The FBI’s arrest of Roger Stone flows from the same source as the indictments of Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort and the federal investigation into payoffs of a porn star and a nude model. All of them are due to President Trump’s penchant for surrounding himself with sleazy people.
It’s possible that Trump is innocent of any and all crimes committed by Cohen and Manafort and the alleged crimes of Stone. We think the campaign finance rap on Trump’s hush money payments to his former mistresses is ridiculous. Still, the president is in legal and political peril because he lived in an ecosystem inhabited by lawbreakers and other ethically challenged people.
Why was Trump surrounded by rogues? It wasn’t an accident. It was a reflection of Trump’s own values. He frequently praises bad men for their “strength” and ingenuity; tyrants Kim Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, and Vladimir Putin come to mind. In his business world, he’s sought out “killers” who do not let scruples get in the way of goals.
Trump spent decades not filtering for character, emphasizing only his acolytes’ ability to give him what he wanted, and quickly. Thankfully, the president now has many more people around him, including lawyers and an acting chief of staff who value ethics while also being effective. We hope he learns from his experience of the past couple of years how much character counts.
But there are reasons to doubt that he either has or will. Trump repeatedly and publicly races to defend Paul Manafort, although Manafort is more likely to have manipulated than to have genuinely befriended the president. There’s worry that Trump will pardon Manafort. Trump reacted to the news of Stone’s arrest by crying “witch hunt” on Twitter.
The president objected to the raid on Stone’s home, and he has a good point there. It looked more like the seizure of an armed killer than of an elderly former lobbyist who was hardly likely to flee. (The idea of Stone heading for the hills in his double-breasted suit and pocket square is charming but hardly plausible.)
The best explanation of this raid is that it was payback by angry law enforcement to a man who has spent years flaunting his disdain for the feds. Payback is not something those feds should engage in, but feds are human, too, and bitterness is probably inevitable.
Stone is the sort of man a presidential candidate ought to avoid. However weak the case, if any, against Trump, and however flimsy the charges turn out to be in the indictment against Stone, the president should still now realize that the self-confessed dirty trickster is not the sort of man with whom he should associate.
There is still not public evidence of Trumpian “collusion” with Russia. None of the indictments or pleas indict Trump. But part of the blame for Trump’s trouble lies with him and the company he keeps.
