This summer — like last summer and the one before it — seems to be another case of promise denied. Once again we started with high hopes or at least middling hopes. (Let’s face it: Since Covid, the bar has been set pretty low. And once again, it has not been cleared. We can each point to personal disappointments, which may or may not be of our own making. But as a society, we must consider a failure that stems from our own lack of rationality, imagination and compassion.
One example — the dominant story of the season — will suffice. No sooner did the FBI search former President Donald J. Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago for documents that belong to the National Archives than the Bureau was under attack. The contrast with Watergate — whose 50th anniversary occurred not so coincidentally on Aug. 8, the day of the search — is striking. Then Republicans told the president — Richard M. Nixon, a member of their party — that they did not have the votes to keep him in office and so he went. Now we read that at least some of the National Archive-bound Trump White House documents wound up in Mar-a-Lago in part because the final days of the Trump presidency, a portrait of a leader in denial clinging to power, were so chaotic.
Whether or not this is an indictable offense is beyond my pay grade. But how is it the FBI’s fault that the documents were in Trump’s possession and members of the Bureau were sent to retrieve them? Why should FBI offices be under siege? We have lost the ability to talk to one another, to reason with one another. We are so convinced of the rightness of our position — the correctness of “our truth,” which is nothing more than our own opinion — that we can’t see anything or anyone else.
And while this exists on the left with the political correctness police, who often straitjacket freedom of expression, nowhere is the inability to see the position of others more violent than on the far right. For this we can thank the incendiary Trump himself, whose latest move is to request a special master to oversee the documents. (Ooh, sounds like we’re in “Fifty Shades of Grey” territory. here: “Yes, Special Master, I come to do your will.”)
A special master is actually a third-party, often an attorney, appointed by a judge to oversee some aspects of a case. Trump wants to make sure that nothing that is “mine,” to use a favorite Trumpian word, is kept by the government — rich, isn’t that? — in what amounts to another attempt to run out the clock on a legal matter. (In this case, District Court Judge Aileen Cannon in the Southern District of Florida — a Trump appointee — is giving Trump until Aug. 26 to explain his need for the special master thingy. (She also had to explain to Trump’s unlicensed-in-Florida attorneys that they had filled out paperwork incorrectly and could find the correct form online. Sheesh.)
Regardless of whether or not he “stole” government papers, the single biggest crime Trump has committed is his assault on the truth. The continuing charade that he is some kind of deposed monarch who will be reinstated if he just clings long enough to the fantasy has emboldened other fantasists and narcissists, in the Jan. 6 attack and in attacks on FBI offices, some of whom have ended up dead. And for what? When you die for a lie, you die for nothing.
Yet Trump’s hold on the Republican Party — archrival Ron DeSantis, Florida’s “more Trump than thou and with a brain” governor, must be kicking himself as he sees the 2024 nomination ooze away from him — is such that experts are advocating that we not prosecute him but instead let the political process play out.
Yet that suggests that some people are above the law, that they are so-called “too big to fail.” There may be no good options here. Yet if the judicial system ultimately finds evidence that the former president committed a crime — and the investigation is ongoing — then he deserves to be prosecuted. We need to follow the truth to its logical conclusion, as Rep. Liz Cheney is doing, and let the chips fall where they may.
This is, to borrow a phrase from Eleanor Roosevelt, “no ordinary time.” It requires no ordinary measures.