It was the best of weeks and the worst of weeks for Trump
WASHINGTON » The week before Christmas may go down as the strangest and most revealing of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Over just a few days, his sheer thuggishness, venality and corruption were laid bare. But it was also a time for Trumpian good deeds that revealed how he might have governed if he had a genuine interest in the good government can do.
On Sunday, he displayed gangsterism and utter indifference to the law in a tweet calling his former lawyer Michael Cohen a “Rat” for telling the truth about various matters, including his dealings with Russia to build a Trump tower in Moscow and the president’s payoffs before the 2016 election to hide his alleged sexual conduct. “Rat,” as many have noted, is a legendary organizedcrime epithet and we really are gazing at something like the Trump Family Syndicate.
On Tuesday, the New York state attorney general, Barbara Underwood, forced the closure of the Donald J. Trump Foundation for what she described as “a shocking pattern of illegality.” She said the foundation functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”
And, yes, this was an all-in-the-family thing. The foundation’s board consisted of Trump himself, his three adult children and the CFO of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg. Incidentally, it was the painstaking work of The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold that first blew the lid off Trump’s scamming disguised as charity.
But that wasn’t all. Two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee made it abundantly clear Trump was Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate in 2016 — and remained Putin’s guy after he won.
In extraordinary detail, the reports showed the lengths to which Russian social media went to demobilize Democratic constituencies, particularly African-Americans and young supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Oh, yes, and there are the lawsuits about whether revenues to Trump’s hotels from foreign governments constitute a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
Less than two years into Trump’s presidency, nearly everything with his name on it is under scrutiny.
But at least where policy is concerned, he had another path before him, and it’s the one he took this week.
Good for Trump for endorsing a criminaljustice reform bill that passed the Senate on a bipartisan 87-12 vote on Tuesday. It’s highly unlikely this would have happened without him.
This is a key civil rights issue of our time. ( Voting rights is another, and on this problem Trump is pushing entirely in the wrong direction.) The long sentences the new law would roll back hit African-Americans the hardest.
Kudos as well to those conservatives and libertarians in groups such as Right on Crime who recognized that filling the prisons is not only problematic from the point of view of justice but costly as well.
Also on Tuesday, the administration announced it will ban bump stocks, attachments that effectively allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns. There’s much more to do about gun violence, but this was an important and constructive step.
What if Trump had governed in other areas with the same eye toward bipartisan agreement that led him to criminal-justice reform?
Imagine a big infrastructure bill or a far less regressive approach to tax reform. Democrats would have been hard-pressed not to work with him. Instead, Trump just kept dividing us and stoking his base. He lazily went along with traditional conservatives on taxes and corporate lobbyists in the regulatory sphere because governing was never really the point. And now, he is reaping the whirlwind. E. J. Dionne is a Washington Post columnist.