Is decency returning to our politics?
Trump's conviction may herald a swing back to morality
In mid-1954 the chief counsel of the U.S. Army, Joseph N. Welch, asked two questions that triggered the end of the paranoid, conspiracist-dominated era of McCarthyism. With those queries, both Washington and America generally began a slow road back to respect for law, due process and simple reasonableness. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch asked Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Now, with the conviction of Donald J. Trump as a felon in his tawdry case involving a porn star, a Playboy model, dishonest lawyers and accountants and infidelity, one might ask: “Is America again beginning a return to decency?” Is it possible that, in time perhaps, we will get back to a point where longstanding American virtues can prevail in our civic lives, where our leaders can be moral and fundamentally decent? Does the return begin with the careful judgments applied first by a state grand jury that indicted Trump and then by 12 trial jurors, one of whom spoke favorably of him before the trial? She, along with the others, apparently was persuaded about his perfidy by the mountain of evidence she saw.
With its attack on the Washington establishment for a fabricated infiltration by Communists, McCarthyism preceded Trump’s assaults on the “deep state.” It is not accidental that the period saw the rise of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel – the same oft-disciplined Roy Cohn who taught Trump how to play the legal and PR games that helped him survive financial disasters and rise to the presidency. As a writer for Politico put it, “Trump was Cohn’s most insatiable student and beneficiary.” His techniques included refusing to apologize and never backing down, but instead sticking by lies even as they are debunked, counting on a gullible public to buy them.
Indeed, whether out of calculation, willful blindness or narcissistic self-delusion, Trump continued such deceit in a press conference Friday. He insisted, for instance, that the case was orchestrated by President Biden, though, in fact, it was a state case, not one involving the federal Department of Justice or the president, as a CNN fact-checker noted. Trump argued that the judge barred his lawyers from calling an elections expert, when, in fact, the judge would have permitted the man to testify, though he limited the scope of questioning to issues in the case, so the defense withdrew him. And Trump claimed that the prosecutors were bringing his case, while not dealing with crime that is occurring at levels never before seen in New York (something statistics show is false, with the early 1990s a far more deadly time in the city).
Of course, Trump is given to wild overstatement (a charitable term for it), as he again showcased. He said that his witnesses were “literally crucified” by Judge Juan Merchan, a man he said who “looks like an angel but he’s really a devil.” No crucifixions, literal or otherwise, were reported.
As Trump again derided the trial as “rigged,” he drew the first public rebuke on the case from Biden. The president asserted that the "American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed." Speaking from the White House, Biden said: "It's reckless, it's dangerous, it's irresponsible, for anyone to say this was 'rigged,' just because they don't like the verdict."
"Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years, and it literally is the cornerstone of America,” Biden added, as reported by The New York Times. “Our justice system. The justice system should be respected. And we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It's as simple as that. That's America. That's who we are, and that's who we'll always be, God willing."
America’s justice and political systems haven’t always been respectable, of course. They have been subject to cycles, moving in Hegelian lurches from nuttiness to comparative sanity. The move in the 1950s from the darkness of McCarthyism to a sunnier Eisenhower/Kennedy era marked one such turn, for example. That shift required courageous people who stood up to fear mongering and dishonesty.
Someday we may look back on the New York prosecutors and the jurors as similarly gutsy people, folks who separated the facts from the BS. Depending on how the election goes, we may see those dozen men and women as ordinary citizens who turned the wheel of history.
We have a long way to go first, of course. The sort of rot that McCarthy brought into parts of the GOP in the 1950s has resurfaced to dominate the Republican party today. An opportunistically paranoid view of reality, as so eloquently described by Richard Hofstadter, now reigns in the party that Trump seems to own. It never really went away there, of course (recall Barry Goldwater, the John Birch Society and Richard Nixon), but it was suppressed by such leaders as Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – men of basic decency and morals, even if one disagreed with them.
As it has driven out reasonable people, today’s party of Trump has come to lack respect for morality and shun decency. His lapdogs, such as VP-hopefuls South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, along with House Speaker Mike Johnson and No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise, wasted no time in rising to Trump’s defense. Such prominent figures in the self-described party of law-and-order dissed the judicial system, managing to be simultaneously hypocritical and cynical – a far cry from the Republican leaders who persuaded Nixon to quit in 1974.
To his credit, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is running for the Senate, seemed like a lone voice on the right. Ahead of the verdict, he urged the public to “respect the verdict and the legal process.” “At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship,” Hogan posted on X. “We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”
But the Trumpy response came swiftly, echoing the sort of cancellation that Trump delivers to GOP officials who cross him. "You just ended your campaign," said Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump advisor, on X. (As it happens, Hogan could turn the Senate red if he wins, so LaCivita may have helped undermine that GOP effort).
Unless something momentous happens, we will witness the spectacle of a convict becoming the presidential nominee of his party in mid-July, only days after his scheduled July 11 sentencing. Even felons can run for office and take the job if they win. Of course, in Cohn-inspired style Trump will appeal, something that will drag out the process well into the next presidential term. Trump, who knows how to play the legal system like a fiddle, could even win a reversal (if his apologists at The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere are right about the legal questions the case raises).
All along, Trump will do what he does best – stay in the news, oozing or muscling his way past President Biden in the headlines. He is a master of attention-getting stunts as shown by his vice-presidential sweepstakes, which has kept him in the public eye for months. He will stay in the limelight, overshadowing the real achievements Biden can point to from his time in office.
If issues come into the race, Trump will use them in his manipulative fashion to generate rage. In the din, it could be hard for Biden to remind voters, for instance, that Trump in February sank a promising bipartisan effort to fix the southern border, a bit of naked demagoguery designed to give the GOP an issue to run on. And Trump will hammer away at inflation, ignoring its decline and counting on voters’ ignorance that it’s the independent Federal Reserve that operates the levers on inflation through interest rates.
Certainly, as a product of a normal political culture, Biden would like to run on the issues. Indeed, while Trump courted the press as he played the victim in his pathetic legal melodrama, Biden was on the job as president, endorsing a plan to help resolve the Gaza war. Such diplomatic efforts seem far more newsworthy.
Until this conviction, in fact, Biden has been loath to speak about Trump’s many legal woes and it remains unclear just how hard the president will hit his rival over them, going forward. Will Biden make much of the twice-impeached Trump’s remarkable legal woes in their June 27 debate? Certainly, Biden is all too aware that the conviction is not a knockout punch for the GOP contender and that only voters can deliver that in November. Indeed, Trump and his minions already are trying to turn the conviction to their advantage with supporters, raising funds by playing the persecuted outsider-victim role that resounds with his die-hard backers.
There’s no question that Trump has upended our electoral system and much of our culture, politically and otherwise. It wasn’t so long ago that voters would shun a potential candidate for being divorced (Reagan broke that barrier). Now many would tolerate a philanderer who cheats on his third wife while she is pregnant and pays hush money to suppress information about his infidelities. Also, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, Trump has managed to cast doubt on the integrity of elections (as he would certainly do again if he loses in the fall). Not incidentally, he has managed to drive suspicions about science and institutions.
But perhaps focusing on the conviction is taking a too-narrow view, as is dwelling on polls that show a close presidential contest. It’s possible that the national return to decency began in 2020, with Biden’s defeat of Trump, or in 2022, when the GOP lost the Senate and many Trump-backed candidates in competitive areas lost races up and down the political ladder. If there is, indeed, a return to decency in our political culture, history will have to fix the turning point. While, the climb back appears likely to remain uphill for a while, Trump’s new description as a felon surely helps.
Bill,
I agree that the TV reporters rarely challenge their guests, either for fear of seeming like bullies or of losing access. Abby Phillips pushed Tim Scott a little, but I wished she told him outright to drop the talking points and answer her questions. The pols seem trained to blabber their main points, irrespective of the questions asked. Very unpleasant.
Thx for taking note.
JW
Joe, This is one of the more hopeful columns I've read in the wake of the verdict. I certainly hope you are right.
Listening to the Republicans standing up for Trump being interviewed, I've been disappointed that the journalists haven't done more to challenge them. The politicians claim the trail was a sham and shameful, and proof that Biden has weaponized the Justice system. But they never seem to be asked if they think the charges against Trump were false. Was Stormy Daniels lying about her encounter with Trump, and do they believe she was NOT paid hush money?
The key point in this entire trial is that by paying Daniels to keep her mouth shut, Trump CHANGED THE COURSE of American history. In my mind, there is no doubt that if Daniels had gone public with her story days before the 2016 election, Trump would have lost. Back then, there were surely enough women voters who would have found this unacceptable, and thus handed the election -- decided by a razor thin margin -- to Clinton. This was classic election interference.
Of course, now Trump claims he is the victim of election interference. But what he did in October, 2016 surely ranks as one of the most blatant examples of election interference in our history. This is the point the Republican politicians want to hide.