are the tried and true (and legal) method of getting the ear of
politicians. Trump’s parade of foreign ministers and dignitaries to his hotel amount
to the same thing. Many a politician has
succumbed to “Potomac Fever,” wanting to stay in D.C., whether as a Senator or
Congressperson, which means having to ask for campaign contributions as a huge
percentage of their time in office.
While House and Senate members campaign to get the vote of
the average constituent, they govern mainly for the people and firms that have
access to them through monetary contributions.
This one form of corruption is corruption of the Democratic ideal of one
person, one vote, and that all Americans are deserving of representation.
Academic opinion seems divided, but major campaign contributions to
your federal representative is likely to skew what policies get made, and for
whose benefit. In short, selling and
buying access is perfectly legal, but ethically suspect. Bill Greider spelled this out in 1992 in his
book, The Betrayal of Democracy, and despite some intellectual support for the
notion that the Citizens United case has helped the citizenry and
politicians have rational discourse over public policy, Greider’s work is
empirically supported and his message is ever more clear and obvious: money corrupts,
and a lot of campaign money corrupts what would otherwise be politics and
policies for the marginalized and disenfranchised –– ironically, the very folks
that hoped Trump would be their champion against “special interests.”
Point (2): Nepotism –
hiring family and relatives instead of hiring people who bring the best talent
and potential productivity to a job –– is legal, common and accepted in certain
nations and places. And some great minds
publishing in places like the Harvard Business Review that it’s not necessarily
wrong.
But, point (3): whether
it’s Biden’s son getting fat paychecks just for being related to a powerful
politician, or Trump family members getting money or opportunities for
profit by the mere fact of relatedness, the cases are part of the same
phenomenon: the family members have done nothing to individually “earn” those
benefits and opportunities, other than being family. This offends many who think of the U.S. as a merit-based
society that values what you can do, not what you know. The very notion of a U.S. aristocracy was
anathema to the founders. Modern day
realists, however, rebuke such ideals with the oft-used phrase, “It’s not what
you know, but who you know.”
But my Facebook friends want to say that Hunter Biden’s
hiring by Burisma, or getting money from China was ethically “worse”––or
somehow more “corrupt” ––than the nepotism suggested in the Facebook post. But
this is a stretch, and a fair case can be made for the proposition that the
Trump family’s nepotism is even less ethical.
One of my Trump-embracing friends answered the post by saying “Legitimate work,” referring to Ivanka and Jared. But Jared surely didn’t do much work at diplomacy; more likely, he took notes from Netanyahu (never seriously trying to understand the Palestinian perspective or bring Palestinians to the table) and called it a “peace plan.” Is Jared being paid by the government? His expenses certainly are, and he fully expects to make profitable business connections for the Trump empire, if not now, then in the future. They are getting exceptional access to leaders of many countries to pave the way for future deals, and perhaps even deals not made public; we simply can’t know, as there is no transparency around what deals Jared and Ivanka are making as they make their contacts abroad. Jared’s close ties to Mohammed bin Salman seem especially worrisome.
Jared’s kinship with Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) is likely
motivated by potential “deals” that Jared could make with the Kingdom. It also
puts the U.S. squarely in the Saudi side of the Iranian-Saudi conflict, and
likely encouraged MBS to have his agents kill and dismember Jamal Khashoggi, a
U.S. citizen journalist that was exposing the corruption of the Saudi
regime. MBS almost surely knew in
advance that Trump would not downgrade U.S.-Saudi over the “internal politics
of the Saudi regime.” To the consternation of many GOP politicians in D.C.,
Trump soft-pedalled the murder of a U.S. citizen by agents of MBS. Khashoggi’s
“crime” was that he was active in trying to publish the truth about corruption
in the Saudi regime. Kushner’s
relationship with MBS, which bypasses established channels of diplomacy,
corrupts the accepted diplomatic processes the U.S. has maintained since World
War II, and is problematic in the extreme.
Jared’s wife, Ivanka may be working for “free,” but she is
also riding to international meetings at taxpayer expense, and presumably working
to profit from those contacts. Again, it’s hard to know because of how much is
hidden. The Chinese patents she was
awarded are often mentioned, as well as grants from the Saudis.
Side note: in
the Facebook flame wars that obscure sound moral inquiry, there is also considerable
misinformation about Ivanka’s role in the $100 million grant by the Saudis to a
program she championed –– the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative—better
known as We-Fi, or the “Ivanka Fund.” That misinformation showed up in the
snarky Facebook posting. A fuller
explanation can be found in the Atlantic article linked here, which leads us to
the conclusion that people from all over the political spectrum are inclined to
obfuscate the truth and make “the other side” look more corrupt. (Though I hasten to add that Trump’s ongoing
demonization of mainstream media has been a factor in the de-rationalization of
political discourse in the United States, and that his administration seems
content to allow Russian bots to poison social media with gross
misrepresentations, as long as it benefits Trump.). As to Ivanka’s evidently
unfair treatment in social media, see
In a similar way, Hunter Biden’s relationship with Chinese
firms has been misrepresented repeatedly by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani,
have both claimed that Hunter Biden got “$1.5 billion” from China for a private
equity fund. Don, Jr. has taken up the
accusation, but it’s just not true. Claims like these obscure the truth, much
like claims that Ivanka got money from the Saudis.
What is true, then? We can safely say that a similar kind of corruption occurs on both sides. In each case, a politician (Trump, or Biden) could be benefitting a family member financially by virtue of his position, or family members can benefit financially just by being related. But how are they dissimilar? For one thing, there is no evidence that Joe Biden asked or encouraged Burisma to hire his son, or that he received any benefit. For another, there is no evidence that Ukraine did any favors, or was asked to do any favors, by Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, or Burisma. Rudy Giuliani wants people to believe that Biden pushed Ukraine’s prosecutor to “go easy” on Burisma, but the known facts don’t bear that out. Finally, there was no change in U.S. foreign policy as a result of Hunter Biden’s employment by Burisma.
By contrast, Trump’s “perfect phone call” was by all reliable accounts an attempt to benefit himself, skewing and confusing U.S. foreign policy; whether it was or was not intended to benefit Trump’s political prospects (it was), it could not have actually furthered U.S. interests in the region and could only have hurt Ukrainian efforts to push back Russians in the Eastern parts of Ukraine. Finally, if Trump were seriously interested in corruption, his Presidential words and acts would be markedly different. As Jonathan Chait wrote in November of 2019, “Trump’s interest in rooting out corruption in Ukraine was not even zero. It was, in fact, less than zero.”
So, it was anything but a “perfect phone call” but rather it was an illegitimate effort to extort the new Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into the Bidens. So, how “legitimate” and “free” is the work of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner? They are not entirely working for free, since a lot of their travels are taxpayer funded, and they may well be serving their own financial interests, whether short term or long term. It seems fair to be skeptical of any claims that they are volunteering their time and efforts for “free,” given Trump’s own history of self-enrichment, fraud and deceit as a businessman. There is a glaring lack of transparency around Trump and his ongoing businesses, now led by Don, Jr. The former White House ethics advisors argue that Trump’s publicly announced plan to divorce himself from his own business interests while President is deeply flawed, and has not even been followed.
Setting all that aside, however, there is still room to
criticize the Bidens. Joe Biden could
have told Hunter that taking money for nothing was not morally right; he
evidently did not do so. (He reportedly
said to him “I hope you know what you’re doing.”) Granted, telling your offspring to avoid even
the appearance of a conflict of interest is something we would not expect Trump
to understand or implement; it is only in an ethicist’s wildest dreams that
Trump would tell family members that they could have no role in his
administration, given all the potential conflicts of interest. In this way, my Facebook friends want to
hold the Bidens to a standard that they would apply to the Trumps.
Admittedly, my snarky reposting on Facebook, like many false
pronouncements from Trump, is a classic example of “whataboutism” –– a phenomenon
that will only be more obvious once the Democrats have nominated a person for
Trump and his allies to attack. These
will predictably fall into the category of “I’m not so bad, but you are worse,”
or “I’m perfect, and you’re an enemy of the people.” It’s predictable that Trump would call his
opponents “evil” and “sick,” because anything repeated often enough short
circuits rational thought.
All that political trash talking is not designed to get to
the truth, but only to obscure what’s really going on. To be fair, other
Presidents have tried to obscure what’s really going on in their
administrations. But Trump hides the truth
with particularly tenacity and effectiveness.
Tellingly, Trump has even demanded a pre-publication review
of John Bolton’s book, which may claim that Trump directed the entire Ukraine
“do us a favor” fiasco.
As far as Trump and the family finances are concerned, he
has succeeded in hiding the truth thus far, and it works for him politically to
accuse opponents of being corrupt. At
this point, what’s perfectly legal but wrong is that the lies are not illegal
and seem to work politically. Why? Carefully
reading FactCheck.org on the Biden allegations is not simple for the average
citizen, and many do not even care to ferret out facts from fake allegations on
the “Biden scandal” or any other matter. It’s much easier for the people of one tribe
to say that “the other side is evil and corrupt” or conclude that all
politicians are corrupt, so none of it matters.
That’s a perfect recipe for citizens to engage mindlessly, or to
disengage entirely, driven by the now well-known tendency of people to view
events through a lens that is predisposed to believe what they already believe
–– confirmation bias. Confirmation bias enables distortions of judgment,
enables tribalism and “how can I be bad when X is worse?”
As Michael Josephson reminds us, “When winning is the most
important thing, people will do anything to win.” If America is to be the “shining city on the
hill,” an image that Pres. Reagan invoked, then freedom of speech, rational
discourse, and the search for truth must be part of that. But obfuscation reigns, and the Commander in
Chief is particularly adept at the art of misdirection and obfuscation. My
father, an accountant with Price Waterhouse, was particularly proud of a
needlepoint he hung in his office that said “Eschew obfuscation.” He liked the irony. But there’s nothing ironic about a President
and a party that promotes obfuscation, especially hiding the facts of ongoing
corruption and pointing the corruption finger at others.
Trump has been touted by many as the most corrupt politician
in modern times. The list is long and
mind-boggling, and Alex Schultz and Jay Willis have already summed it up
through November of 2019.
But Trump, and Trump partisans, will not look at any such list
with any degree of moral reflection. Tribalism
and party loyalty cannot take seriously the words of Jesus Christ from the
Sermon on the Mount: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,
but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
That would take mental effort and moral courage, both of which seem in very short supply these days.
