The president makes a bittersweet
concession to an American norm.Over the last four weeks, Mr. Trump has lashed out against any criticism of his behavior, because, as he never tires of pointing out, “We won.” In requesting the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, however, Mr. Trump made his first public concession to political expectations. Hypocrisy has scored a minor victory in America. This is a good thing.
.. Mr. Trump wasn’t just breaking the rules of political conduct: He was destroying them. He was openly claiming that he abused the system to benefit himself. If he didn’t pay his taxes and got away with it, this made him a good businessman. If he could force himself on women, that made him more of a man.
.. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt described how fascism invites people to “throw off the mask of hypocrisy” and adopt the worldview that there is no right and wrong, only winners and losers.
Hypocrisy can be aspirational: Political actors claim that they are motivated by ideals perhaps to a greater extent than they really are; shedding the mask of hypocrisy asserts that greed, vengeance and gratuitous cruelty aren’t wrong, but are legitimate motivations for political behavior.
In the last decade and a half, post-Communist autocrats like Vladimir V. Putin and Viktor Orban have adopted this cynical posture. They seem convinced that the entire world is driven solely by greed and hunger for power, and only the Western democracies continue to insist, hypocritically, that their politics are based on values and principles.
Mr. Trump employed the technique of whataboutism when he was asked about his admiration for Mr. Putin, whom the host Bill O’Reilly called “a killer.” “You got a lot of killers,” responded Mr. Trump. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” To an American ear, Mr. Trump’s statement was jarring — not because Americans believe their country to be “innocent” but because they have always relied on a sort of aspirational hypocrisy to understand the country. No American politician in living memory has advanced the idea that the entire world, including the United States, was rotten to the core.
.. Ms. Conway was “counseled” after her impromptu commercial for the Trump brand, said the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. This was certainly a hypocritical move, considering that Ms. Conway had been following the president’s lead, but a hypocritical nod to decency is preferable to the blatant trampling of decency that preceded it.
.. this explanation represented a step back from the we-won-and-therefore-we-can-do-anything stance. If Mr. Trump had stuck to the throwing-off-the-masks manner of addressing controversy, he could have argued that at the time of Mr. Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador, Barack Obama was a lame-duck president and everyone knew that Mr. Trump, once inaugurated, could revisit the issue of sanctions.
Deficits Matter Again
Not long ago prominent Republicans like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, liked to warn in apocalyptic terms about the dangers of budget deficits, declaring that a Greek-style crisis was just around the corner. But now, suddenly, those very same politicians are perfectly happy with the prospect of deficits swollen by tax cuts; the budget resolution they’re considering would, according to their own estimates, add $9 trillion in debt over the next decade. Hey, no problem.
This sudden turnaround comes as a huge shock to absolutely nobody — at least nobody with any sense. All that posturing about the deficit was obvious flimflam, whose purpose was to hobble a Democratic president, and it was completely predictable that the pretense of being fiscally responsible would be dropped as soon as the G.O.P. regained the White House.
.. How do we know that we’re close to full employment? The low official unemployment rate is just one indicator. What I find more compelling are two facts: Wages are finally rising reasonably fast, showing that workers have bargaining power again, and the rate at which workers are quitting their jobs, an indication of how confident they are of finding new jobs, is back to pre-crisis levels.
Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease With Wall Street
In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.
.. Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.
.. In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues.
Donald Trump is trying to claim the moral high ground?
Here’s the twist: Look at the man who threatens to pull the trigger on mentioning the Clinton scandals — a serial adulterer who is more removed from twinges of conscience than any figure in American political life. He boasts of his extra-marital affairs. He humiliated the mother of his children. He is the Playboy philosophy made flesh. He even found the time to mock Paula Jones as a “loser” and argue that Bill Clinton’s conduct was “totally unimportant.” His factotums, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, are also serial adulterers, though they didn’t boast about it. Still, their boss’s crudeness has now rubbed off.