TPM EDITOR'S BLOG. Did Trump Ever Have a Chance?

[DonViejo]

By JOSH MARSHALL Published JANUARY 5, 2018 11:00 AM

Six months ago I joked that the President’s defenders would eventually come around to arguging that we should pity the President rather than hold him in contempt because he’d been raised in a culture of criminality and had no experience following the law.

Link to tweet

The weird thing is that I’m now coming around to that defense. Now, needless to say, it’s no defense. But allow me to explain. Because I do think it is illuminating, inasmuch as something as dark as President Trump’s predatory, criminal instincts can be brought to the light. Three times in recent days we’ve seen references to the President’s belief that Attorneys General for Presidents Kennedy and Obama protected them from the law and that he had great respect for this. He has had a running rage and contempt for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, once his most important political ally, because he has failed in this most basic of duties: protecting the President from the law.

One oddity about this repeatedly stated belief is this: why Obama and Kennedy? Obama makes sense. Trump sees everything through the prism of Obama. But why Kennedy? That was decades ago. There have been many presidents since. Three of them, besides Kennedy and Obama, were Democrats. One of those, Richard Nixon, had an Attorney General who literally went to prison for crimes he committed on the President’s behalf. Why these two Presidents are the point of reference is a mystery I hope to see resolved. (Perhaps it is something Roy Cohn, a nemesis of Robert F. Kennedy, told Trump back in the day or perhaps it is something to do with how both men were and are idealized.) But for now the relevant point is that President Trump actually seems to believe this. Trump is such an instrumentalist in regards to truth-telling that it may be impossible to fully separate belief from bad faith. But to the extent Trump believes anything I think he believes this. He not only wants his Attorney General to protect him from the law. He thinks that’s how it’s supposed to be and in fact has been. Why should Donald Trump be the only President to get treated like a chump? As he told Michael Schmidt of the Times, “When you look at the things that [the Obama administration] did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.”

We see these attitudes as the mindset of a would-be authoritarian. And they are. But they are also the attitudes of a criminal. By this I mean not simply someone who has broken the law. I mean someone who has no inherent respect for the law or great fear of its enforcement and breaks the law more or less casually when it is convenient and relatively safe to do so. Typically, such people see the trappings of the law as little more than a mask for the exercise of power. This is clearly Trump’s view of the world. Just as clearly he saw becoming President as essentially becoming the law. It is the ultimate power and what comes with that is legal invulnerability for him and his family. He earned it.

If you’ll allow me a whimsical comparison, this reminds me of a classic Star Trek episode from 1968: A Piece of the Action. If you’re unfamiliar with the plot, the Enterprise travels to a world, Sigma Iotia II, that has been culturally contaminated by earlier contact with humans. A hundred years earlier a starship had visited the planet with its highly imitative culture on the verge of industrialization and inadvertently left behind a book on mob rule in Chicago in the 1920s. Believing the visitors were superior beings or even gods, the Iotians build a society based entirely around what is described in this book as the ideal society. They refer to it as “the Book”, in effect their bible. In other words, the Enterprise finds a world in which everyone is a criminal. But not criminals in the sense of deviants from a social norm of lawful behavior. They inhabit a world in which criminality is the what is aspired to, valorized and proper.

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[dalton99a]

1. The president is just new to this

Be fair and patient. Let the demolition work continue

[Irish_Dem]

2. The author is describing a family of sociopaths. A crime family. nt

[Pantagruel]

3. 63 million American voters

so frivolously took their responsibilities to elect a POTUS we ended up with the Mango Mussolini. Shame on them and shame on us for not working harder for HRC.

Fact is Trump hasn't changed, he's always been this disgraceful excuse for a human being. Americans were simply too distracted and too lazy to recognize it. The consequences will be felt for decades.

[elleng]

4. No, sorry, it's CONTEMPT.

They do have brains, after all, whatever we think of the quality of their brains. The pity is for us because we're victims of those who voted for the contemptuous/contemptible con man.

[Gothmog]

5. The trump family has inferior genes