Donald “Little Donny” Trump, the would-be mob boss supposedly running the White House, told the New York Post on Thursday he would give his RNC acceptance speech from the White House lawn.
“We’d do it possibly outside on one of the lawns, we have various lawns,” the acting president said. “It’s very big, a very big lawn.” A big, beautiful, taxpayer-owned lawn. The President and Vice President exempted, “federal civilian executive branch employees” are prohibited from engaging in political advocacy on the taxpayers’ dime or using taxpayer resources. Likely, it will take a lot of them to stage Trump’s White House beauty pageant.
Which begs the question: How many of Trump’s staff are so corrupt that they will knowingly violate the Hatch Act — even knowing they will likely never be held to account for it?
A Twitter user responded, “An Act can only be as strong as the people that ENFORCE the Act.”
Not so. Honest citizens obey a host of laws despite the low chance of punishment for violations. They don’t cheat on their taxes, don’t litter, obey stop signs at 3 a.m., and don’t impersonate dead people at the polls. They behave ethically not because they fear punishment but from respect for the law and from strength of character. Little Donny has a character deficit. His pageant will showcase how many around him do.
It was strength of character that compelled national security analyst Kyle Murphy to resign from the Defense Intelligence Agency when he decided the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might lack the character to refuse unlawful orders from Trump.
It is lack of character, Mark Sumner suggests at Daily Kos, that allows Republican House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise to declare QAnon conspiracy kook Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “abject racism, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim rhetoric” offensive while ratifying “every lie and ludicrous claim” from the acting president.
In reviewing Rick Perlstein’s epic, four-part history of the American right from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, The New Republic’s Patrick Iber observes how over time Republicans sacrificed principle for power:
In some ways, this history shows how short a step it was from all this to Trump. How could the United States elect a paranoid and vulgar man who trafficked in racial division, and who made criminal behavior standard operating procedure in the White House? Well, it elected Nixon. How could it elect an intellectually shallow entertainer, who was seemingly incapable of speaking truthfully on a consistent basis? Well, it elected Reagan. And as powerful as the right grew, its entrepreneurs in media and politics stoked culture war divisions to cultivate a powerful sense of grievance.
Grievance trumped principle. Trump embodies grievance. Q.E.D.
Former Trump personal attorney and convicted felon, Michael Cohen, reflects on his own character deficits, writing, “I wanted to climb the highest mountains of Manhattan’s skyscraping ambition, to inhabit the world from the vantage point of private jets and billion-dollar deals, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there.” Cohen’s “willingness to deceive to get ahead” and damn the consequences landed him in federal prison wearing a green jumpsuit:
As the months passed by and I thought about the man I knew so well, I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully. The types of scandals that have surfaced in recent months will only continue to emerge with greater and greater levels of treachery and deceit. If Trump wins another four years, these scandals will prove to only be the tip of the iceberg. I’m certain that Trump knows he will face prison time if he leaves office, the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of “Lock Her Up!” But that is the Trump I know in a nutshell. He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well.
Leaders of Trump’s party confirmed his assumptions long before he ran for office. It is said adversity does not build character, it reveals it. Confronted with the adversity of a global pandemic and economic collapse, Trump’s cult of sycophants revealed theirs. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sent the Senate home this week without a voting on a coronavirus relief bill for Americans out of work and struggling to survive the deadliest pandemic in 100 years. That inaction, Salon reports, “could deny benefits to as many as 30 million Americans currently collecting unemployment” and “force another 4 million people out of work and cause the economy to contract by another 4%.”
With Trump’s poll numbers going the way of the Titanic, Cohen warns that losing reelection will mean exposing the Trump administration’s “tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness.” To prevent that, he writes, “Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.” So after failing miserably at containing the virus that has sickened 5.3 million Americans and killed almost 170,000, Trump vows not to sign any relief bill that includes “$25 billion in aid to the U.S. Postal Service and $3.5 billion in supplemental election funding.” Anything includes sabotaging the U.S. Post Office. Trump and his lieutenants have targeted Post Office funding, sorting equipment, even mail boxes voters — especially Democratic voters (Monmouth poll) — will need to vote safely by mail this fall. Anything also includes leaving millions of Americans desperate, hungry, and even homeless until after Labor Day when the Senate is scheduled to return.
Pandemic relief non-developments prompted this response from Josh Holland, contributor to The Nation:
All the bullying and bluster from Trump and the right are not as indicative of strength as they suppose. “MAGA men are weak,” John Pavlovitz charged last week while observing male peacocking at the annual Bike Rally in Sturgis, South Dakota:
The sad irony of America, is how terribly terrified the quivering coward is who professes to lead this nation: how much he hides behind a phone screen and rows of White House barricades, how he ducks from accountability, the way he runs from reporters, how he uses our military as a shield—his completely inability to stand in the raking light of criticism without withering like a tiny orange flower in the scorching midday sun. He is a man fully lacking humanity.
Sadder still, is a generation of American men who’ve so placed their identity in him that they have lost the ability to criticize him or oppose him, men who cannot stand up for themselves and their loved ones, men who are so enamored with this fraudulent shell, that they will risk their own lives just to flex in the face of a deadly pandemic that is not impressed.
Should Democrats retake the Senate this fall and should the republic survive the transfer of power, Republicans on Capitol Hill will become born-again deficit hawks. They will bluster and stonewall and plead poverty over any Democratic proposals aimed at digging the country out of the hole they themselves dug in shameless obeisance to that “fraudulent shell.” Little Donny has a character deficit. His enablers have made a pageant of theirs.
To defeat them, Democrats will need more than polite scolding. They need to reveal their character via their actions.
[h/t LG]
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