Normalizing Corruption And Its Limits

06-11-2023

Roger Berkowitz
Why is the first-ever indictment of a former President being met with such equanimity from so many in the Republicans Party? Of course some like former governor Chris Christie have rightly condemned the President’s spoiled-child-I’m-above-the-law act and defended the prosecution. But the nihilistic wing of the Republican Party openly suggests that violence may be the appropriate response to Justice Department overreach. And even the usually more critical Wall St. Journal—which acknowledges that “Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump”— headlines its lead editorial “A Destructive Trump Indictment”.

The  article opines that the indictment is and will be seen as a politicalization of the Justice Department. They point to the non-prosecution of Hillary Clinton for having classified documents on her private email server in 2016 as well as to the fact that President Biden also was found to have classified documents at his home. Of course, the Journal acknowledges the obvious differences amongst these cases. President Trump showed documents to others that described a ‘plan of attack’ from the Defense Department; he is caught on tape acknowledging that it is top secret and that he can’t declassify it. It is also the case that President Trump, unlike either Secretary of State Clinton and President Biden, sought to “cover up his classified stash by ‘suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents,’ as well as by telling an aide to move boxes to conceal them from his lawyer and the FBI.”  The journal concludes: “As usual, Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. “This would have gone nowhere,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS recently, “had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.” What they don’t seem to internalize is that President Trump is accused of intentionally refusing to do just that, to return the documents, and also of having intentionally jerked the government around for over a year in an attempt to illegally hold on to and make private use of classified documents to satisfy his prodigious ego.

If the facts alleged are true, President Trump committed a serious crime and did so with the arrogant belief that he could get away with it. His attitude is reminiscent of his early boast in 2016 that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York and his supporters would still rally around him. Why is this? Why is the claim and now the reality of criminality by the former President not only accepted but embraced?"

One answer can be found in Hannah Arendt’s insight about the American people’s acceptance of government by liars. Writing in the wake of the blatant lying by the government during the Vietnam War and the burglaries and cover-ups of Watergate, Arendt came to believe that public opinion appeared ready to condone “all political transgressions short of murder.” In other words, if "lying as a way of life" might not support the kinds of criminality that occurs in fully totalitarian states, it might serve to obfuscate and justify a lower level of criminality in a declining American Republic.

In the 1970s, American politicians consistently got away with lying and even blatant criminality. Arendt's primary example is Richard Nixon and Watergate. While Nixon’s crimes “were a far cry from the sort of criminality with which we once were inclined to compare it,” the facts are clear that Nixon’s administration included many persons who—if not criminals—were so attracted to the “aura of power, its glamorous trappings,” that they came to see themselves as above the law. Nixon, and those around him, assumed that they could and would get away with their crimes because they believed that “all people are actually like them.”  They thought that all people are, in the end, corruptible. Thus, they believed that judges, the press, and politicians could be bought or cowed. They sought to deny the reality of their crimes by spreading the image of human corruptibility—all men would have done the same.

Against the logical ideological coherence backed by terror that supports the big lie in totalitarian states, Arendt sees that the lying in the American Republic of the 1970s was based upon the hidden persuasive power of an image: Namely, the image that those who became "accomplices in criminal activities" in the pursuit of power were normal, just like everyone else, and "would be above the law."  What Nixon sought was a culture of lying as a way of life that could persist because nobody would care. He and his cronies imagined that lying as an everyday activity in the pursuit of power would be as acceptable to their fellow citizens as it was to them. And to Nixon’s shock, the public was not amenable to such pressure and manipulation by the Executive. The press and the American republican institutions did fight back.  “Nixon’s greatest mistake--aside from not burning the tapes in time--was to have misjudged the incorruptibility of the courts and the press.” 

Donald Trump has blown past Nixon in his conviction that the American people are corruptible. He has shown how corruptible formerly respectable politicians are from Kevin McCarthy to Mitch McConnell, although there are exceptions like Liz Cheney. But as did Nixon, Trump has thus far underestimated the incorruptibility of institutions such as the courts and at least parts of the press. Courts are unforgiving. They follow precise rules of procedure that subject the attempt to bluster and intimidate to facts and consideration. There are rules of evidence and rules about hearsay.  It is easy at this point for the former President to bloviate about a witch hunt; but as happened at the trial in New York that found him liable for harassing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, Trump’s power of bullying people into normalizing corruption has its limits. 
 
The kind of lying Arendt saw emerging in the United States—lying as a way of life— was not a traditional political lie that was intended to keep secrets of state. It did not concern "data that had
never been made public." Rather, the modern lie that emerged in the 20th century "deals efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody." Everyone might have known that Nixon was a criminal; the question is, would they care. Once the Trump trials conclude—and there may also be a second Federal trial concerning Trump’s incitement of the January 6th riots and a trial in Georgia for his efforts to intimidate election officials to manufacture votes—people will have the facts. Once again, the question is: Will they care?

Everyone today knows not only that President Trump lies, but also that he is a con man at best and a criminal at worst: The President stole classified documents, showed them to others, and sought to cover it up; he pressured election officials to change the results of a democratic election; he incited a riot to prevent the legitimate transfer of power; he avoids taxes; he pays hush money to prostitutes and covers it up; he harasses women; he bullies and intimidates contractors and employees to accept less money than they are owed; someone else took his SAT; he encourages foreign leaders and American corporations to do business at his hotels, thus profiting off the presidency; and he abuses his power to seek political advantage. The President is a con man and we are all in on the con. His lies simply give plausible deniability to his truth, that he is a con man who is powerful enough to get away with taking control of the most powerful country on earth. His lies are not designed to be believable. They are designed to foment chaos and instability, all in the name of an image of power. The question is: are enough Americans so enthralled by the image of power above the law that they will put a criminal back in the White House.