Our endless stream of scandal
Over the weekend, on “Saturday Night Live,” Michael Che finally immortalized on screen what so many have been thinking for months. Playing NBC anchor Lester Holt, he asked Alec Baldwin’s President Trump a series of questions about the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
After appearing to get Trump to admit to obstructing justice, Che asks his producers, incredulously, “Did I get him? Is it all over?”
Alas, it wasn’t, and it isn’t because, as Che discovers in the sketch, “Oh, no I didn’t? Nothing matters. Absolutely nothing matters anymore.”
That’s sure how it feels. And the latest scandal — a report that Trump gave classified information to Russia — only cements this new reality, where scandals don’t stick, answers don’t ever come, adults are hard to find and obfuscation abounds.
The same cycle now plays on a constant loop. What would for any other President at any other time be a career-jeopardizing revelation breaks to a collective jaw drop. The White House scrambles to explain it with a series of incomprehensible and incomplete denials, distractions and outright perversions of facts, some of which totally contradict each other.
Trump later tweets something that can only be described as insane, and then the White House tries to reverseengineer the facts so that his newly concocted justification makes any sense.
Republicans in Congress do their best to play a careful game called “How do I distance myself from this utter lunacy without losing my reelection next year?” which results in mealy-mouthed nondisavowals that make “unnamed sources” look courageous.
By the time the cycle completes, we are all exhausted, confused and annoyed, which is inevitably when the next controversy erupts.
The freneticism of this is truly jarring. And few conservatives have been more critical of Trump and the Republicans who defend him than I have. We need strong checks and balances now more than ever, and yet they seem frighteningly absent.
But I’m also starting to feel a wave of amnesia washing over the nation as we careen from one controversy to the next. Democrats will shudder at the comparison, but the truth is, for eight years many Americans felt the same way under President Barack Obama.
There was Fast and Furious, the gunrunning operation that left two American border agents and countless Mexican citizens dead, and resulted in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress.
There was ineptitude and worse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, in which hundreds of vets died waiting for care while bureaucrats created phony status reports and cooked their books.
There were two spying scandals, one in which the Justice Department monitored the phone records of journalists, and another in which the National Security Agency was caught collecting bulk data from citizens.
There was solar energy fiasco Solyndra, IRS targeting, drone strikes that killed civilians, the Secret Service gone wild, Hillary Clinton’s email server issues — and we didn’t even get to Benghazi. Democrats may insist, the same way Trump defenders do now, that these were fake scandals. And surely some were overhyped by Republicans. But there’s no truthful way to say Obama’s tenure wasn’t scandal-ridden. It was, and to many Americans, it indeed felt like nothing mattered anymore.
The most obvious difference between then and now is that we are less than a year into Trump’s first term. At this rate, he’ll outpace Obama by Christmas.
But the bigger difference is that Obama’s scandals, I’d argue, were failures of big government and bad policies. Trump’s are his own failure of leadership. Obama had big ideas — some good, plenty of them bad, and many of them implemented poorly.
Trump seems to have no ideas,and so the scandals — exacerbating them, scapegoating them, creating new villains and conspiracies around them — have become the agenda.
Does any of it matter? You could certainly make the case that Obama and Democrats paid a hefty price for their failures: the loss of Congress and the election of Donald Trump. Time will tell how long the same people who voted Democrats out and this particular Republican in can stomach Trump’s rudderless leadership and dangerous ineptitude.