About halfway through the Trump Administration, we had an old friend of mine — we had been buddies in elementary school — to dinner. Talk drifted to politics, but I was careful about it (I thought) because I understood my friend to be more conservative than me and I desperately didn't want to lose more relationships to the stupidity of the man then in the White House.
My friend never outed himself as a Trump supporter. But he said something that stuck with me — that he didn't mind Trump's obvious corruption so much because he figured everybody in Washington was corrupt and at least Trump was so much plainer about it.
Thinking a little bit about that dinner as I read the Wall Street Journal editorial about Donald Trump's indictment.
It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken. It didn’t need to be. However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia. The FBI recovered the missing documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago, so presumably there are no more secret attack plans for Mr. Trump to show off.
The message here — and indeed, across much of the right — boils down to something like this:
Maybe what Trump did was wrong, even corrupt.
But holding him accountable that is also wrong, even corrupt.
Thus, everybody does it.
It's not being expressed quite like that, of course. Instead, there's umbrage and chagrin at the Biden Administration crossing lines that were previously uncrossed — acting as though the current administration is initiating the provocation as opposed to responding to one. "We're the good guys and they're the bad guys" is the most basic message in politics.
But the backup message at play here seems to be that "if we're not the good guys, precisely, we know the other guys are just as bad and probably worse." It muddies questions of right or wrong, justice and injustice, which rules were broken and which weren't, and replaces them all with: "Who's side are you on?"
Thus rule-breaking and punishments for rule-breaking all become the same thing. The rules become meaningless. Power is the only thing that's left. It's an authoritarian, anti-democratic message.
First of all, there certainly are many in Washington that are corrupt but they aren't all corrupt. This thinking is nothing more than a pathetic excuse to justify corruption. Secondly, when corruption is exposed, it is prosecuted. At least that was how it was pre-Trump. Now in the minds of the GOP, all Republicans are innocent victims of political witch hunts . While all Democrats are most definitely corrupt enemies of the country.
Agree completely. I also think David French nailed it here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/opinion/trump-indictment-evidence.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare