Trump Was Never Any Match for the ‘Swamp’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, June 16, 2023

 

I wonder if I can prevail upon the nation’s many multidimensional-chess players to tell me, a mere dilettante of the 2D game, which variant of strategic dexterity this bewildering little incident is supposed to represent:

 

Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have been telling him for months that he needs to return the documents. But other allies, including Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, have been telling Mr. Trump that he is entitled to keep the documents and never should have been pushed to return them.

 

Granted, I lack the raw political sagacity of your average Roger Stone or Jason Miller, but to my uninspired eyes, this seems to have been transparently stupid. “What,” I have been asked in recent days, “is the difference between what Donald Trump did and what Hillary Clinton did?” Well, I’ll tell you one thing: Unlike Trump, Hillary Clinton is actually good at being villainous. Informed that the feds were onto her, Hillary proceeded as a veteran mobster would have: She lawyered up, feigned ignorance, and destroyed evidence, playing the game like a champ. At home, no doubt, she cackled herself to sleep each night. But when the lights were on her and the tapes were whirring away, she was disciplined enough to get away with it.

 

I do not find this admirable. I do, however, find it instructive. For eight long years now, the case made in defense of Donald Trump has been that, unlike the feckless yellowbellies he replaced, he has the courage and the capacity to “fight.” Washington, D.C., we have been told, is a “swamp,” a “sewer,” a breeding ground for out-of-touch hypocrites, and Trump, that plucky little outsider, is those hypocrites’ worst nightmare. Only he can effect substantial change. Only he can take on the entrenched special interests. Only he can survive the gauntlet of the elites.

 

To which I would respectfully inquire: When, exactly, did they decriminalize LSD?

 

The most devastating sections within the latest indictment of Donald Trump are the ones that star the man in his own words. In the minds of his admirers, Trump is a populist Sir Humphrey Appleby. In the transcripts of the indictment, he’s Marv from Home Alone, explaining to anyone who’ll listen how he knocked over all those houses. Not only does Trump explain that he did it, he establishes that the defense on which his champions have relied — that he had secretly declassified every document he kept — was untrue. Effective political reformers are deft, intentional, and covered in well-tailored armor. Trump is a klutz, a narcissist, a bumbler. He’s a manatee in a jacuzzi, making mess after mess after mess while insisting to the world that he’s a mermaid. That — that — is the guy who’s going to vanquish the “deep state”? Get real.

 

With the notable exception of belligerence, Trump lacks all of the characteristics that would be necessary to such a job. A president who can rein in the bureaucracy will be a president who understands that the serious obstacles in his way must be eliminated from within rather than without; who is prepared to utilize the existing levers of power against those who installed them; who can distinguish between good and bad advice; who is capable of evaluating which risks are worth taking and which are not; and who grasps instinctively that if he is to avoid the worst consequences of having a giant target painted on his back, he must appear cleaner than clean. Entrenched institutions will invariably fight back against those who wish to renovate them, and they will invariably do so in unfair or inconsistent ways. Morally, that unfairness and inconsistency matter. Practically, they do not. Here, there are no half-victories to be had. A reformer who cannot survive his own attempts at reform is useless.

 

Donald Trump cannot survive his attempts. Worse still, Donald Trump does not want to survive them. It is true that, on the matter of classified documents, there exists an infuriating difference in the justice system’s treatment of Hillary Clinton and its treatment of Donald Trump. It is also true that Donald Trump’s choices made it easier for that double standard to be observed. Trump did not need to take classified documents and store them in his home. He did not need to reject the DOJ’s overtures and refuse to return those documents. He did not need to be caught on tape admitting that he was breaking the law. He did not need to ignore the advice of his lawyers in favor of the bad counsel offered up by the head of Judicial Watch. These were choices — bad choices. What, may I ask, does Trump have to show for them?

 

It has become popular in recent years to argue that it does not especially matter how a given Republican politician behaves because, irrespective of who he is, he is destined to be treated in exactly the same way by the press, by the Democratic Party, and by the permanent bureaucracy with which both are now so closely entwined. This is false. It is true, indeed, that all Republicans are reflexively accused of the same sins. But it still matters whether those accusations happen to be true. Every Republican is deemed corrupt, selfish, a wannabe dictator. Not every Republican is caught standing over the body saying “bang.” There is nothing to be gained by self-deceit here: GOP primary voters can have reform of the bureaucracy, or they can have Donald Trump’s endless sh**show. If they try to have both, they will get neither — and they’ll deserve it, too.