The False Equivalences That Prop Up the Felon

For years now this blog has complained about the false equivalencies far too much of the mainstream media employed when comparing the Felon to other politicians  or contrasting Republican reverse Robin Hood policies with Democrat initiatives. Similarly, news outlets give the Felon a platform from which to lie incessantly without ever pointing out to viewers the falsity of the lies spewing from the Felon's mouth.  Then, of course, there is Fox News - a platform that paid billions to settle defamation cases for untruths it pushed and admitted it was "entertainment" as opposed to news in open court - and its imitators who falsely promote story lines that are utterly false and/or not supported by objective fact.  The end result is that the Felon too often is depicted as "another politician" when in reality no president, even Richard Nixon, ever engaged in such unlawful and abnormal conduct.  The sooner the Felon is routinely exposed for what he is, the sooner America may recover from the damage the Felon is wreaking. A column in the New York Times looks at some of these false equivalencies as opposed to objective reality and normal political norms.  Here are excerpts:

While [the Felon] President Trump certainly has supporters who adore him and feel no need to justify that, he survives — and too often prospers — with the crucial help of voters who basically regard him as the lesser of evils.

They tell themselves something like this: Trump has shortcomings, but those are merely mirrors of the corruption and craziness on the other side. Almost any accusation leveled at him is lodged as easily — and often more righteously — against his opponents. In a government of bad apples, he’s no mealier than the rest.

But those claims insist on a symmetry that doesn’t exist. They’re equivalences not merely false but fantastical. They ignore the severity, the prevalence, the consequences of the misconduct in question. Imagine defending a suitor who’s a serial arsonist because the other guy has a jaywalking citation; both bachelors are lawbreakers, after all. That’s the perverse moral arithmetic of more than a few Trump apologists.

I find two of their rationalizations especially preposterous, starting with this: Trump is merely using his Justice Department as President Joe Biden used his and persecuting opponents in the fashion that Biden did.

That isn’t some random, cherry-picked absurdity. That’s practically every hour of Fox News. Trump’s supposed mimicry of Biden when it comes to politically motivated investigations and prosecutions is more than an article of faith on the right. It’s the dogma that washes Trump’s authoritarianism clean.

And it’s bunk. I don’t recall evidence that Biden ordered the prosecutors who filed charges against Trump to do so. In contrast, Trump’s commandments that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her unctuous underlings go after James Comey, Letitia James and others are a matter of Truth Social record.

Show me where, during Biden’s presidency, you find anything analogous to Trump’s purge of Justice Department lawyers who have failed or might fail to quench his thirst for vengeance. Anything like the series of events by which Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was pushed out of his job in September after he hadn’t produced the indictments against Comey and James that Trump so fervently desired.

Trump installed, in Siebert’s place, one of his personal lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, who had zero experience as a prosecutor. She raced to indict Comey before the statute of limitations ran out. That heedless sprint entailed an embarrassment of errors and a mockery of jurisprudence . . . . Try to locate Halligan’s doppelgänger in the Biden administration. Best of luck.

Trump’s launderers insist that partisanship, not wrongdoing, motivated the legal cases against him. To accept that magical thinking, you must erase the photographs of classified documents keeping company with a commode at Mar-a-Lago. You must delete the recording of Trump telling Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to figure out some way to reverse Biden’s victory there in 2020. And you must persuade yourself that Trump’s emphatic proclamations that the 2020 election was being stolen, his haranguing of former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results and his support of Big Lie conspiracy theorists were just politics as usual. That’s a sequence of moral calisthenics so arduous they burn more calories than an hour at CrossFit.

They’re good training for the other juicy rationalization that most infuriates me: Trump’s grifting merely echoes the graft of his predecessor, who was not only a senator, vice president and then president but also the don of the “Biden crime family,” in the cracked MAGA parlance.

It’s true that several of Biden’s relatives prospered in ways that surely traded on his name; . . . . But it’s a lie to say that Trump is simply doing likewise — that the main difference between him and other wealth-greasing, self-dealing politicians is the zeal with which Trump haters scrutinize and vilify him.

No, the main difference is how relentless, boundless and unabashed Trump’s monetization and merchandising of his political station are. In an article in The New Yorker in August, David D. Kirkpatrick estimated that Trump’s businesses, business associates and projects tied to him or his family members had pulled in some $3.4 billion during his time in the White House. But even that dollar figure doesn’t do justice to the crass details and to the ancillary ugliness.

Trump and his kin are all over the Middle East all the time, immersed in high-ticket real-estate projects and not so much ignorant of the conflicts of interest as intent on them. Only chumps let such niceties impede them. Champs realize when they’ve been given the key to a gilded till and hasten to rob it.

Some Trump supporters undoubtedly grasp his greed but deem it a small price to pay for a less porous border, for less punishing regulations, for a stand against progressive excess. Others just aren’t paying attention. We political analysts never adjust sufficiently for the percentage of voters who are so busy, so distracted or so uninterested that they have little idea what politicians are really up to — the good, the bad, the blundering, the plundering.

But then there are the voters who respond to Trump’s antics and outrages — whether those involve executive overreach, defiance of Congress, brazen pardons, suppression of dissent — as familiar transgressions in festive new attire. Hardly. They’re more and worse than that. But cynicism and tribal loyalty have a way of replacing discernment with delusion.