David Brooks, Derp and the Poverty of Trump-Russia ‘Hot Takes’

President Donald Trump meets with Russian Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, in the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 10, 2017. At right is Russian Ambassador to USA Sergei Kislyak. President Donald Trump on Wednesday welcomed Vladimir Putin's top diplomat to the White House for Trump’s highest level face-to-face contact with a Russian government official since he took office in January. (Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP)
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, next to Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 10, 2017. Trump on Wednesday... U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, next to Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 10, 2017. Trump on Wednesday welcomed Vladimir Putin's top diplomat to the White House for Trump's highest level face-to-face contact with a Russian government official since he took office in January. (Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP) MORE LESS
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This morning I had the chance to read David Brooks column pooh-poohing the Russia probe and the scandal engulfing the Trump administration. There are many things I could say about it. But I’ve resolved to be nicer and less cutting in my writing, or to do the contrary only when it is inextricably tied to explaining and conveying points of substance. Certainly this is a resolution that won’t last long.

Suffice it to say that Brooks framing proposition is both glorious and parodic: that is, that his own ring-side seat on the Whitewater probe gives him a special insight into the politics of scandal, how scandal frenzy can quickly get overblown and how these episodes poison our public life.

It is now plain for basically everyone to see what was fairly clear at the time: that the ‘Whitewater’ scandal was the grand parody of DC scandals. I don’t think Brooks ever had the bile or moral blindness that characterized the true hatchetmen at the Journal oped page – the deep driver of so much of that charade. But even a sideline presence there is something to answer for. (Yes, I’ve already failed.) The Whitewater scandal was truly a scandal about nothing which managed to bag a handful of associates in smallbore white collar crimes unrelated to the Clintons. It’s only final ‘success’ was getting Clinton on his real fatal flow – impulsive and reckless sexual behavior. In that case for an assignation that was years in the future when the investigation kicked off. Even the label given the ‘Whitewater’ scandal captured its essence: a Potemkin scandal inextricably tied to payback and projection over the Watergate scandal of a decade earlier.

This passage shows that Brooks is still captive of the 90s nonsense culture that gave birth to his career and in most respects he has happily transcended.

In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.

Brooks’ subsequent suggestion that a probe like the Russia probe might well drive even a “paragon” like Abraham Lincoln to fire a James Comey and “do something that had the whiff of obstruction” is just too insipid and fatuous for words, a hot take told to an idiot version of himself signifying nothing. (I embrace my failure.) Even a Bill Clinton, neither a crook like Trump nor a paragon like Obama, never came close to what Trump has now done in front of eyes with a scandal that was really special prosecutor who typified all the excesses of scandal politics. Even what we currently know about Michael Flynn is a wildly bigger deal than everything uncovered in eight years of the Whitewater probe. Yes, it went on that long.

It is certainly true that scandal is no replacement for politics. Trump may be defeated by his almost limitless corruption and possible collusion (either his or his cronies) with Russia. But whether Trumpism will be, or Paul Ryan’s effort to create a Hobbesian state of nature America, is an altogether different question.

Here Watergate is in fact instructive.

The politically catastrophic Watergate scandal was devastating for the Republican party. After a landslide reelection for Nixon in 1972, his party was decimated in the 1974 mid-terms, which saw the arrival of a new generation of young, technocratic liberal Democrats who are only now retiring from the scene. That was followed in 1976 by the election of Jimmy Carter, on what amounted to an honesty and purity platform. But the political or rather ideological fallout of Watergate was ephemeral and fleeting. Republicans had a strong midterm election in 1978, coming after the harbinger of California’s Prop 13 in June of that year. 1980 saw the election of Ronald Reagan and a sweeping congressional victory which placed Republicans in charge of the Senate for the first time in more than a generation and gave Republicans working control of the House. In other words, Watergate created a relatively brief Democratic resurgence on the road to what we now recognize as the beginning of an era of broad conservative dominance of American politics which lasted at least a generation and by some reasonable definitions continues to this day.

Yet scandal, even if it is no substitute for the politics of ideology and coalition-making and campaigning, is nevertheless its constant companion, as it should be. The mechanisms of scandal are the republic’s antibodies against its own destruction. Yes, scandals can be overblown and destructive. But they don’t come from nowhere.

Just consider the late lamented Obama administration. Unlike Clinton’s, Bush’s and now Trump’s administration it was likely as scandal-free as you can ever expect to see in a country in which the President oversees an administration made up of – depending on your definition – hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. It was no accident. Obama was different. He’s clean and he was temperamentally inclined to hire clean people. That isn’t the only metric by which we judge presidents. LBJ was, let us say, a very different kind of character. But we owe him for Medicare and Medicaid. Politics, like life, is complicated.

In any case, it is silly to say that there doesn’t seem to be a there there in the Russia story. While Democrats are now fully on board trying to thrust it forward, its key developments have been pushed forward by career government officials who are either apolitical or in most of the key cases actually Republicans. They thought there was something important there to look at. We should heed that counsel.

Indeed, it is widely accepted that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election with a mix of propaganda and theft of private communications with at least the immediate goal of electing the current president. Whether they had a longterm ideological or strategic interest in Trump or merely wanted to sow discord and defeat Hillary Clinton is, I would say, still an open question. There is at least circumstantial evidence that the Trump campaign encouraged this effort and quite possibly colluded in bringing it about. Getting to the bottom of that is obviously almost infinitely more important to the safety of the state than the venal corruption – bribes and self-dealing – which are the normal run of political scandals.

This should be obvious. Yes, there will be political hyperventilation. Yes, it will be shot through with partisan goals. But this should be obvious. Elegant writing cannot change that.

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