It bears repeating: The world did not begin in January 2017.
Some people need to hear it said more often.
Earlier this week, as she commented on the current fiasco in Virginia, GQ magazine’s Julia Ioffe argued that Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s refusal to tender his resignation amid his grave racist scandal is proof that Trump has irreparably damaged our politics.
“The fact that Northam, a Democrat, has not yet resigned is a lesson learned from Trump: If you don’t resign and stare down the public outrage, chances are the news cycle will move on and you just might survive,” she tweeted.
The historical illiteracy here is breathtaking, but I guess there has been a lot of that going around in political journalism lately. Has Ioffe been in a coma for the last six or seven decades?
If you want to talk about politicians staring down scandals until they simply blow over, former President Bill Clinton was a master at this. That man weathered not one, not two, but at least three major sex scandals as president. Also, there was that whole Whitewater thing. He was credibly accused of rape and he did not resign. He served two full terms in the White House and, at least until recently, remained a hero
The late Marion Barry, longtime mayor of Washington, D.C., was caught on camera in 1990 smoking crack cocaine with a former girlfriend. He was arrested on the spot and gave the rest of the world the unforgettable line, “Bitch set me up.” After a brief stint in prison, Barry would go on to serve on the D.C. Council and then win a fourth term as mayor. After his fourth go-around as mayor, Barry returned to the D.C. Council, where he remained until his death in 2014.
But that’s all from the recent past. If you want the real MVP of staring down scandals, look to the Kennedy family, and especially to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
Kennedy crashed his car in a tide pond and then swam away and left a woman to die in it. He looked straight at the cameras later and said, with a straight face, that he had not been “driving under the influence of liquor.” The woman’s death did nothing to stop him from serving in the U.S. Senate for the next 40 years, until his death in 2009. In fact, Kennedy even had the temerity to run for president in 1980.
Kennedy was shameless enough that he lived to be buried with full honors. To this day he is still lionized, described even as the “Lion of the Senate,” despite that whole dead woman and “waitress sandwich” thing.
These are just the first examples that come to mind. There are many, many more if you want them.
Ioffe is not wrong when she says that Trump’s defense mechanism is often to stare down scandals until they go away. Trump is shameless about these things. But to suggest that this strategy is somehow new or unique to Trump is to miss everything that ever came before his inauguration.
