Freedom is slavery, 2+2=5
The moral/political sins of which the right accuses the left are quite familiar. They annoy Frank Bruni as much as they do me. We recognize them as the very disingenuous and fact-averse behaviors that confound our own attempts to perfect the union here on Earth One. So when the right flings their own misbehaviors at our feet with such bold indignance, one wonders sometimes if there might be something to the accusations. Or if Alzheimer’s is setting in and we simply do not remember lefty sins that the right seems to recall so clearly.
Frank Bruni views the he who smelt it, dealt it asymmetry of bothsidesism as “equivalences not merely false but fantastical.” They arise from “the perverse moral arithmetic of more than a few Trump apologists.”
One matter in particular that’s dogged Bruni as it has me are the claims that the Biden administration “weaponized” the Justice Department against Republicans. The junior partners in Trump 2.0’s federal law firm justify their exacting revenge on his enemies with all the schoolyard authority of “He started it!”
Except Biden didn’t, Bruni writes:
That isn’t some random, cherry-picked absurdity. That’s practically every hour of Fox News. Trump’s supposed mimicry of Biden when it comes to politically motivated investigations and prosecutions is more than an article of faith on the right. It’s the dogma that washes Trump’s authoritarianism clean.
And it’s bunk. I don’t recall evidence that Biden ordered the prosecutors who filed charges against Trump to do so. In contrast, Trump’s commandments that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her unctuous underlings go after James Comey, Letitia James and others are a matter of Truth Social record.
Show me where, during Biden’s presidency, you find anything analogous to Trump’s purge of Justice Department lawyers who have failed or might fail to quench his thirst for vengeance. Anything like the series of events by which Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was pushed out of his job in September after he hadn’t produced the indictments against Comey and James that Trump so fervently desired.
I clearly recall the Bush II purge of U.S. attorneys for failing to prosecute voter fraud where none existed or for their prosecuting Republican officials. One of the fired attorneys, John McKay, reminded Vox in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey that the Bush firings were an “effort to turn law enforcement into an arm of the White House’s political wing.”
(Maybe my memory is not failing. Who started it?)
Trump replaced Siebert with Lindsey Halligan, a Florida insurance attorney lacking any prosecutorial experience. She had worked for Trump personally, appears unflinchingly loyal and, coincidentally, has that certain je ne sais quoi, that made-for-TV look that Trump routinely seeks out in lieu of genuine competence. Her performance to date, Bruni writes, has been “an embarrassment of errors and a mockery of jurisprudence.”
He adds, “Try to locate Halligan’s doppelgänger in the Biden administration. Best of luck.”
To explain Trump’s wholesale retooling the Department of Justice as a weapon of MAGA payback, one must “erase the photographs of classified documents keeping company with a commode at Mar-a-Lago…. delete the recording of Trump telling Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to figure out some way to reverse Biden’s victory there in 2020,” etc. Fortunately, MAGA Republicans can muster the magical thinking to manage that.
The rationalization that most infuriates Bruni is MAGA’s “Biden crime family” narrative. It’s not as if Hunter Biden was not “an unmitigated ethical calamity.” But to equate that with the most blatant self-dealing that nation has seen under any prior president is insane. The meme coins, the cryptocurrency, the Qatari jet, etc. What’s as infuriating is watching his supporters accept it as the price of a less-porous border, owning the libs, and punishing random brown people for not looking “American,” etc.
But then there are the voters who respond to Trump’s antics and outrages — whether those involve executive overreach, defiance of Congress, brazen pardons, suppression of dissent — as familiar transgressions in festive new attire. Hardly. They’re more and worse than that. But cynicism and tribal loyalty have a way of replacing discernment with delusion.
A few MAGAs (albeit too few) may be finding their way out of that delusion. During one of my rush hour sign protests last week (above), a youngish pedestrian waiting for the Walk signal told me that one of his MAGA acquaintances finally had begun to question his allegiance to Trump.
I replied with a line from Independence Day, “Welcome to Earth!”
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