Who still believes in letting Donald Trump off the hook?
HOW DOES PRESIDENT Joe Biden's apparently unauthorized possession of classified papers, left over from his vice presidency, affect the relationship between the law and the presidency? A deputy opinion editor at the Washington Post, David Von Drehle, wrote that the news last week of a new batch of Biden papers "should spell the end of any realistic prospect of criminal charges against former president Donald Trump over his Mar-a-Lago portfolio of pilferage."
Here were two dangerous words for an opinion writer, casting doubt on one another: was this an assessment of what was "realistic," or a demand about what "should" happen? Was Von Drehle arguing about how things were or about how things ought to be?
Or neither? Trump's refusal to hand over classified documents, Von Drehle wrote, "constituted a case that bordered on open-and-shut." So why not prosecute him for it?
Von Drehle explained, or at least wrote a paragraph that occupied the space where an explanation would go:
But now that case will probably not be brought, no matter how many side-by-side charts are created to distinguish between the known allegations against Trump and the (so far unknown) culpability of Biden. According to the latest Gallup data, 45 percent of Americans identify as Republicans or leaning toward the Republicans; 44 percent are Democrats or lean in that direction. The Justice Department serves them all, and its credibility rests on being perceived to play fair.
There were two notable absences in this account of what people would do and why they would do it. It began with the passive construction that the "case will probably not be brought," as if the case itself, not the prosecutors of the Justice Department, were the one in charge of the bringing. And it ended with the problem of whether the department is "being perceived to play fair."
Who was committing this disembodied act of the perception of fairness? David Von Drehle, deputy opinion editor of the Washington Post, in that very column—in that precise passage, even! Perhaps he believed he was describing his perception of other people's perception of fairness. But the column's existence, on its own, expressed the belief that the scandal over Biden's papers was a serious enough matter to cast doubt on any prosecution dealing with Trump's papers.
The mainstream political press was committed to that belief from the moment the news of Biden's possession of classified documents broke: Trump's documents were a page-one scandal, therefore Biden's documents also belonged on page one. The original context—that Trump's case landed on front pages because federal agents had raided Mar-a-Lago, because he was allegedly refusing direct requests to return the documents he had—no longer mattered. The two stories had to be balanced. The Democrats had gotten their turn, and now the Republicans were going to get theirs.
And so an opinion editor at the Washington Post was arguing that a "so far unknown" violation on Biden's part had to cancel out a near "open-and-shut" violation by Trump, in the name of fairness. Or of the perception of fairness. Or of realism? It didn't have to make sense, because Von Drehle's true focus wasn't the Biden proto-scandal at all.
What he was worried about, he wrote, was the threat of Donald Trump—a "bad person," whose "presidency has been a terrible thing for the country I love," but a person who should not be punished for apparently breaking the law:
I’m relieved by the likely collapse of the classified documents case against him. Because it was the strongest case against Trump, in terms of trial strategy, it was the most likely to produce an indictment—and indicting Trump is a terrible idea for those who genuinely hope to be rid of him.
Behind Von Drehle's overexcitability about the latest Biden headlines, that is, lay a fossilized complacency—the endlessly discredited, endlessly renewed establishment belief that Trump is too dangerous to be held accountable. Right now, Von Drehle wrote, "Trump is a dead man walking" who has "lost the ability to drive the news cycle." A prosecution, he argued, would revive him:
To be indicted and hauled into court for history’s most heavily publicized trial would invigorate Trump, and the spectacle would galvanize his dwindling base of support. He’d go from grumbling irrelevance in the gilded prison of his Mar-a-Lago mausoleum to ring master of a circus trial that would dominate every news outlet.
This was the same logic that kept Democratic leadership from impeaching Trump for months after they won back the House in 2018, until he finally pushed them too far by trying to undermine Biden's presidential candidacy. Trump would relish the fight, and his support would only grow stronger.
But if Trump is diminished and unpopular now, it's because people and institutions have been pressing their cases against him. The January 6 committee spent last year collecting and broadcasting the evidence that Trump brought about the attack on the Capitol and sat back and sullenly watched the carnage on the White House dining-room TV rather than saying or doing anything to stop it. The state of New York convicted his company of tax fraud. The National Archives got so tired of his refusal to turn over classified documents that, again, the government sent agents to raid his luxury compound in Florida.
None of this made Trump look good or increased the size of his following! What empowered Trump and his movement all along was the belief that he had the power to get away with whatever he, or they, wanted. Now that people have put some effort into stopping him, the ex-president looks distinctly non-unstoppable. "His outlandish social media posts fall as silently as unheard forest trees," Von Drehle wrote. Yes, they do—because Twitter and Facebook took his accounts away after the Jan. 6 attack, for the sake of deterrence and punishment.
Von Drehle was out to convince the public, and himself, that Trump has settled into harmlessness, and must not be disturbed out of it:
As drum major of a wackadoodle parade, he marched through the Republican primaries last year, delivering candidates who bombed in the general election. Now no one marches to his tune. When he tried to influence the election of a House speaker, even the surviving zealots ignored his instructions.
That was one way of describing recent events, but wasn't a very good way. Trump's march through the Republican primaries may not have led to much success in the general election, but it successfully wiped out the last remnants of the party's anti-Trump wing. The zealots ignored Trump's endorsement of Kevin McCarthy in the House speaker's race because they saw McCarthy as an insincere standard-bearer for Trump's cause. And in the days after Von Drehle published the piece, they kept wringing concessions out of McCarthy until they had taken control of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
If the Trump movement were simply a bunch of people following Donald Trump, then it might be possible to dream that by leaving Trump alone, you could make it all go away, and that the country could settle into the ordinary, comforting rhythm of alternating party-for-party scandals in the news. "Rather than reboot the old show as a courtroom drama," Von Drehle wrote, "we must call off the conflict that feeds the beast."
But the conflict isn't something the Washington Post opinion page can call off, and the beast hasn't lost its appetite. The same legislators who plotted with Trump to overturn the 2020 election are now running the Oversight Committee as a bastion, or a forward outpost, of Trump loyalists. They're writing the investigative agenda for the House majority with the aim of avenging not only Biden's victory, but the Jan. 6 prosecutions. Yielding to Trump's desire for impunity won't placate them. It will confirm that they're winning.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
OVER ON POPULA this week, Tom greeted each new day with a new episode of the Populacast audio program, and tried to find the lesson in a pair of profiles of Elon Musk. And the Mr. Wrong column reveled in the joy of being rewarded for participating in rating systems.
Meanwhile, further afield at Air Mail, Tom reviewed the very long and fairly gory new Bret Easton Ellis novel, The Shards, starring a teen protagonist named "Bret Ellis," who is working on a novel called Less Than Zero.
Thank you for reading Indignity! We appreciate your interest and support, and we encourage you to find more of our work at Popula.
By the way, regarding that Popula piece about His Muskness:
"What if there were a rapidly accumulating body of evidence that Elon Musk is an utter boob who has bluffed his way into a position of world-changing wealth and influence?"
Nailed it!
There really should be a satirical movie about all this. I'm imagining a cross between "Citizen Kane" and "Being there". I suspect Armando Iannucci could do it justice.
I wonder how much the Republicans are paying this clown.
Just kidding. (Probably.) Presumably, Von Drehle is just another high-status idiot (as Stephen Colbert described the character he played on "The Colbert report"), a person who has spent his life cocooned in money and status (I note he's a graduate of Oxford*) and thus has never been forced to face the fact that he understands very little about how the world actually works. As George Orwell quipped of such absurdities, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
In the real world, failure to punish blatant criminality, particularly political criminality, has baleful, long-term consequences. Ironically, establishment organs like the WaPo frequently wring their hands about Americans' "loss of faith in government"; here, for example, is such a WaPo piece from 2018 (which I'm citing merely because it's the first such piece to which DuckDuckGo referred me - there's plenty more where it came from):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/30/how-americans-lost-faith-in-government/
That piece is about the impact of the American war in Vietnam and the mendacity of the American government regarding it on Americans' faith in government. Yet it never seems to occur to the WaPo and its ilk that the abject failure of the American government to punish blatant criminality by powerful men (they are, of course, men, and rich white ones, too) may well have contributed at least as much to Americans' lack of faith in government as the Vietnam war and other such fiascos.
The USA has an appalling history of this kind of corruption. For example, it let Jefferson Davis, Robert Lee, and other ringleaders of the confederacy - men who were as guilty of treason as it is possible to be - walk away free. More recently, and highly relevant to what has happened since, it let Richard Nixon retire in wealth and comfort, never suffering anything like what an ordinary American would suffer for orchestrating a burglary, and suffering nothing at all for his much worse crimes, such as sabotaging the 1968 Paris peace talks. Basically, Tricky Dick got away with it all, as did many of his henchmen, some of whom (e.g., Roger Stone) have continued shitting on the country to this day. Likewise Ronald Reagan and his henchmen got away with waging an illegal proxy war in Central America. Likewise George Bush Jr. and his henchmen got away with waging a war under flagrantly false pretenses in Iraq. Etc. Ad nauseam, with emphasis on "nauseam".
This kind of thing makes it as obvious as obvious can be that "equality under the law" is a polite fiction or just a lie used to keep all us little people in line. It is potently corrosive of faith in government. To be sure, many Americans, particularly brown Americans, have many other reasons to scoff at the notion that the American government is worthy of trust or respect. However, for many others, this corruption looms large. For me personally, the impunity of Dick Nixon was the beginning of the end of whatever faith in government I ever had. I was a child at the time, being raised by Republicans, but it was clear to me that there was one set of laws for mere hoi polloi like us and quite another for Dick Nixon.
Beyond the corrosion of faith in government, of course, there's also the fact that criminals who get away with it have a tendency to do it again. As I've remarked here before, the current situation of the USA bears a striking resemblance to that of the Weimar Republic after the "beer hall putsch" of 1923. The leader of that failed insurrection, a widely ridiculed fellow named Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to five years in prison but released after about eight months, for good behavior and for the sake of "healing" and "unity". A person with a name like "Von Drehle" really should have at least an inkling of how well that turned out. I won't be surprised if the impunity of Donald Trump turns out equally well.
*By the way, I have a master's degree from Cambridge. Cambridge and Oxford are weird little worlds.