Trumpism is new, and it is awful. But the style of politics that delivered Donald Trump to power is something the world has seen before. And it is unlikely to disappear when he’s gone. That can be difficult to recognize and accept. Because the lies, corruption, graft, racism, xenophobia, hucksterism, and demagoguery of President Trump and leading members of his administration are so brazen and diverge so sharply from the political norms of the recent American past, it’s easy to lapse into misplaced hope that the pathologies swirling around us will dissipate as soon as the man leaves office. That’s because, while Trump is a hugely significant catalyst of the political transformations going on around us, he is also a symptom of deeper changes in our political culture, which he’s merely exploiting to further his own ambitions.
These deeper changes have many mutually reinforcing facets. There’s the spread of skepticism, rooted in radical egalitarianism, about the capacity of any authority to judge fairly among competing truth claims. There’s the technological amplification of extreme views, which allows those on the ideological margins (and other bad actors) to spread and organize with unprecedented potency in virtual space. There’s the thoroughgoing transformation of our public life into a forum for mass entertainment aimed at the lowest common denominator. There’s ideological polarization combined with a regional (urban-rural) split along both cultural and political lines, which is exacerbated by our country’s multiple counter-majoritarian institutions. And there’s the willingness of cynical, power-hungry political functionaries to traffic in outright lies and distortions in order to win and hold office.
All of these tendencies contribute to our political woes. Donald Trump makes all of them worse. But the dynamics go beyond the president and his administration. They’re unfolding according to their own logic — a logic that will remain at work even after the current occupant of the White House is gone. That logic is producing a form of politics that can best be described by borrowing a line from conservative philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre: Politics has become a “civil war carried on by other means.” As in a civil war, political conflict now takes the form of a battle to the figurative death. Justice has been reduced to the friend/enemy distinction: Whatever damage is done to the other side in the name of progress for my own mission is acceptable, even laudable.
In such a world, all political disagreement begins to look like zero-sum conflict in which mutually beneficial outcomes are impossible. Each party is either a winner or a loser, and compromise is impossible. The very notion of a politics of principle vanishes, with all appeals to higher loyalties increasingly dismissed as a cover for lower, more self-interested motives. All that matters is victory for one’s own side or faction. This is a politics conducted without any notion of a common good. The interests of the whole political community no longer transcend the competing, perpetually clashing, and conflicted parts. This is our reality, and it’s bad. But it isn’t new.
It goes all the way back, in fact, to the ancient world, when the first political philosophers recognized the distinctive advantages and dangers of republican self-government. At its best, republicanism can serve as an incubator for human excellence. When the political order cultivates public spiritedness and virtue, citizens flourish by fulfilling their political natures, thriving to a greater degree than they do under most other forms of government. But at its worst — especially when the community is too large, when the inculcation of civic virtue is neglected, or when moral degradation takes root and proliferates — republicanism can be unstable, volatile, corrupted, and corrupting of everyone in public life, driving the few good souls who remain to withdraw into the relative insulation of private life, leaving the political sphere to the worst elements in the community.
That’s when things really turn ugly, with politics reduced to squabbling factions, backstabbing, and clan warfare conducted through cutthroat competition, intrigue, and the ruthless lust for power. (The mafia reproduces these dynamics in microcosm.) The possibility (and even likelihood) of republican government declining over time into such a morass is one reason why so many political philosophers prior to the modern era were reluctant to advocate it. Benjamin Franklin spoke from that wisdom when he responded to an inquiry about what form of government the constitutional convention had chosen by declaring portentously, “A republic, if you can keep it.” We are on the cusp of fulfilling the predictions of the skeptics who would have scoffed at the possibility of a continent-wide commercial republic perpetuating itself over the long term. They would be astonished that we managed to keep it this long. We more than beat the odds. But luck always runs out, eventually. Trump is our present. But Trumpism is our future.
The Truth is the Truth no matter what Rudy says
The Trump team mantra of truth isn’t truth can only carry him so far. So despite what Trump, Rudy, Fox & other cronies try to tell us, there are objective truths that no amount of spin or propaganda can alter: opinion/the-truth-is-
Donald Trump and the people around him made a wager: They thought they could beat the truth. They lied their way to wealth and power. For a long time, the bet paid off. But on Tuesday, reality roared back in the form of Paul Manafort’s conviction, Michael Cohen’s guilty plea, and Rep. Duncan Hunter’s indictment. Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, lied to banks and the government. He stashed millions of dollars in fake corporate accounts overseas. He deceived lenders by fabricating income, and he evaded taxes by hiding wealth. But he couldn’t erase all the records of what he’d done. Nor could he silence his former accountant who knew the truth. On Tuesday, a jury found Manafort guilty of bank fraud and tax fraud. Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, also lied about his debts and income. He deceived lenders and the IRS. Shortly before the 2016 election, he helped pay off two women to silence their stories about affairs with Trump. But the government got hold of Cohen’s records as well. On Tuesday, he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud, and making illegal campaign contributions.
Trump’s allies in Congress are on the run, too. Two weeks ago, Chris Collins, the first congressman to endorse Trump, was indicted for insider trading for allegedly passing a stock tip to his son, who used it to dump massive equity losses on unsuspecting buyers. Then, on Tuesday, Duncan Hunter, the second congressman to endorse Trump, was indicted for allegedly diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to pay for personal expenses. Collins is accused of lying to federal agents; Hunter is accused of falsifying finance reports. Trump is surrounded by proven liars and alleged liars because, as any cop knows, men of low character are drawn to one another. The liars lie, the crooks cheat, and eventually, if there’s enough investigation, the conspiracy unravels. In October, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to deceiving the FBI about his conversations with Russian intermediaries. In December, former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to agents about back-channel talks with Russia. In February, former Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates pleaded guilty to fraud and false testimony. Eventually, it all comes out.
Some of these cases lead directly to Trump. In the past year and a half, we’ve learned that he knew more than he admitted about Flynn’s deceptions. We’ve learned that prior to firing then–FBI Director James Comey, Trump unsuccessfully pressured Comey to go easy on Flynn. And on Tuesday, Cohen directly implicated the president, telling the court that as Trump’s attorney, he had illegally used campaign funds to silence Trump’s sexual accusers “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump. Like a vampire recoiling from daylight, Trump rages at every discovery. He denounced the release of Comey’s memos about Trump’s attempts to corrupt the former FBI director. He sniped at the federal raid that captured Manafort’s records. He excoriated the raid that captured Cohen’s records. On Wednesday, after Manafort’s conviction, Trump attacked the Justice Department on Twitter for prosecuting a “12-year-old tax case.” Trump called the prosecution part of a “witch hunt.”
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, says Cohen’s plea has nothing to do with the president. “As the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen’s actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time,” Giuliani says. But Trump is part of that pattern. He has already been caught lying about the payments to women, and he’s been caught on tape talking about those payments with Cohen. Court documents released as part of Cohen’s plea indicate that the Trump Organization used fake accounting to cover its role in the payoffs. Trump’s whole presidency has been a tower of lies: that Mexico would pay for a border wall, that man-made climate change is a hoax, that workers would get the money from corporate tax cuts, that trade wars are easy to win, that North Korea is dismantling its nuclear program. At a rally on Tuesday night, the president lied to West Virginians, telling them that the coal industry was coming back. Trump’s followers love these fantasies. But eventually, truth does to his lies what the ocean does to sandcastles.
Trump’s political success has infuriated and alarmed people who detest him. They can’t believe that so many Americans voted for, and continue to support, such an egregious fraud. His critics worried that his base would ignore most of his fabrications, and they were right. No one is going to punish Trump for falsely claiming, as he did at the West Virginia rally, that Hillary Clinton “said there’s no such thing as manufacturing jobs anymore.” But Trump’s bigger lies can be falsified, and the falsification hurts. When crop prices plummet, interest rates rise, health insurance premiums go up, coal jobs don’t come back, and shareholders take the tax cuts, Trump voters feel it. The mounting evidence that Trump approved and covered up pre-election payoffs to his accusers is just the beginning of his exposure. Voters who don’t care what he’s done with Russia or with Stormy Daniels will care about what he’s doing to America. Some people worry that Trump’s presidency, with its propaganda about “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and “truth isn’t truth,” has plunged us into a post-truth era. But it’s much more likely that truth will cruelly reassert itself. That’s not because the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. It’s because the amoral arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward hope. There’s a fabric of reality out there—evidence, witnesses, meteorology, economics—and you can’t hide it forever. It brought down Cohen and Manafort. It will bring down Trump, too.
Rudy has just commented there’d be a revolt if Trump is impeached/removed, which he’s probably right. Many Trumpeters appear to be crazy. But democracy is worth fighting for! Don’t worry about those trapped in the deranged Trump cult who seem to be beyond hope, since we can only inform the logical who can recognize facts. Check out excerpts from inside hooray-for-mueller-but-
Donald Trump was probably right when he said he could shoot someone and not lose political support from his die-hard base. Even as the glaring hypocrisy of their continued approval stares them in the face, they chant and cheer and proudly sport their red hats. All of which raises the question: Has partisan tribalism grown so entrenched that the president can get away with just about anything? Last night in West Virginia, Trump’s hard-core base broke out in enthusiastic chants of “Lock her up,” referring to Hillary Clinton. They did so hours after Trump’s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to federal crimes that carry jail time; hours after Trump’s former campaign chairman was convicted of federal crimes that carry a potential sentence of more than a decade “locked up”; and hours after Trump was himself implicated in a criminal conspiracy.
They want Trump to jail someone who has been investigated and cleared of criminal wrongdoing, but they are outraged that Trump associates face jail time after either being convicted by a jury or pleading guilty to criminal wrongdoing. They claim to want to “drain the swamp” of Washington’s corruption and criminality, apparently unaware that the swamp flooded the Trump campaign and the Oval Office but is now being drained by law enforcement in the form of indictments, convictions and guilty pleas. The Trump mob’s hypocrisy is fueled by hypocritical elites on Trump’s staff, his legal team and his media cheerleaders. Rudolph W. Giuliani’s two-faced defense of Michael Cohen as an honest lawyer was rapidly replaced by his attack on Michael Cohen as a dishonest lawyer. As soon as Cohen morphed from someone who was useful to the White House to someone who was useful to federal prosecutors, Giuliani’s assessment of Cohen morphed, too. Late-night television was even able to create a spoof video debate between Giuliani and Giuliani.
The pro-Trump media hypocrisy is blatant, too. Three days before the 2016 presidential election, Fox News commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro said:
“We cannot have a country led by a president, subject to ongoing criminal investigations, potential indictments and never-ending hearings … and irrespective of what happens to her, whether she’s indicted or even guilty, it doesn’t matter. … How do you think the world is going to look at the United States when a woman under federal criminal investigation, who has lied repeatedly to the American people, is elected?” Every time she says “her,” change it to “him,” and you’ve got a damning attack on Trump. And yet night after night Pirro goes out and cheerleads for him. The hypocrisy is staggering — and it trickles down to those who watch Fox News and populate his roaring crowds.
It’s irrational to believe that these criminal convictions are “fake news” or part of a “deep state plot” when the convicted felons surrounding Trump have either admitted they are guilty or been convicted by a jury of their peers. Political scientists have an explanation for this phenomenon. It’s a blend of three interrelated trends: an intensification of partisan tribalism, in which rooting for a political party is about identity rather than policy; an intensification of polarization, in which rival political parties are seen as the enemy rather than as compatriots who hold different views; and an intensification of motivated reasoning, in which voters leap to the most extreme conclusions about their rivals while excusing the most egregious behavior by the person they support. These trends were not created by Trump, but he has taken advantage of them masterfully.
Between 30 percent and 40 percent of Americans are willing to support a racist bigot who lies routinely, lashes out at democratic institutions like a thin-skinned despot, has surrounded himself with people who turned out to be corrupt (and now convicted) criminals and may even be a criminal himself. There is no other functioning democracy in the world where such a statement holds true. Trump may finally have created a scandal that he can’t escape, but the dangerously authoritarian and cult-like reasoning that he has exploited for so long are a threat to American democracy that we cannot escape.
Crazy Conspiracies Abound
Being caught in his crimes, Trump denied any wrongdoing while making the ridiculous assertion Obama’s campaign finance violations were worse. These articles could help set him straight, seen in why-michael-cohens-
It’s a bit baffling that Trump would assert that criminal charges accepted by Cohen aren’t a crime. Perhaps he’s arguing that the alleged crimes didn’t occur or that prosecutors crafted their charges in a way to maximize Cohen’s exposure to legal risk. It’s not clear — but neither is true. But let’s focus on the second part of Trump’s assertion, that Cohen’s charges and his actions fall into a big bucket of “campaign finance violations” that also includes violations that President Barack Obama was found to have committed. It’s a very Trumpian bit of whataboutism, waving away something severe that Trump or a Trump ally did by pointing out something minor that one of his political opponents did. It’s certainly true that both Cohen’s admissions and the Obama campaign did things that were “campaign finance violations” in the same way that your lifting a candy bar from a convenience store as a kid and what Bernie Madoff did are both “stealing.” Which isn’t to say that the Obama campaign’s violations weren’t serious. It’s just to note that broad legal terms can cover a variety of actions. So what did Obama do? Well, Obama didn’t do anything, really.
Fox Lies & Conspiracies
President Trump’s primary source of news, excluding what his advisers might offer him, comes from watching cable news broadcasts. On many days of his presidency, perhaps most, he spends part of the morning watching the show “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel, often having recorded it earlier. We know this because of his tweets; they often either reflect the network’s coverage or mention it directly. On Wednesday morning, after a day in which Trump’s former campaign chairman and former personal attorney were found guilty of or pleaded guilty to a combined 16 federal charges, here’s how “Fox & Friends” promoted its upcoming program.
The lead story is about the murder of Iowan Mollie Tibbetts. On Tuesday, authorities in that state identified a suspect in the crime, an immigrant in the country illegally named Cristhian Rivera. The last promoted story focuses on comments Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) made, riffing on Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan. Those two stories occupied about 20 seconds each in the promo. The guilty plea by Michael Cohen and the verdict against Paul Manafort were each allotted about seven seconds. Now the kicker: That comment from Cuomo was a week ago. It warrants, at least in Fox News’s promo, more time than the Cohen and Manafort developments combined. For “Fox & Friends” fans who are active on Twitter, this is the presentation of what’s important in the world at the moment.
Behold the ever-widening gap between the newsgathering side of Fox News and its ever-more-unhinged prime-time opinion hosts: Moments after President Trump finished his rally in Charleston, W.Va., on Tuesday night, host Tucker Carlson invited Ed Henry, the network’s chief national correspondent, to run down the day’s headlines. In a clean and forceful presentation, Henry went through the conviction of former Trump campaign honcho Paul Manafort in a federal court as well as the guilty plea of longtime Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen. “This plea deal … raises questions about whether the president or anyone else from the campaign will be implicated,” said Henry, summing up the matter.
Now: Carlson, if nothing else, is a master at cutting through large clumps of facts and finding the story, the upshot. In this instance, however, he had trouble deploying those skills. He said to Henry: “At its core, a confusing story, really, and thanks, Ed, for that, I appreciate it.” Then Carlson invited famous lawyer Alan Dershowitz to pooh-pooh the legal implications of the day’s events. There is, of course, nothing confusing about Tuesday’s events. They underline what we’ve known, which is that Trump surrounds himself with crooks and incompetents. That’s the one lesson that applies regardless of whether the president faces further legal troubles.
Oh, but on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Trump is now on a roll. Social media on Tuesday night filled with gleeful commentary about how Carlson’s programmatic contortions on a day of miserable news for the Republican president — not to mention those of his prime-time partner and Trump-supporter-par-
excellence, Sean Hannity. Fair enough. What was particularly noteworthy, though, was just how far prime-time product diverged from the news product. To recap the twists and turns here: Hannity had welcomed Giuliani on his show back in May for an exculpatory exercise benefiting Trump. The plea deal with Cohen vacates Giuliani’s statement to Hannity that there was no campaign-finance violation. So Baier & Co. run the tape, showing Hannity as the gullible sycophant that he is. This intra-network divide is getting interesting.
It’s Tuesday afternoon. Imagine, for a moment, that President Trump logs on to Twitter. News is breaking that could prove existential for his presidency. But his social media feed hardly records the magnitude of the developments. Instead, a link from Sean Hannity of Fox News appears, announcing the intention of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, to enter a guilty plea but omitting the fact that Cohen’s admission implicates the president. A minute later, another link from Hannity comes through, this one about a former congressional IT staffer targeted by conspiracy theories cooked up by right-wing media and advanced by the president.
Trump’s carefully curated feed is a reflection of the ideological chasm that’s dividing the media and splintering society. Tuesday offered vivid evidence of the way in which right-wing media insulates Trump, and his most devoted supporters, from blunt assessments of his administration.
There were examples across social media, television, talk radio and conservative websites. Alongside a Daily Caller story about Cohen were laudatory posts about Trump, from the president’s defense of free speech to his status as “the most feminist president.” TheBlaze gave prominence to Trump’s attacks on ESPN for not “defending our anthem,” foregrounding the president’s grievances with NFL player who kneel during the national anthem to protest police violence. Meanwhile, conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh asserted that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III isn’t interested in what Trump’s former attorney has to say. “Remember, Mueller passed off the Michael Cohen case,” he said.
But it was the president’s own universe on Twitter that became perhaps the starkest illustration of the alternative account that exists of his presidency. As the afternoon rolled on, and a jury found Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, guilty of eight counts of fraud, the president’s feed presented him with commentary exculpating him of wrongdoing. Hannity dismissed Tuesday’s news as a bloodthirsty campaign against the president. “The media is once again beside themselves with false reporting, speculation and hysteria,” he said. Hannity maintained that the wrongdoing targeted by prosecutors had “zero to do with Donald Trump or the Trump campaign” but was seized on by Mueller to smear the president. “Is this not now the witch hunt the president has been saying, an attempt to turn the screws?” Hannity asked. The host said this was “persecution,” not “prosecution.” Trump echoed Hannity’s verdict. “It doesn’t involve me, but I still feel — you know, it’s a very sad thing that happened,” he said in Charleston, W.Va., where he arrived Tuesday evening to stump for a Republican candidate for Senate. “This has nothing to do with Russian collusion. This started as Russian collusion. This has absolutely nothing to do — this is a witch hunt, and it’s a disgrace.” Given his media diet, he hardly could have concluded differently.
The persistent echo villain
When in doubt, the echo keeps going back to that Hillary card, as insanity Hannity did again on Tuesday night after the breaking news on the guilty verdicts for Manafort & guilty pleas by Cohen. So these excerpts from sean-hannity-scrambles-
Yet Tuesday night, Hannity continued to demonize Clinton, who was exonerated, rather than actual felons. Of the pair, he asked, “How did we get to taxi cabs and tax fraud and bank fraud and lies to the FBI?” Clinton was investigated over her use of a private email server — not alleged meddling with a foreign government, which is why Mueller’s team is investigating Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. However, Hannity argued Tuesday night that Mueller’s “witch hunt” was never actually about Russian collusion. This is what we have been telling you for a long time, and we have the evidence,” Hannity said, without providing any. “It is an attempt at a political takedown of a man who the deep state never wanted to be the president of the United States.”
In the wake of the felony convictions of Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and personal attorney, Michael Cohen, Fox News has endeavored to trivialize these historically unprecedented events. Their tactics include sweeping these legal bombshells under other stories that don’t have the national scope of presidential corruption, but which fit into the Fox themes of wingnuttery and racism. Or they entirely dismiss the crimes as even being criminal (which Trump did himself Wednesday morning on Twitter). Joining the parade of propaganda, Fox News host Eric Shawn interviewed Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, on Wednesday’s episode of America’s Newsroom. Shawn thought he was going to bury Davis with a question that stuffed every Clinton cliche imaginable into thirty seconds of blather.
But Davis wasn’t having it. Shawn didn’t take Davis up on his request for facts. Davis did, however, masterfully let Fox News have it on their own air. Shawn’s question was reeking of bias and a predetermined mindset that Clinton is the real criminal. Never mind that she has been investigated for thirty years by hostile Republicans who still couldn’t find any trace of wrongdoing. Shawn’s reference to Steele and his dossier ignores the fact that much of it has been confirmed and that none of it has been proved untrue. And the only reason there is a distaste for Trump among law enforcement officials is because they know what he’s done. It’s like complaining that the police, after investigating, had a distaste for Charles Manson. Who wouldn’t?
What’s more, the knee-jerk reaction by Trump and so many of his sycophants/surrogates to point their fingers at the Clintons or Obama is merely their obvious attempt to change the subject by way of a scheme now known as “whataboutism.” Trump’s cult followers simply can’t focus on any of the facts about his crimes without resorting to whining about factless allegations involving retired Democrats. That’s a pretty good indication that they have no coherent response to Team Trump’s crime spree. If they did they would present it, and not jingle their keys at the camera as a distraction. Then again, that’s just the sort of thing that compels the attention of babies and Trump supporters who have trouble comprehending the real world.
GOP/Conservative Corruption
Recent Comments