In a normal, pre-Donald-Trump political world—you know, when pastors didn’t pray around golden statues of political leaders and presidents didn’t plaster their names and faces on public buildings, passports, and currency like in a tin-pot dictatorship—lawmakers could agree on some basic parameters of decent behavior. Democrats and Republicans may fight about everything, but they could unite in their opposition to self-dealing outrages.
That’s no longer true. There is seemingly nothing Donald Trump or his family could do that would spark denunciations from the GOP. That’s especially obvious after Trump exacted vengeance in Tuesday’s primaries on the handful of Republicans who would sometimes raise concerns about the administration’s threats to the Constitution. I still remember when sucking up was a loathsome character trait, but now it’s a Republican art form.
In pre-Trump days, Republicans would laugh at Bagdad Bob-style third-world toadyism. Yet this week, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry went to Greenland as Trump’s special envoy. “Greenland was not on a map, until Donald Trump put it on a map,” he gushed. Ick. I also remember when Louisiana governors, however ill-behaved, were independent-minded and clever. Edwin Edwards on a foe: “He’s so slow that it takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.”
While derriere-kissing behavior is embarrassing, the latest news from Washington, D.C., is shocking. Trump had sued the IRS for $10 billion for the leak of his tax returns, and now the agency that he runs has settled with the president and his family. The terms of the agreement are not surprisingly tilted heavily in Trump’s favor and should make any self-styled advocate for limited government blush, but you know that isn’t the case.
As The Dispatch‘s Jonah Goldberg explained, “Realizing that the courts might find this too cute to countenance, the Justice Department and IRS—both, again, run by Trump—compromised by creating a $1,776,000,000 fund (that “1776” before all the zeros is a play on the country’s 250th birthday) that Trump will control. Its primary function would be to compensate the January 6 rioters, all of whom he has already pardoned.” Trump isn’t particularly smart, but he is cunning. (And you thought it was self-dealing when unions negotiate for pay deals with the politicians that they elected to office.)
Further details of this “anti-weaponization” deal are more brazen. As the BBC noted, the deal “blocks the IRS from reviewing tax filings that Trump, his family and his businesses made in the past.” It’s a self-pardon for any financial problems and, as others have noted, largely puts the Trump family above the nation’s tax laws. In free societies, no one is above the law, whereas in despotisms the despot and his cronies can do pretty much anything they choose. As a Peruvian dictator once said, “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.”
So where are Republican lawmakers? Some of them feigned ignorance of the details of any of this well-reported deal. Others expressed some concern, per the Deseret News, with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R–S.D.) saying that he’s “not a big fan” of a slush fund that could pay millions of dollars to people who attacked the Capitol and its police officers. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) says he wants to ask more questions. It won’t be long before all elected Republicans—including those now expressing “concern”—become big fans of the deal.
Already, per the news report, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) is doing the whataboutism thing by comparing it to a deal made under the Biden administration—a laughably weak comparison. The case he references involves a $2 million settlement the administration made with former FBI officials, not to a president who “negotiated” a $1.8-billion slush fund with get-out-of-jail-free passes for his family.
One writer referred to Trump’s governance as “patrimonialism,” meaning that he treats the United States and its government as his personal property. That certainly helps explain Trump’s desecration of the White House and other D.C. monuments, as he imposes his Early Saddam Hussein style on everything largely free from congressional oversight. But that’s an overly generous description.
The key to Trump’s success is that he throws so much stuff against the wall that it leaves his opponents constantly flat-footed. Consider this doozy of a news story that, in that long-forgotten sane world, would be intolerable. From The New Republic: “At least two companies tied to Don Jr. and Eric Trump have won large government contracts.”
Why do Republicans roll over? “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle,” wrote Carl Sagan. “It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” And now the nation will probably never get back to normal because a spineless GOP can never admit that it’s been conned.
