When the mainstream media fawned over the Obama administration, I was glad to have the conservative media as an alternative because much of the criticism was pointed and thoughtful. But now that we have an administration I usually agree with on policy led by a president who is, at best, a deeply flawed man, I find the cable coverage almost completely useless. Much of the opposition to Trump is unhinged — though, having had some time to reflect on it, the natural impulse of Trump critics to conflate policy disagreements with personal revulsion over Trump’s character is, if not excusable, at least understandable. Even Trump fans (and there are many we’ve visited with in California) tend to temper their praise with grumbling over the president’s antics. Meanwhile, much of conservative media sounds eerily like the mainstream media during the administration of Bill Clinton, even as comparisons to that deeply flawed man have become the leitmotif of Trump apologia.
.. It is simply not a defense of Trump to argue that Clinton did worse. President Clinton, as Fox commentators were wont to remind viewers not so long ago, was not impeached over sexual improprieties. He was impeached over illegal and unethical actions taken to cover up sexual improprieties, the untimely revelation of which might have cost him the presidency. Parading out Juanita Broderick and Paula Jones as a reminder of how bad Clinton was, and how indifferent the media was to how bad Clinton was, does not improve Trump’s perilous position. In the mid-to-late Nineties, we on the right full-throatedly argued that Clinton was unfit for office not merely because of the tawdry behavior (though that certainly was relevant), but because of the fraudulent abuses undertaken to conceal the tawdry behavior, some of which involved actionable misconduct.
.. the lesson from Clinton’s impeachment that I tried to draw in Faithless Execution: The further removed misconduct is from the core responsibilities of the presidency, the less political support there will be for the president’s removal from office.
.. A lot of the commentary about Clifford is of the all-or-nothing variety: Staunch Trump critics believe her every word; staunch Trump defenders reject her in toto. In nearly 20 years as a prosecutor, dealing with countless witnesses of suspect character, I learned that things rarely work that way.
.. There appears to be no doubt at this point that: (a) Cohen paid Clifford $130,000 for her silence; (b) the payment came on the eve of an election that Trump appeared to have little chance of winning and won by the narrowest of margins, meaning disclosure would likely have been fatal; and (c) the agreement went to absurd lengths to obfuscate Trump’s involvement, including the use of pseudonyms for Trump (Dennis Denniston) and Clifford (Peggy Peterson) and the use of an obscure Delaware company (Essential Consultants LLC) as a vehicle to make the payment. Even though Cohen has risibly claimed that he paid Clifford on his own accord, with no involvement by his client (Trump) or the Trump organization, at least two Trump lawyers (Cohen and Jill Martin) have been involved in the energetic legal efforts to keep Clifford silent — efforts that President Trump has now formally joined.
.. it does not matter that one may not be a fan of the campaign-finance laws — they are the law, and as we’ve seen, they can be enforced by criminal prosecution. It does not matter that one may not be a fan of the special-counsel appointment of Robert Mueller — he is the prosecutor, and it is a commonplace for prosecutors, and especially quasi-independent prosecutors, to investigate crimes that are disconnected from the original rationale for the investigation (compare, e.g., Kenneth Starr’s shift from Whitewater to the Lewinsky scandal in the investigation of President Clinton).
Longtime NR Friends John Bolton and Larry Kudlow Head to the White House
Correct. Trump is really good at “driving a media agenda.” He takes bold, beyond-the-Overton-window positions; he gets combative in interviews, he insults critics, he insists solutions are simple and that only a conspiracy of the malevolent and foolish stands in the way of enacting them.
.. I used to joke that Bill Clinton was the only guy who could distract attention from a fundraising scandal by getting into a sex scandal.
.. Trump figured out how to overload the system, generating so many headline-grabbing surprises, controversies and personnel changes that few if any really had the time to leave a lasting impression.
.. just during a couple months in the campaign, we saw Trump contending that a federal judge couldn’t rule fairly because “he’s a Mexican;” mock Carly Fiorina’s face; get into a war of words with a slain soldier’s father. Any one of those would have defined and politically destroyed a lesser-known figure.
.. Think about how Obama and the Democrats spent almost all of 2009 and a chunk of 2010 focused on what became Obamacare. But the amount of consistent focus — and presidential persuasion — needed to pass a legislative agenda is completely different from the amount needed to dominate a news cycle.
Every time it seems the president has zeroed in on an issue, and appears determined to see it through — guns and immigration are just the two latest examples — he moves on to something else. And Congress, which isn’t designed to respond swiftly to national events and the wishes of the White House even in the least distracted of circumstances, simply can’t keep up.
The constant whiplash of priorities is getting on lawmakers’ nerves.
“It’s unbelievable to me,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “The attention span just seems to be. . . it’s a real problem.”
Republicans redefine morality as whatever Trump does
In marked contrast to the rest of the country, Republicans also say that Trump shares their values (82 percent) and that — get this — he “provides the United States with moral leadership” (80 percent).
.. Yet so strong is the pull of tribalism that we’ve reached a point where partisanship outweighs morality. Republicans aren’t approving of Trump despite his behavior; in calling him a role model, they’re approving his behavior.
.. The difference: Democrats disapproved of Clinton’s morality by 2 to 1 (65 to 33 percent), even as they overwhelmingly approved of his job performance. Only 16 percent of Republicans today say Trump does not provide moral leadership.
.. Such normalizing of Trump’s behavior makes the seediest elements feel safe to crawl out from under their rocks. The FBI reported in November that hate crimes were up again in 2016 after rising in 2015. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents were “significantly higher” through the first nine months of 2017
The presidency survived the Watergate, Iran-contra and Clinton scandals. Trump will exact a higher toll.
Histories of past presidential scandals reveal common threads and turning points — but also show how Trump stands alone.
American presidents get the scandals they deserve.Richard Nixon’s paranoia produced Watergate. Ronald Reagan’s indifference contributed to Iran-contra. Bill Clinton’s appetites led to impeachment. And Donald Trump’s delusions — about his singular abilities and the impunity of his office — are propelling the crisis of legitimacy threatening his presidency... What distinguishes the Trump scandal is how its central character appears to combine the worst qualities of his troubled predecessors. How, rather than evolving into scandal, this presidency was born into it. And above all, how perceptions of the president’s integrity and honor — which proved critical in the outcomes of past political and constitutional crises — are barely an issue for a man without moral high ground left to lose.
.. This is not President Trump in 2017, but rather descriptions of Clinton and Nixon, respectively, at the height of the Lewinsky and Watergate sagas. Indeed, one of the most recurring images of a White House in turmoil is the isolated and vengeful commander in chief
.. Trump may spend lonely nights and mornings with the remote and the phone, but historically speaking, he has plenty of company.
.. Haig even repeatedly urged a top telecommunications policy official to not bring anything substantive to Nixon’s attention. “The President isn’t in any shape to deal with this,” he explained.
.. Clinton’s famous ability to compartmentalize, to carry on amid the ever-expanding inquiry by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, was largely for show, Baker reports. “In private, Clinton was consumed with the Starr investigation and its collateral damage, sometimes so preoccupied that he appeared lost during meetings.” Clinton told Cabinet members that he had woken up “profoundly angry” every day for 41/2 years. Imagine what his morning tweetstorms would have been like.
.. In the same way Trump says digging into his personal finances would be a red line Mueller should not cross, Nixon regarded Cox’s attempts to secure his tapes as “the ultimate defiance” meriting dismissal.
.. The effort by Trump and his supporters in the right-wing media to depict Mueller’s probe into Russian electoral interference as a partisan “witch hunt” — another common phrase across these scandals — is a time-honored tactic for any White House under siege. Haig and Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler agreed on the need to “place the impeachment issue in as partisan a light as possible,” and the Clinton team reached the same conclusion more than 20 years later. Baker describes the latter group’s strategy during the impeachment fight: “Attack the accusers, demonize the investigators, complain about partisanship while doing everything to foment it.”
.. Poindexter, who saw himself as “the head of an American version of a Roman praetorian guard around the president, loyal and responsible to him alone,”
.. Clinton aide Paul Begala “sank into a deep depression” during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Baker writes, and vowed never again to appear on television defending the president.
.. Their true challenge is less about surviving Trump’s eruptions than simply living with the choice they’ve made, convincing themselves that service to the nation — passing a tax cut, forestalling a war, reducing immigration — is worth it.
.. Trump’s refusal to accept the U.S. intelligence finding that the Kremlin sought to tilt the 2016 election in his favor mirrors the stubbornness of his predecessors. Reagan went along with the sale of arms to Iran in an effort to free American hostages, though “always telling himself that it was not an arms-for-hostages deal,”
.. Nixon lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt concluded that the 37th president lied not just to others but to himself. It was an easy tell, Woodward and Bernstein explain: “Almost invariably when [Nixon] lied, he would repeat himself, sometimes as often as three times — as if he were trying to convince himself.”
.. Mike McCurry, Clinton’s press secretary, decided to leave the White House before the impeachment proceedings got underway, in part to avoid “becoming the Ron Ziegler of his era,” Baker explains.
.. Trump appears
- Nixonian in his disregard for democratic norms,
- Clintonian in his personal recklessness and
- beyond Reaganesque in his distance from the details of policy.
.. But where the parallels and parables of past scandals fall apart is with Trump’s well-documented disregard for truth.
.. When Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, among the most devoted of the president’s men, explained to Nixon family members why a damning Oval Office recording meant that resignation was inevitable, he emphasized not law but dishonesty. “The problem is not Watergate or the cover-up,” he argued. “It’s that he hasn’t been telling the truth to the American people. The tape makes it evident that he hasn’t leveled with the country for probably eighteen months. And the President can’t lead a country he has deliberately misled.”
.. “She could not get over Clinton’s recklessness — it was as if he could not stop doing wrong, could not tell the truth,”
.. Ziegler was adamantly opposed to releasing transcripts, Woodward and Bernstein write, because “there was rough language on the tapes,” candid discussions that would “offend Middle America, destroy his mandate.” Once certain transcripts were made public, Nixon lawyer Leonard Garment worried that president had “allowed America into the ugliness of his mind