Dark views color Trump’s conduct
Trump gave himself and his aides a pass on ethics based on belief that ‘everybody does it’ in Washington.
His actions and his defense of them ref lect his vision of politics as incurably corrupt and transactional.
WASHINGTON — After the guilty verdicts came down against Paul Manafort on Tuesday, President Trump was quick to note that his former campaign chairman had worked for Ronald Reagan and many other Republicans, implying that anyone in politics would have hired him, despite Manafort’s later reputation for operating in lobbying’s darker corners.
What about the illegal payments that Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen admitted to in another court that day, intended to hush two women alleging affairs with Trump? No more a crime than a minor campaign finance violation by the 2008 Obama campaign, Trump tweeted.
Earlier this month Trump again dismissed suspicions about his son’s 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected operative offering dirt on Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. “Totally legal and done all the time in politics,” he falsely tweeted.
Trump has long promulgated a dark image of politics as usual in America. While campaigning, he bragged of buying politicians and said only he could end the corrupt scheming because he had “seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens.”
Yet his oft-stated view that politicians are generally corrupt and transactional may have colored the conduct of Trump and those around him, resulting in actions that could imperil his presidency.
“He thought they were stupid,” said former business associate Barbara Res, speaking of his view of the politicians he lobbied on real estate matters. “He thought they were all for sale.”
Michael Gerson, a former speech writer for George W. Bush and a frequent Trump critic, called Trump’s White House the “‘everybody does it’ presidency” in a recent Washington Post column.
“Doesn’t every campaign try to conspire with a hostile foreign government to influence an American presidential election? Doesn’t every politician try to discredit and derail a federal investigation against them? Doesn’t every prominent man pay off Playboy bunnies and porn stars after he has used and discarded them?” Gerson wrote. He answered: “No. They. Don’t.”
On Wednesday, after Manafort’s conviction and Cohen’s guilty plea, many in Trump’s orbit were calling this the most difficult moment of his presidency. Some were consoling themselves that the bar for removing a president is high, and the partisan politics in a Congress now controlled by the GOP make it unlikely.
“Most of them, I’m sure, were all hoping that someday soon the Russia investigation would go away,” said Barry Bennett, a former campaign advisor to Trump. “Now it seems the Russia part has gone away but the investigation goes on.”
On Twitter early Wednesday, Trump expressed sympathy for Manafort, and praise that he’d “refused to ‘break’” and cooperate with the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into possible campaign collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. He tweeted more scornfully of Cohen, who implicated him in the crime Cohen admitted to and offered to cooperate more with Mueller’s inquiry.
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dodged questions Wednesday about Trump’s culpability and allegedly false statements about the payments to a porn star and a Playboy model. “He did nothing wrong. There are no charges against him,” she said several times. “Just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal, that doesn’t mean it implicates the president in anything.”
Former White House staffers, demanding anonymity to avoid burning bridges to the administration, expressed relief that they no longer worked for Trump. “You just never knew what he was going to do, but usually it would make things worse,” said one former aide.
Several current and past advisors say Trump — schooled in a hardball politics by former mentor Roy Cohn of McCarthy-era notoriety — is now motivated by “grievances about perceived double standards,” as one put it.
“There’s a lot of whatabout-ism ... like ‘Obama did X, Y and Z and now I’m getting yelled at,’” said a former White House official. That attitude “can sometimes be because he doesn’t appreciate the very important legal nuances,” the former official added.
Fox News and other conservative media have helped amplify Trump’s frustrations, repeating his claims that the investigations are a “witch hunt,” that “others have done worse” and that Clinton is the one who should be investigated.
During the campaign, Trump said politicians were controlled by donors, Wall Street and lobbyists for foreign governments. He suggested the rich and powerful — like himself — could do whatever they wanted when it came to politics.
“I was a businessman. I give to everybody,” he said at one GOP primary debate. “When they call, I give .... When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.”
Another former White House official said Trump holds the view that “he’s never gotten in trouble for this kind of stuff his whole career and now they’re coming after him because he’s president,” and that “he’s done stuff a lot of people do and that he’s being singled out.”
Trump’s view on Manafort, who faces a second trial next month on charges related to his lobbying for a Ukrainian strongman, is that “this stuff isn’t legal per se, but everyone does it — it’s how the world works,” the former official said.
Manafort was convicted on eight charges of tax and bank fraud and failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The jury failed to reach a verdict on 10 counts.
Trump’s sense that he is being singled out ignores a long record of others’ travails. Clinton faced damaging investigations throughout her career. Her husband, as president, was impeached by the House after a lengthy investigation. And politicians of both parties have faced career-ending criminal charges. Among them was former presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards, a Democrat who was indicted for using campaign dollars to cover up an affair, a case that ended in a mistrial.
Though Trump has repeatedly hammered the Clintons, he has showed a measure of compassion for Edwards. “I have never been a fan of John Edwards but it is time for the gov’t to focus on more important things,” Trump tweeted in 2012.
Trump went further in forgiving another Democrat’s illegal conduct. In May, he floated the possibility of curtailing the 14-year prison sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who’d been a contestant on Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” reality show. Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 of corruption for seeking to sell the Senate seat Obama vacated.
Blagojevich was being punished, Trump said, “for being stupid and saying things that every other politician — you know that many other politicians say.”