The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Everyone and everything he touches rots.
There’s never been any confusion about the character defects of Donald Trump. The question has always been just how far he would go and whether other individuals and institutions would stand up to him or become complicit in his corruption.
the Ohio Republican Party
state dinner in Columbus
on Friday.
Gabriella Demczuk
for The New York Times
When I first took to these pages three summers ago to write about Mr. Trump, I warned my fellow Republicans to just say no both to him and his candidacy. One of my concerns was that if Mr. Trump were to succeed, he would redefine the Republican Party in his image. That’s already happened in areas like free trade, free markets and the size of government; in attitudes toward ethnic nationalism and white identity politics; in America’s commitment to its traditional allies, in how Republicans view Russia and in their willingness to call out leaders of evil governments like North Korea rather than lavish praise on them. But in no area has Mr. Trump more fundamentally changed the Republican Party than in its attitude toward ethics and political leadership.
For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life. They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong.
Senator Lindsey Graham, then in the House, went so far as to argue that “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”
All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé. We saw it again last week when the president’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen — standing in court before a judge, under oath — implicated Mr. Trump in criminal activity, while his former campaign chairman was convicted in another courtroom on financial fraud charges. Most Republicans in Congress were either silent or came to Mr. Trump’s defense, which is how this tiresome drama now plays itself out.
It is a stunning turnabout. A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.
For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.
Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; that there would be some line Mr. Trump would cross, some boundary he would transgress, some norm he would shatter, some civic guardrail he would uproot, some action he would take, some scheme or scandal he would be involved in that would cause large numbers of Republicans to break with the president. No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. So far there’s been no bottom, and there may never be. It’s quite possible this should have been obvious to me much sooner than it was, that I was blinded to certain realities I should have recognized.
In any case, the Republican Party’s as-yet unbreakable attachment to Mr. Trump is coming at quite a cost. There is the rank hypocrisy, the squandered ability to venerate public character or criticize Democrats who lack it, and the damage to the white Evangelical movement, which has for the most part enthusiastically rallied to Mr. Trump and as a result has been largely discredited. There is also likely to be an electoral price to pay in November.
But the greatest damage is being done to our civic culture and our politics. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are right now the chief emblem of corruption and cynicism in American political life, of an ethic of might makes right. Dehumanizing others is fashionable and truth is relative. (“Truth isn’t truth,” in the infamous words of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.) They are stripping politics of its high purpose and nobility.
That’s not all politics is; self-interest is always a factor. But if politics is only about power unbounded by morality — if it’s simply about rulers governing by the law of the jungle, about a prince acting like a beast, in the words of Machiavelli — then the whole enterprise will collapse. We have to distinguish between imperfect leaders and corrupt ones, and we need the vocabulary to do so.
A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.
Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this?
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.
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The mask on the left looks just like him.
They are in fact rotten fruit, but the symbolism is pretty cool...
You can say that again pal. It has been obvious since long before Donald Trump, that the Republican party has become an amoral gang of corporate thugs. The 'pledge' they signed to corporate attack dog Norquist said it all. In a way, it's surprising that Trump doesn't have 100% support from so called 'conservatives.' If it took something as extreme as Donald Trump to wake you up; you're too damn sleepy to be taken seriously at all.
The GOP has been faithful to its principles for decades.
It's just that the GOP has lied about what those principles are.
The GOP exists for one thing only: to give more money to the already-rich. This has been true for decades.
Cool I’d love to see tax rates go down as income increases. They have their work cut out for them reversing the current tax curve.
The only way that will happen the way you stated it, is if the GOP I voted out of office and, the Democrats take over, the Republicans don't want any kind of wage increase for working Americans, that would cut into the profits of their donors and, the donors don't want that, all they want is more tax cuts so that they can line their pockets better, they don't give a shit about working Americans.
Me too, except who's going to pay for the wars and the tax cuts?
Coming right upon the heels of "The Squeaky Cleanest Presidential Administration in All US History". with zero ranking Obama campaign or administration officials having ever been indicted for malfeasance while in office, the widespread endemic top to bottom corruption of Trump, his family, his campaign and his administration stands in stark contrast. It it out in the open. You cannot miss it. We, The American People, have one opportunity to put the brakes on Trump and that is to vote the damn gop out of our Congress. On Tuesday November 6th Vote Democratic...
It still does! But it's not everything. I'm not going to vote for a candidate with insane policies just because they might be more polite than their opponent.
The only time the Left decided that character was worth talking about was when Republicans finally nominated someone who clearly wasn't as well mannered as their nominee. Before that, though, they cast a lot of good men - Reagan, both Bushes, McCain, Romney - as freaking Hitler! Every one of those decent people was characterized as evil.
For Republicans, I get the complaints about Trump and his behavior, and I totally agree. I voted for someone else - in the primaries. But on policy, there's no way I could vote for Hillary now. Ten plus years ago, sure, but she has changed a lot. That was the choice I was presented with in November 2016.
But you will vote for one who violates all the moral codes you pretend to care about just to get his vote. Don't pretend there's anything pure about your decision-making.
But you will vote for one who violates all the moral codes you pretend to care about just to get his vote
For me to agree with him on enough policies to vote for him, it's not possible that he would violate every moral code I care about. Your assertion is not logical. I get it: you think he's evil. I'll bet you weren't nearly this worked up about him ten years ago when he was a Democrat. Now that he's a Republican president, you think he's evil.
And you shouldn't pretend there's anything objective or fair about your assessment.
Being impeached is hardly given a pass. You wouldn't say that if Scumbag were to suffer the same fate. You had your shot to "kill the king" and you missed.
You might want to re-read that sentence a few times. It does not reflect well on your moral "standards". Not sure about evil (probably either not bright enough or too far gone for that) but corrupt as hell, a pathological liar and someone whose sexual morals make Clinton look like a choirboy. As far as "when he was a Democrat" (was he or does he just like to have his picture taken with "important people"? Oh, hey, like Bill and Hillary Clinton:
And it'll be a cold day in hell, as the saying goes, when a Scumbag supporter gets to lecture anyone else on being "objective and fair." I imagine you even laughed at that one.
All of 5 - that's right: FIVE - Democratic members of the House voted to impeach. Every single Democrat in the Senate voted to acquit. That's called being given a pass.
I'm not even saying it's right or wrong, but they all knew what Clinton did. The facts were not even in dispute. The only thing in dispute was whether or not anyone cared.
Lindsey Graham is a Quisling. He is also afraid of something.
Morals? Not relevant. Not anymore.
But if a politician or president is compromised by domestic revelations or actions noted by a foreign power or powers-------------this is an area where our democracy has never treaded since The American Civil War.