from New York Magazine. Jonathan Chait is a big reason to read the magazine.
Trump is trapped, and trying to protect himself at all costs
by Jonathan Chait
On November 7, President Trump woke up to a world in which Democrats had smashed through a gerrymandered map to win three dozen House seats,
depriving him of both his legislative majority and his effective
immunity from congressional oversight and accountability. He responded
in the most Trumpian way: with an atavistic display of brute dominance.
He insisted the election had been a triumph
(“I thought it was a very close to complete victory”), belittled
Republicans who had lost for declining his “embrace,” pulled the press
pass from CNN reporter Jim Acosta,
and warned Democrats not to investigate anything in his administration
or he would refuse to work with them and have Senate Republicans
investigate them back.
And he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions,
whose sole offense, in Trump’s eyes, was recusing himself from the
Russia investigation. Trump maintains the attorney general’s job is to
protect the president’s political interests, even if the president or
his allies have committed serious crimes. In an interview with the New
York Times last year, Trump explicated this belief. Barack
Obama, according to Trump, had engaged in all manner of wrongdoing (as
any Fox News addict could tell you), but Attorney General Eric Holder
shielded him from investigation. Trump held up this imagined cover-up as
admirable. “Holder protected the president,” he said. “And I have great
respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.”
Trump finally acted on this vision, skipping the normal chain of command and declaring Matthew Whitaker
the acting attorney general. As recently as three years ago, Whitaker
worked for a scam company that catered to customers with invention ideas
and “provided almost no service in return,” according to the Federal
Trade Commission. Whitaker’s role was to testify to the company’s
integrity (“World Patent Marketing goes beyond making statements about
doing business ‘ethically’ and translate [sic] those words into
action”) and serve as legal muscle, firing off threatening letters to
customers who complained they had been bilked.
Aside
from his now highly relevant experience working for con men, Whitaker’s
primary qualification to serve as the nation’s highest law-enforcement
official is a fanatical adherence to the right-wing legal agenda. As an
unsuccessful far-right Senate candidate in Iowa, Whitaker declared he
would be “very concerned” about any judge with a “secular worldview” and
should instead follow a “biblical view of justice.” Whitaker’s version
of biblical justice blends harsh Old Testament punishments for Democrats
with New Testament forgiveness for Republicans. Like Trump, he has
argued that Hillary Clinton should have been indicted for using a
personal email account, and has publicly opposed the appointment of a
special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016
election.
Whitaker’s
hostility to the Mueller investigation is surely what recommended him
to the president. He claimed Trump’s campaign had not colluded with
Russia (“The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the
Trump campaign”) at a time when such a defense could not possibly be
known. He even denied that Russia interfered in the election at all, a
conclusion directly at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies have
found. He has said Mueller has no right to probe Trump’s finances (which
of course contain links to Russia) and called for Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein to curb the investigation. Trump had appointed
Whitaker as Sessions’s chief of staff, a position that reportedly
allowed him to serve as the president’s eyes and ears within the
building.
Whitaker
will have ample opportunity to undermine or quash Mueller’s
investigation, but his authority over Mueller is not the only weapon at
Whitaker’s disposal. Nor is the Mueller investigation the only threat to
the president. Trump is a crook who is drawn to other crooks, and the
potential criminal exposure across his administration is vast. We barely
have a handle on the criminality that has already occurred — it has
only been in the last few weeks that we learned, via the Times, that Trump committed systematic tax fraud over many decades. A lawsuit
credibly accusing Trump of having run a variety of “fraudulent schemes”
came out October 29 — nearly two years after his election.
Because
Trump has benefited in office from a near-total Republican blockade on
oversight of the Executive branch, it is difficult to estimate how much
misconduct has escaped detection. Weeks before the election,
congressional Republicans privately circulated a lengthy list of Trump scandals
that would be investigated if Democrats won Congress. The list ranges
from Trump’s tax returns (which Republicans had voted to keep hidden) to
his acceptance of undisclosed payments from foreign and domestic
interests while in office to more routine incompetence and sleaze, like
lavish expenses by Cabinet members and the hurricane response in Puerto
Rico.
In
public, Republicans are warning that investigating any of these matters
will backfire on Democrats. “The business of presidential harassment,”
offered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “which we were deeply
engaged in in the ’90s, improved the president’s approval ratings and
tanked ours.”
It
ought to be self-evident that McConnell is not actually expressing
sincere concern for the political fortunes of the party with which he is
engaged in zero-sum competition. Alas, it isn’t self-evident. The
notion that rigorous oversight amounts to “harassment,” and can backfire
on the congressional party, has taken hold in Establishment Washington.
“There is scant evidence of a mandate for a scorched-earth pursuit of
Trump,” two senior editors at Politico wrote the day after the election. In the Times,
Nicholas Kristof warned that “Democrats jockeying for the presidential
nomination in 2020 will tug the party toward impeachment talk or a
blizzard of subpoenas — in ways that may help Trump.”
Yes,
sometimes aggressive congressional oversight can backfire, like when
Republicans fanatically pursued conspiracy theories like Benghazi and
“IRS targeting” during the Obama years. The Republican investigation of
Bill Clinton also created some blowback, although even that famous
episode has a much less straightforward denouement than is widely
understood. While hounding Clinton over his affair, Republicans lost the
1998 midterms, an outcome that suggests that there can be a price for
going overboard in the pursuit of a scandal that is palpably unrelated
to job performance. But the atmosphere of scandal and dysfunction still
clung to the Clinton presidency, and it was that stink that allowed
George W. Bush to make a case for change in 2000 in what was otherwise
an atmosphere of peace and prosperity.
As Fred Barnes reported at the
time in The Weekly Standard, impeachment “played a historic
role, holding Clinton accountable, seeking just punishment, and, not
least, shaping the 2000 race and paving the way for a likely Republican
victory.” A Bush adviser told him, “There are 13 people who are
responsible for where we are now. They are the House impeachment
managers.” The lesson seems clear: Even if Congress somehow overreaches
in its pursuit of Trump — a prospect that is almost logistically
impossible, given the staggering list of misconduct already in plain
sight — it would still probably help the Democrats’$2 2020 presidential candidate run against the mess in Washington.
From
the very beginning, when Donald Trump and his father ignored demands
from the Nixon Justice Department that they stop discriminating against
African-Americans, through his repeated tax fraud and financial scams,
legal impunity has formed the through-line of his career. Holding him
accountable serves not only Democrats’ self-interest but the rule of
law. That process begins now.