Trump and Republicans are on the hunt for Real Crimes

For a party that prides itself on being the champion of law and order, the GOP has some peculiar ideas about crime.

Nothing President Donald Trump does, it turns out, is a crime. That’s not only because some crimes are not crimes, according to both Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. It is also not only because a sitting president is supposedly immune from criminal prosecution.

According to Republicans’ airtight legal reasoning, nothing Trump does can be considered criminal because somebody else somewhere might be doing something worse.

For instance: The Real Crime isn’t that Trump secretly withheld military aid to extort a desperate ally into announcing a sham investigation into a political rival. Heavens no. The Real Crime is that the public knows that this happened.

At least so says Sen. Ron Johnson, RWis., who railed against the whistleblower’s decision to “leak” information about Trump’s Ukrainian shakedown by reporting it to the intelligence community’s inspector general. That leak, Johnson complained, “exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed.”

“This would have been far better off if we would’ve just taken care of this behind the scenes,” the senator said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” extrapolating on his dubious understanding of both the law and the Constitution. “We have two branches of government. Most people, most people wanted to support Ukraine. We were trying to convince President Trump.”

In other words: The crime here isn’t the arson; it’s that snitching smoke alarm.

Elsewhere, other Republicans have discovered even more damning Real Crimes. They are in particularly high dudgeon that Democrats have begun characterizing the president’s actions as “bribery.” Not because the term is inaccurate, per se; rather, they’re furious because Democrats used focus groups to determine that this verbiage was more understandable to the typical voter than the Latin “quid pro quo.”

“They’re making it up and polling to figure out what is best to sell to the American people,” fumed Rep. Douglas A. Collins, R-Ga., on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Indeed, the real scandal isn’t the scandal; it’s the words used to explain the scandal.

Yet another Trump surrogate argued Sunday that the Real Crime was something else entirely: that Democrats continue noticing when Trump does something wrong.

These include Trump’s bullying tweet about his former Ukraine ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, which Trump fired off as she was testifying before Congress. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., read the tweet aloud during the hearing, and later said it should be viewed as part of a “pattern” of witness intimidation and obstruction of justice.

Republicans condemned this scurrilous pattern-spotting.

“It’s kind of laughable that, in the middle of the hearing, he reads a witness a tweet that she’s up until that point unaware of, and then says, shazam, eureka, I have another reason to impeach the president,” said Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Again, the Real Crime isn’t the growing number of new possibly impeachable offenses; it’s that Democrats are cataloging them.

Then finally there’s the Realest Crime of all: that Democrats might deign to hold Trump accountable through impeachment when an election is just a year away. If Democrats truly believe Trump did something wrong, Republicans argue, the right way to test that thesis is at the ballot box.

Crime doesn’t pay, so they say. But whataboutism? As Trump keeps proving, that can be quite profitable.