A Tempered Celebration
People who have polluted the waters of American politics have had a bad few weeks. Another gang of seditionists was found guilty
of plotting against the United States. Donald Trump was found liable
for the sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll. And one of the
weirdest phonies ever to bumble his way into a congressional seat,
George Santos, has been booked by the Justice Department for a long list
of alleged offenses. (He has pleaded not guilty to all of them.)
Unfortunately,
I’m here to rain on your parade, because the struggle to restore basic
decency in politics is still mostly a rearguard action.
But
first, let’s drink in the good news that there is still some
accountability for wrongdoing. The Justice Department secured yet more
convictions for seditious conspiracy, this time against three leaders of
the Proud Boys and their former chairman, Enrique Tarrio, who now joins
the previously convicted Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, as
another walking example of the banality of evil. The government asked that Rhodes get 25 years in federal prison. For a man already in his late 50s, that sentence (if levied) basically amounts to “from now on.” (Attorneys for Rhodes, Tarrio, and the three Proud Boys leaders have indicated that they plan to appeal the verdicts.)
Back in January, George Santos’s arrival in the People’s House dented my already shaky faith in the People. Santos, however, has finally been ensnared by his own prevarications. As my colleague David Graham wrote today,
Santos might have been better off losing and remaining just another
unknown flake who took a run at elected office, but like so many people
in the age of Trump, his thirstiness brought him both fame and legal
attention. Santos remains a free man, but only because three unnamed
people have put up half a million dollars of bail money while he awaits
trial for 13 federal charges.
And
justice, of a sort, snared Trump himself when he was found liable for
sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. Trump’s defenders,
including his lawyer (who says that Trump plans to appeal the verdict),
are emphasizing that the jury declined to affirm the claim of rape, but
they are carefully not mentioning that this decision may have been
colored by some confusion about how to apply the term rape. Trump’s own deposition probably helped sink him,
and it provided a reminder that our 45th president is a surly, smug
child who never admits to a moment of regret or responsibility.
One
might hope that Trump’s loss in New York would lead him to slink away
in shame, but we now live in post-shame America. Instead, Trump will sit
for a town hall on CNN tonight, where he will field questions as if he
is a normal person running for office instead of a sexual abuser who
incited sedition and violence against the government he is once again
seeking to control.
Trump,
of course, has the self-awareness of a traffic cone, and he is
seemingly incapable of remorse. But CNN’s decision to move ahead with
the event, as if nothing has happened, is disappointing. A more
defensible position would have been to scrap the town-hall format and
tell Trump that he is still invited to sit, one-on-one, with a CNN
reporter. To present him to voters as just another candidate, however,
is the very definition of normalizing his behavior.
I
understand why CNN, as a journalistic outlet, would give a town hall to
every candidate. Trump is the leading contender for the GOP
presidential nomination, and he is by definition newsworthy. (I will be
watching, and I will likely write about it, so I am in something of a
glass house here myself.) But Trump has just been found liable for a
hideous act. This feels, to me, nearly as distasteful as if a network
were interviewing O. J. Simpson on his views about the future of
professional sports right after his loss in civil court to the families
of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.
Trump
and Santos are clowns, and sadly, we’ve gotten used to them. But their
antics have also taken our attention away from the indecent behavior of
other public figures. One might think, for example, that House Speaker
Kevin McCarthy would be breathing a sigh of relief that Santos is
reaching the end of his cringe-inducing political fan dance. One would
be wrong. McCarthy, instead, is mumbling his way through fuzzy and
shapeless expressions of concern. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/05/trump-santos-justice/674023/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230510&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily Psychologists who studied shame around the world say it’s an essential part of being human:https://qz.com/1420754/these-psychologists-studied-shame-around-the-world-and-now-think-its-an-essential-part-of-human-evolution | 
