We all should be disturbed by the lengths to which Donald Trump’s millions of enablers go to excuse his utterly inexcusable behavior.
Again and again, they rush to defend him for actions they surely would condemn vociferously, and perhaps already condemned vociferously, if a Clinton or a Biden or an Obama had done them. What’s more, they often maintain that, because one of those Democrats got away with doing something similar, that somehow justifies their defense of Trump.
Morally, ethically, logically, and legally, that argument is specious. The remedy for failure to enforce standards, rules, or laws is not to ignore them, but to start enforcing them again. If someone escapes punishment for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, that doesn’t mean someone else should escape punishment for shooting someone on that same street.
Referring to Hillary Clinton, thousands of Trump fans yelled “lock her up” when the former secretary of state was found to have improperly used private email systems and kept classified information on them. While it was premature to conclude she was guilty of a criminal offense, the Trump fans’ underlying sentiment was right: Clinton should not have been immune to prosecution.
Likewise, every American should be outraged that Trump indisputably kept government documents, some of them of a highly sensitive nature, that by law do not belong to him in any case and that, if never properly unclassified, would almost surely be a crime even for an ex-president. And legalities aside, the offense against normative ethics and against what Americans have a right to expect from ex-presidents is apparent.
Conduct this thought experiment: What if precisely equivalent documents in precisely equivalent numbers had been kept, despite repeated denials, by ex-President Barack Obama? Every single Trump fan in the country would be braying for Obama’s arrest, and millions of them would be suggesting Obama had behaved not just wrongly and recklessly but treasonously. Even without the utterly disproven “born in Kenya” nonsense, the right-wing commentariat would be full of reminders that Obama’s father moved back home to Africa and supported radicals there, that five years of Obama’s childhood was spent in Muslim Indonesia, and that he spent his high school years living with left-wing grandparents while being mentored by a noted communist poet.
With all that in mind, Trumpsters would scoff at the assertion many of them now make — namely that an outgoing president has near plenary power to do anything he wants with government documents and that he can declassify material by mere implication.
Meanwhile, what of Trumpworld’s argument that the Justice Department search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was somehow a major norm-breaker because no prior president in 233 years has received such a warrant? The argument is risible. If there has been no occasion to issue such a warrant in 233 years, that sets no precedent against doing so when the occasion does arise. Can anyone argue with a straight face that if then-President Gerald Ford had not pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon, and if the FBI suddenly found out that Nixon had a stash of previously unknown and potentially incriminating Watergate-related documents, that the bureau should have declined to serve a search warrant at La Casa Pacifica?
But let’s get away from the Mar-a-Lago search. What’s most worrisome is that so many putative conservatives have done this sort of ex post facto rationalizing for Trump’s behavior so many times. If Obama had essentially fomented a violent incursion into the Capitol, every conservative alive would have wanted him punished. If Al Gore in 2000 had done with electoral votes what Trump wanted Mike Pence to do — and with far, far more justification for doing so — the predecessors of MAGAworld would have demanded his arrest and trial.
When Obama was caught on a hot mic telling a Russian envoy that he would have “more flexibility” after the next election, conservatives went apoplectic. When Trump’s son and son-in-law and campaign chief accepted a meeting described in writing as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” most of those same conservatives essentially said, from the very start, that there was not even the remotest thing objectionable about it.
Trump continued egging on a crowd against his own vice president even after being told many in the crowd wanted to execute the vice president. Trump refused for months to implement an unambiguous law requiring the provision of weapons to Ukraine while demanding that Ukraine prosecute his rival’s son. Trump authorized hush money to a pornographic performer. Trump stands believably accused of, and in his own words bragged about committing a nasty form of, multiple sexual assaults. Trump paid $25 million to cover for knowingly bilking “students” of so-called Trump University, promising to select its instructors personally, but he actually selected nobody.
And so on, ad infinitum. It’s not just “mean tweets” but actual, execrable actions by Trump that too many conservatives excuse but for which they would harshly denounce a Democrat.
Enough is enough. No president who responds with equanimity, much less reported approval, to threats to his vice president’s life should ever, ever be anywhere near power again. And if he knowingly and deliberately held on to government documents after repeatedly denying he still had them, he should face the same threat of prosecution that any other former official would face. Ex-presidents have no special legal immunity for anything they do after leaving office. And supposedly law-and-order conservatives should never, ever defend the idea of an imperial ex-presidency.
