Trump’s Scandals Are Never Done

It is no coincidence that Donald Trump is most disliked in his native New York City where residents are long familiar with Trump's skirting - if not open violation - of the law and mob boss style of doing business.  It's the same reason that old New York society has never embraced Trump who is viewed as a gauche neveau riche boor.   Once Trump moved into politics nothing changed and it has been one scandal after another.  Tellingly, despite being a moral cesspool, Trump remains the darling of evangelicals motivated by a mix of hatred of others and white supremacy.  With Trump, it never gets better and the scandals simply keep on coming, seemingly worsening each time they unfold.  Meanwhile, Trump's number one tactic - lying - remains a constant. Sadly, most Republicans remain so afraid of the ugly base of their party that they time and time again close their eyes to the truth and willingly act as Trump's whores simply to avoid a primary challenge.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the never ending cascade of Trump scandals:

Although there are many rivals for the title, this week’s FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, the apparent mishandling of classified information that led to it, and the political fallout since is close to the paradigmatic Donald Trump scandal.

The story is at once totally new and unexpected and yet entirely of a piece with everything we know and have seen from Trump. Both Trump and his most bitter opponents have noted that the search of a former president’s home is unprecedented—Trump to claim it was unjust, his critics to highlight his misdeeds—but it shares three important characteristics with previous Trump scandals. First, Trump is singularly terrible at keeping secrets. Second, Trump always says that what Democrats, especially Barack Obama, did was worse or caused it. Third, there are always more developments yet to come, and it always gets worse.

Documents about Tuesday’s search released on today don’t offer many details, but they indicate that agents seized “miscellaneous top secret documents.” The warrant also cites three federal laws: the Espionage Act, which involves information about national defense; a second that involves obstruction of investigations by destroying or hiding documents; and a third related to unlawful removal of records.

None of these documents describe the specific contents of what was seized, but The Washington Post reports that FBI agents were seeking “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” when they executed their warrant. The New York Times says simply that documents involved “related to some of the most highly classified programs run by the United States.” The Wall Street Journal adds that agents seized 11 sets of classified documents, “including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities.”

In statements responding to the stories, Trump didn’t bother to deny the claims about nuclear information. . . . . In a second statement this afternoon, he added, “Number one, it was all declassified. . . . . even the president can’t declassify nuclear secrets); and the Department of Justice seems to have sought the warrant only after Trump failed to turn over all documents that the government requested.

The idea that a former president would be investigated for absconding with sensitive nuclear secrets is almost unbelievable. Speaking on CNN on Tuesday, the longtime Republican operative Alice Stewart set a hyperbolically high bar for the search.

In fairness to Stewart, how could she have known? And yet, how could she have been so naive? He’s been here before. Trump is both an inveterate braggart and a terrible secret-keeper. In May 2017, the same week he fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to protect him personally, Trump disclosed classified information (reportedly obtained from Israel) to the Russian foreign secretary and ambassador during a White House meeting. In April 2019, he posted a photo of an explosion at an Iranian facility, over the objections of intelligence officials, who worried it would undermine future American spying. Later that year, he blabbed about nuclear systems to the reporter Bob Woodward.

[T]he U.S. intelligence community became consistently worried about sharing secret information with Trump, for fear he’d spread it, as Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times notes.

Trump has sought to blame Obama whenever he gets into a scrape. When he was criticized for sycophancy to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, he accurately pointed out that Russia seized Crimea during Obama’s presidency. When his former national-security adviser Michael Flynn was accused of lying to the FBI, Trump insisted without evidence that this was a conspiracy by the Obama administration. Now he’s turning to whataboutism to defend himself in the document fiasco.

His political allies are ready to buy this argument. The Mar-a-Lago search has, at least initially, rallied the Republican Party around him after months of attenuation. That could change based on new information, but in the past the pattern has been for Republicans to first recoil from Trump and then regroup around him. They haven’t even bothered with the first step here.

Yet the warrant serves as a reminder of a lesson of the Trump administration that could otherwise be forgotten with time: The story always gets worse. After Trump attempted to steal the 2020 election and then incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol to disrupt Congress, one might have imagined Trump had just about reached his nadir. Once you’ve disrupted the peaceful transfer of power, what other depths are there to plumb? And yet the investigations into the paperwork coup and January 6 insurrection have continued to turn up disturbing details, revealing Trump’s role in the whole nightmare to have been one not of passive acceptance but active instigator.

One can never take comfort in the idea that surely the worst has already come to pass with Trump. Who could have imagined things getting worse than the Access Hollywood video? Or than the week of the Comey firing? Or than the coddling of neo-Nazis marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia? Or than attempted blackmail of the Ukrainian government for electoral gain? Every time, Trump manages to find a new way to shock and appall, and every story gets worse.