Sometimes, writers tell more truth than they mean to.
“This is Mr. Trump’s era and Mr. Trump’s Washington,” the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent wrote on Monday. “And the old rules do not always apply anymore.”
Cynical conservatives on Twitter have a hashtag for that mentality: #newrules. When either trying to get someone fired for a bad tweet or defending President Trump’s rhetoric, the Twitter trolls will grant that such behavior violates old-fashioned norms. But since popular culture and the American Left have trashed those norms, the argument goes, we’re not going to play by the old rules either.
It’s a vicious circle. Norm breaking excuses norm breaking, which excuses more breaking of norms. Because the “grab ’em by the p—-” guy won the election, the Resistance isn’t going to play nice.
And as a result of this arms race, Trump’s base is ready to excuse some of his more reckless or seemingly corrupt actions.
One reason it’s hard to believe that Trump had good motives when he pressed Ukraine to investigate the Bidens or election interference by the country is that he assigned the investigative work and some of the diplomatic work to his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani rather than to federal law enforcement.
Running a diplomatic-investigative deal through his private lawyer looks a bit shady. It suggests Trump knew it was improper. It was also reckless to outsource U.S. diplomacy with Ukraine to Giuliani because he had as clients two Eastern European emigres, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were pursuing oil business with Ukraine’s government.
How could you defend this as anything other than a cover-up or at least reckless freelancing?
Jay Sekulow, Trump’s attorney, tried. “Let’s for a moment put ourselves in the shoes of the president of the United States right now,” Sekulow told the Senate on Saturday. “Before he was sworn into office, he was subjected to an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation called Crossfire Hurricane.” It was unprecedented for our government to spy on a presidential candidate, and we have since learned that the FBI misled the spy court.
Maybe the FBI figured Trump was so bad or Carter Page so clearly crooked that they didn’t have to follow the rules.
Sekulow piled the FBI investigation onto this story. FBI Director James Comey certainly didn’t follow norms in his odd early conversations with Trump. FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page certainly seemed determined to undermine Trump.
Thus, Sekulow argued, it was reasonable that Trump decided to circumvent the intelligence community in his Ukraine efforts. Trump “decided that he would listen to people that he trusted, and he would inquire about the Ukraine issue himself,” Sekulow explained rather than “blindly trust some of the advice he was being given by the intelligence agencies.”
Similarly, Trump’s White House moved the transcript of his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to something of a secret server. This is held up as a cover-up, a sign of guilt. But recall how in 2017, intelligence community insiders leaked transcripts of Trump’s rocky calls with Australian and Mexican leaders — not to be whistleblowers but simply to embarrass Trump.
And now, it looks like someone at the National Security Council leaked excerpts of John Bolton’s book just to make Trump look bad.
It sure seems as though it wasn’t merely paranoia for Trump to believe that folks in the intelligence community are out to get him.
Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine look either reckless, corrupt, or both. But they’re also plausible reactions to rule-breaking by the FBI and the National Security Council.
The old rules have gone out the window in the Trump era. Now everyone, including intelligence officials and the president, is playing by new rules. And that’s not good for the country.
