Aren’t Trump’s
apologists exhausted by their moral calisthenics?
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By Frank Bruni |
While President Trump certainly has
supporters who adore him and feel no need to justify that, he survives — and
too often prospers — with the crucial help of voters who basically regard him
as the lesser of evils.
They tell themselves something like
this: Trump has shortcomings, but those are merely mirrors of the corruption
and craziness on the other side. Almost any accusation leveled at him is lodged
as easily — and often more righteously — against his opponents. In a government
of bad apples, he’s no mealier than the rest.
But those claims insist on a symmetry
that doesn’t exist. They’re equivalences not merely false but fantastical. They
ignore the severity, the prevalence, the consequences of the misconduct in
question. Imagine defending a suitor who’s a serial arsonist because the other
guy has a jaywalking citation; both bachelors are lawbreakers, after all.
That’s the perverse moral arithmetic of more than a few Trump apologists.
I find two of their rationalizations
especially preposterous, starting with this:
Trump is merely using his Justice
Department as President Joe Biden used his and persecuting opponents in the
fashion that Biden did.
That isn’t some random, cherry-picked
absurdity. That’s practically every hour of Fox News. Trump’s supposed mimicry
of Biden when it comes to politically motivated investigations and prosecutions
is more than an article of faith on the right. It’s the dogma that washes
Trump’s authoritarianism clean.
And it’s bunk. I don’t recall evidence
that Biden ordered the prosecutors who filed charges against Trump to do so. In
contrast, Trump’s commandments that Attorney General Pam
Bondi and her unctuous underlings go after James Comey, Letitia James and
others are a matter of Truth Social record.
Show me where, during Biden’s
presidency, you find anything analogous to Trump’s purge of Justice Department
lawyers who have failed or might fail to quench his thirst for vengeance.
Anything like the series of events by which Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney
for the Eastern District of Virginia, was pushed out of his job in September after he
hadn’t produced the indictments against Comey and James that Trump so fervently
desired.
Trump installed, in Siebert’s place,
one of his personal lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, who had zero experience as a
prosecutor. She raced to indict Comey before the statute of limitations ran
out. That heedless sprint entailed an embarrassment of errors and a mockery of
jurisprudence that my Times Opinion colleague David French detailed in a
flabbergasting newsletter last week. Try to locate
Halligan’s doppelgänger in the Biden administration. Best of luck.
Trump’s launderers insist that
partisanship, not wrongdoing, motivated the legal cases against him. To accept
that magical thinking, you must erase the photographs of classified documents
keeping company with a commode at Mar-a-Lago. You must delete the recording of Trump telling Brad
Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to figure out some way to
reverse Biden’s victory there in 2020. And you must persuade yourself that
Trump’s emphatic proclamations that the 2020 election was being stolen, his
haranguing of former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election
results and his support of Big Lie conspiracy theorists were just politics as
usual. That’s a sequence of moral calisthenics so arduous they burn more
calories than an hour at CrossFit.
They’re good training for the other
juicy rationalization that most infuriates me: Trump’s grifting merely echoes
the graft of his predecessor, who was not only a senator, vice president and
then president but also the don of the “Biden crime family,” in the cracked
MAGA parlance.
It’s true that several of Biden’s
relatives prospered in ways that surely traded on his name; that Hunter Biden
was an unmitigated ethical calamity; and that his father at best turned a blind
eye to much of that and at worst abetted it. But it’s a lie to say that Trump
is simply doing likewise — that the main difference between him and other
wealth-greasing, self-dealing politicians is the zeal with which Trump haters
scrutinize and vilify him.
No, the main difference is how
relentless, boundless and unabashed Trump’s monetization and merchandising of
his political station are. In an article in The New Yorker in
August, David D. Kirkpatrick estimated that Trump’s businesses, business
associates and projects tied to him or his family members had pulled in some
$3.4 billion during his time in the White House. But even that dollar figure doesn’t
do justice to the crass details and to the ancillary ugliness.
Just a few months after his
inauguration in January, Trump proudly announced that he’d hold a black-tie
dinner at one of his golf clubs for 220 of the biggest spenders on his $TRUMP
memecoin; the fat cats who ended up attending the event spent a combined $148 million on the cryptocurrency. He
blithely accepted a $400 million luxury plane from the government of Qatar,
which of course tendered the gift out of the goodness of Qatari officials’
hearts. Trump and his kin are all over the Middle East all the time, immersed
in high-ticket real-estate projects and not so much ignorant of the conflicts
of interest as intent on them. Only chumps let such niceties impede them.
Champs realize when they’ve been given the key to a gilded till and hasten to
rob it.
Some Trump supporters undoubtedly
grasp his greed but deem it a small price to pay for a less porous border, for
less punishing regulations, for a stand against progressive excess. Others just
aren’t paying attention. We political analysts never adjust sufficiently for
the percentage of voters who are so busy, so distracted or so disinterested
that they have little idea what politicians are really up to — the good, the
bad, the blundering, the plundering.
But then there are the voters who
respond to Trump’s antics and outrages — whether those involve executive
overreach, defiance of Congress, brazen pardons, suppression of dissent — as
familiar transgressions in festive new attire. Hardly. They’re more and worse
than that. But cynicism and tribal loyalty have a way of replacing discernment
with delusion.
