PUBLISHED TO
If Donald Trump seems relatively subdued in the immediate aftermath
of learning that both his ex-campaign manager and his longtime personal
"lawyer" are headed for prison, it may be because his usual conservative
television cronies aren't quite sure how to handle this one themselves.
Lawyer Michael Cohen's plea statement asserts that Individual 1,
now serving as U.S. president, directed him to pay hush money to an
ex-mistress in order to buy her silence during the presidential
campaign. This was a felony.
While Fox News lynchpin Sean Hannity has elected to go full fascist on us, blasting the rule of law and lying to his audience about the timing of the crimes and their relationship to Trump, other conservative figures appear to be pinning their hopes on an "everybody does it" line of defense.
Fox "legal analyst" Gregg Jarrett was enthusiastic about the premise, claiming that paperwork errors resulting in a fine from a past Obama campaign was after all pretty much exactly the same as Donald Trump personally directing a hush money payment to an adult film actress in exchange for keeping silent about his creepy serial adultery habit. Since Jarrett said this on Fox & Friends, it naturally resulted in a Trump tweet parroting the same line.
Fellow Fox personality Geraldo Rivera, who has been silly for a very long time, has chosen to bemoan special prosecutors and their "independent army" of lawyers for digging up all sorts of criminal activity unrelated to the "original purpose" of their investigation. By gum, Michael Cohen's crimes wouldn't have come to light at all if it weren't for those meddling investigators. How very unfair. Now that they've gone that far, "What would stop them from adding the tax returns of" Donald J. Trump?
Much of the rest of the B-tier defense, however, will be the usual. Pocket sand!
We're now at a place we never reached during Watergate. A sitting president is accused not only of covering up a crime, but of personally directing one. And this is, still, just the beginning. The Russia investigation continues; we already know that multiple members of the same Trump campaign sought out collusion with the Russian government in what is almost certainly, at the least, a campaign finance crime itself. We still know nothing about Trump's taxes, even as his own longtime "fixer" heads to prison for tax crimes himself.
If the Republican Party weren't made up of—and let's choose our terms carefully here, so as not to overstate things—corrupt child-molesting traitors to the nation, this one crime would be indefensible. You can do a lot of crooked things as an American politician, but at no point in modern history has it been acceptable to break campaign finance laws in order to hide a hush money payment to a porn star you had sexual relations with while your wife was home taking care of your newborn child.
We can be quite assured that if any non-Republican candidate anywhere in America did such a thing, the family values and swamp-draining party would burst every blood vessel in their foreheads as they sought to bring the perpetrator to justice.
But not if it's a Republican, because they are crooked. The party is deeply, probably irreversibly crooked, to the point where even their highest-profile lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham or Rep. Paul Ryan will insist that lawbreaking by a president is of no great concern. That is the level of corruption the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and conservative media outlets have all willingly descended to.
There may be no way to repair the damage other than to scrape each of those lawmakers out of office, one by one. Even that, however, cannot fix a movement now swimming in the authoritarian notion that even crimes themselves are negotiable things—if they are in service to The Movement.
While Fox News lynchpin Sean Hannity has elected to go full fascist on us, blasting the rule of law and lying to his audience about the timing of the crimes and their relationship to Trump, other conservative figures appear to be pinning their hopes on an "everybody does it" line of defense.
Fox "legal analyst" Gregg Jarrett was enthusiastic about the premise, claiming that paperwork errors resulting in a fine from a past Obama campaign was after all pretty much exactly the same as Donald Trump personally directing a hush money payment to an adult film actress in exchange for keeping silent about his creepy serial adultery habit. Since Jarrett said this on Fox & Friends, it naturally resulted in a Trump tweet parroting the same line.
Fellow Fox personality Geraldo Rivera, who has been silly for a very long time, has chosen to bemoan special prosecutors and their "independent army" of lawyers for digging up all sorts of criminal activity unrelated to the "original purpose" of their investigation. By gum, Michael Cohen's crimes wouldn't have come to light at all if it weren't for those meddling investigators. How very unfair. Now that they've gone that far, "What would stop them from adding the tax returns of" Donald J. Trump?
Much of the rest of the B-tier defense, however, will be the usual. Pocket sand!
Alongside a Daily Caller story about Cohen were laudatory posts about Trump, from the president’s defense of free speech to his status as “the most feminist president.” TheBlaze gave prominence to Trump’s attacks on ESPN for not “defending our anthem,” foregrounding the president’s grievances with NFL players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police violence.Look, the president's lawyer may have sworn in a court statement that the president directed him to break laws, but how can we possibly pay attention to that when professional athletes are kneeling?
We're now at a place we never reached during Watergate. A sitting president is accused not only of covering up a crime, but of personally directing one. And this is, still, just the beginning. The Russia investigation continues; we already know that multiple members of the same Trump campaign sought out collusion with the Russian government in what is almost certainly, at the least, a campaign finance crime itself. We still know nothing about Trump's taxes, even as his own longtime "fixer" heads to prison for tax crimes himself.
If the Republican Party weren't made up of—and let's choose our terms carefully here, so as not to overstate things—corrupt child-molesting traitors to the nation, this one crime would be indefensible. You can do a lot of crooked things as an American politician, but at no point in modern history has it been acceptable to break campaign finance laws in order to hide a hush money payment to a porn star you had sexual relations with while your wife was home taking care of your newborn child.
We can be quite assured that if any non-Republican candidate anywhere in America did such a thing, the family values and swamp-draining party would burst every blood vessel in their foreheads as they sought to bring the perpetrator to justice.
But not if it's a Republican, because they are crooked. The party is deeply, probably irreversibly crooked, to the point where even their highest-profile lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham or Rep. Paul Ryan will insist that lawbreaking by a president is of no great concern. That is the level of corruption the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and conservative media outlets have all willingly descended to.
There may be no way to repair the damage other than to scrape each of those lawmakers out of office, one by one. Even that, however, cannot fix a movement now swimming in the authoritarian notion that even crimes themselves are negotiable things—if they are in service to The Movement.
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