Look what you made Donald Trump do
Are principled conservatives playing dumb? Or are they dumb?
The Free Press gets to the heart of the matter:
My own answer is “yes” because the Constitution is the law, and Donald Trump is definitely breaking the Constitution and will probably break it more before it’s all over.
But I’m not an expert, and I’m really not an expert in the mode of The Free Press which has, let’s say, a MAGA-curious mode of being. Not anti-anti-Trump, exactly, but not entirely anti-Trump either.
Several answers. My favorites:
But some more MAGA-friendly voices tried to hedge their criticism a bit, to the point that it seems the president they expected is entirely different from the one we know Donald Trump to be.
I think Whelan knows this, but Trump’s chief policy goal is turning law into politics. That he shares some of your other policy goals is incidental.
Was Jonathan Adler in a coma on Jan. 6? Who could be shocked at the “aggressiveness with with Trump has challenged the rule of law?”
The entry that made me want to throw my computer against the wall was from National Review’s Andy McCarthy:
Listen, I appreciate that McCarthy is willing to name the lawlessness for what it is.
But also: I think the real question is not "Why is this administration acting lawlessly?" but "Why would anybody expect differently?"
More irritating: McCarthy has an answer to his own badly-premised question:
Victim?
Victim?
VICTIM?
Listen: I don’t think that every civil and criminal case against Donald Trump brought after he left the White House the first time was equally strong. Neither do I think it was “lawfare.” Trump on Jan. 6 — and in the months beforehand — proved himself a threat to Constitutional democracy. Society responded by (too slowly, in my opinion) by throwing lots of cases against the wall to see what would stick.
Nothing stuck hard enough.
But the public record suggests the president is a miscreant through and through. A sex pest. A bully. A corrupt man. One who does not respect the boundaries of the law.
What’s more: This is who he has always been in public life, reaching back all the way at least to 1980s and even before.
According to McCarthy, though, attempts to finally hold Trump accountable for all his misdeeds was … lawfare.
Nonsense.
McCarthy does think that what Trump is doing is bad, that Trump is seeking to “eviscerate any remaining constraints on his power by illustrating that the courts and American institutions are impotent, too.”
And again: Good on him for saying so.
But by calling Trump a “victim” of “lawfare,” McCarthy also kinda-sorta justifies Trump’s behavior, and does so in a fashion that law-and-order conservatives would sneer at if a progressive lawyer tried it as the explanation for why their indigent client robbed that liquor store. “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!”
Look what you made Donald Trump do.
Nicely done, Joel!