From Trump, No Respect for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or the
Rules
Once a
cheater, always a cheater.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 19, 2020
I was prepared for Mitch McConnell’s
hypocrisy, but his brazenness left me breathless. He pledged a speedy Senate
vote on a Trump-nominated replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two
hours after news of her death broke.
He couldn’t have waited, I don’t know,
six hours? A day? Out of respect?
Silly question. Silly me. I sometimes
forget the era we’re living in and the president we’re living under. McConnell
understands that neither is about propriety, procedure, precedent. They’re
about taking whatever can be taken and exploiting whatever can be exploited.
Rules are for fools. To the cheaters go
the spoils. That’s President Trump’s credo. And he hasn’t been proven wrong
yet.
Technically, yes, it’s
Trump’s right to nominate a new Supreme Court justice as soon as he wants and
for as long as he’s in office — and he indeed signaled in a tweet on Saturday
morning that he wanted to move forward “without delay.” McConnell, for his
part, can absolutely try to hustle that nominee through Senate confirmation.
But McConnell would be violating his
own code, the one he adopted after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February
2016. McConnell then decreed that with an election just nine months away,
President Obama should not be allowed to fill a court vacancy. The American
people should first be allowed to speak through their presidential ballots in
early November.
Now an election is little more
than one month away. And that
code — poof! — is gone. McConnell’s quickness to abandon it arises principally
from his own unscrupulousness but owes something as well to his confidence
about Trump’s ethically inverted inclinations, which are that it matters only
whether you win or lose, not how you play the game.
Look at the unfolding election.
President Trump and his allies have been stubbornly trying to prevent Americans
from voting by mail, which is known to be more popular with Democrats than with
Republicans. While you can call this an attack on democracy, you can instead be
blunter and truer to its intent. You can call it cheating.
On his own or with the aid of
apparatchiks like Michael Caputo, the president has sought to manipulate,
minimize or repudiate statistics and studies that render a withering verdict on
America’s battle against the coronavirus. This has been characterized, rightly,
as an insult to science and to the scientists at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
It’s also cheating.
As Republicans maneuvered to get Kanye West on the
ballot in states where he might siphon votes from Joe Biden, Jared Kushner just
so happened to huddle with
the entertainer in Telluride, Colo.
It could be that each enjoys basking at
high altitudes in the other’s affluence. Or it could be that Kushner was
conniving with West in violation of federal election
law: in other words, cheating.
“The only way we’re going to lose this
election is if the election is rigged,” Trump told supporters at
a rally in Wisconsin last month. He has repeatedly made versions of that claim,
at one point exhorting North Carolinians to monitor polling sites and
“watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing” by Democrats, who will work
to lift Biden to victory by “doing very bad things.”
And it’s a perfect example of Trump’s
tendency to assign his own motives and methods to others. He worries that
they’ll cheat because he has
always cheated — on his taxes, on his wives, in his business dealings, in his philanthropy. He imagines them cheating because
he actually is cheating.
He considers it their only hope because
it may well be his only hope, given his
persistently underwhelming approval ratings and
some 200,000 Americans dead from causes related to the coronavirus. And when
you step back and take in the scope of his cheating, it’s shocking.
But exactly no one is shocked. This is
Trump, after all. He will wipe his memory clean of Merrick Garland, the Obama
nominee whom Republicans refused to consider for the court, as he races to wipe
the court clean of Ginsburg’s memory. He’s the bearer of double standards.
Trump approaches “cheating as a way of life,” his niece Mary, a clinical
psychologist, once explained. She has recordings of
one of Trump’s sisters, Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal judge, saying
that he had someone else take the SAT for him.
He is infamous for stiffing creditors and being
sued by them, for using bankruptcy laws to lessen or evade the
personal financial impact of corporate disasters, for inflating his net worth when
that suited his image, for undervaluing his assets when that suited his tax
returns, for assuming the fictive identity
of a publicist to call journalists and whisper flattering
secrets about himself. These behaviors could variously be tucked under the
subheadings of hard-nosed business tactics, creative public relations and
egomaniacal pathology. But the banner over them all? Cheating.
The presidency has no
more altered that ethos than it has ennobled him. The White House is just a
highfalutin stage for the same old huckster, a fact made crassly clear by his
exploitation of those trappings for his big convention speech. The fireworks at
the finish spelled more than his name. They spelled cheating.
Under the Hatch Act, which forbids
federal employees from engaging in overtly political activities while on the
job, that whole climactic evening (Ivanka as Evita!) shouldn’t have happened, and Mike Pompeo shouldn’t have stumped for Trump while on a
diplomatic trip abroad, and Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland
security, shouldn’t have been swearing in new citizens as Trump-burnishing
convention theater.
But Trump’s cheating is its own virus,
infecting everyone around him. Trump’s cheating is its own ecosystem. Abandon
all scruple, ye who enter here.
Trump was impeached because he tried to
cheat, pressuring Ukraine to
do a political hit job on Biden. But the cheating didn’t stop there: As John Bolton revealed in “The Room Where It
Happened,” Trump pleaded with the Chinese president to buy more American
agricultural exports, because that might help his prospects for re-election.
By refusing to condemn Russian
interference in American elections — an orientation evident in the diluting of intelligence reports about
Russia’s aims and activities — he’s essentially inviting a fresh round of
Russian cheating in 2020 on his behalf.
Meanwhile, he and his administration
take various tacks to fool voters about the pandemic’s severity. His health
department, not C.D.C. scientists, schemed to change coronavirus
testing recommendations in a manner sure to depress the number of recorded
cases. He and his administration have tried to intimidate and discredit the
C.D.C. in additional ways. And he promoted a bogus claim that
the coronavirus death toll was just 6 percent of the correct figure.
But his and his Republican allies’ most
flagrant cheating is in the realm of voting. Republicans in multiple states have fought against secure drop
boxes for ballots that give people concerned about exposure to
the coronavirus an alternative to traditional polling sites. They have opposed the expansion of
such sites.
Although voting by
mail makes by far the most sense during a pandemic and has gone smoothly in
states that have long used it, Trump is determined to thwart it. His campaign
has filed suit against
three states that are trying to institute universal mail-in voting. He has
advocated a slowdown in the United States Postal Service precisely because it could
impede the timely arrival of ballots.
And, knowing full well that many
mail-in ballots may not be counted until the days immediately following Nov.
3, Trump tweeted: “Must
know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even
years later!” To translate: Trump doesn’t want a full tally. He wants a partial
one that’s partial to him.
And he wants the whole process shrouded
in doubt. As Richard Hasen, the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks,
Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy,” wrote in The Times last month, “The most benign
explanation for Mr. Trump’s obsessive focus on mail-in balloting is that he is
looking for an excuse for a possible loss to his Democratic opponent, Joe
Biden, in November. The less benign explanation is that he is seeking to sow
chaos to drive down turnout and undermine the legitimacy of the election,
laying the groundwork for contesting a close election if he loses.”
“Laying the groundwork” is euphemistic
for cheating, and what a grand form of cheating at that: the prophylactic
invalidation of any outcome displeasing to Trump. He went so far as to suggest postponing the election, and while he had to
know that the idea was a non-starter, he also knew that it further seeded
cynicism among some voters about a trustworthy process.
In the context of cheating as epic as
that, jamming yet another of his nominees onto the Supreme Court as the clock
runs out is nothing.