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It’s somehow a long-running question in Democratic politics: Do corruption scandals move voters on its own, or must there be some nexus to an extraneous, substantive concern.
Prior to Donald Trump, there was no such debate.
If federal agents, say, discovered $90,000 cash in a politician’s freezer [ [link removed] ], that was game over.
Even today, the old rules still apply when specific cases arise. Tom Homan is not an elected official, and enjoys the benefits of Donald Trump’s protection racket, but everyone in Democratic politics understands the political value in the fact that Homan accepted a $50,000 cash bribe, and the FBI caught the exchange on video. They toss it back in his face without trying to conjure a connection to the price of beef.
Mikie Sherrill appears to be underperforming fundamentals in the New Jersey governors race, and may actually lose, on the basis of congressional stock-trading allegations that seem (in her case) to be completely bogus [ [link removed] ].
Trump confounded this simple “voters don’t like crooks” rule in Democrats’ minds, partly by being unusually brazen. If he could do these things out in the open, without shedding supporters automatically, he must be teflon. Voters must be unmoved by anything that doesn’t touch their wallets directly. Thus, throughout his first term, Democrats relegated what should have been major corruption scandals to passing curiosities.
When Trump forced Mike Pence, visiting Ireland on state business, to lodge at his Doonbeg golf resort [ [link removed] ], all the way across the island from Dublin, they didn’t try to make people care the way Jack Ciattarelli has made New Jerseyans care about Sherrill’s investments.
It wasn’t until long after Trump left office that Jamie Raskin, operating independently, gathered proof that Trump had used his erstwhile Washington, DC, hotel as a conduit for foreign bribery [ [link removed] ]—one exploited most aggressively by the Chinese government, which paid him millions of dollars.
Democrats recently helped Republicans pass a crypto-regulation bill even after Republicans refused to include measures that would prohibit Trump from using crypto instruments to accept bribe money.
But now, in a teetering economy, with the government shut down, and Trump fixated on bailing out cronies, padding his pockets, and building a palace ballroom for MAGA-elite self-dealing, the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about have begun to converge.
ARGE AND IN CHARGE
Just since the shutdown began, Trump: ...
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