Grifters From All Directions

For John, BLUF:  I am not as pessimistic as is Mr Dreher, including about President Trump, but he has his finger on a long term problem in the Western political scene.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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What Happens When Trump Falls?

Here is the sub-headline:

From The American Conservative, by Mr Rod Dreher, 2 December 2018.

Here is the lede plus five:

Ross Douthat has a good column today, about how Trump’s grift has been paradoxically cleansing.  He argues that Trump’s claim that he would go to Washington and “drain the swamp,” while only ever plausible to those eager to be a mark, is now impossible for anyone to take seriously:

But the more common reason a certain kind of Trump supporter accepted his anti-corruption pitch was less conspiratorial and more cynical.  He’s bad but they’re all like that, the whole elite class is rotten, so why not send a grifter to catch a bunch of grifters?

That hasn’t worked out; it turns out that when you send a businessman-grifter into the world of political grifters he hires some of the worst of them to help him with the fleecing.

True. We are very close to the point, if not past it, where any good that Trump’s election might have done in terms of breaking up a corrupt aristocracy, in spite of Trump’s own corruption, is now exceeded by that corruption.  David Brooks articulated on NPR on Friday something that has been on my mind lately, but I hadn’t put into words.

And the final question I have is, what are our standards? Behind the legal standards, what’s our political standards.  President Nixon could be really removed from office for obstruction from justice — of justice.  Are we at a state in this country where we no longer really mind?  And that actually could be the case. I’m just reminded The New York Times had a story of tax fraud in the Trump family, and that story went away in about 35 seconds.  And so we’ve become — may have become inured to corruption.

Yes, I think we are.  Do you really believe that Michael Cohen, not Donald Trump, is lying about the Trump organization’s business dealings with Russia? Seriously?  I said here after the shocking final Kavanaugh hearing that seeing the behavior of the Democrats and the liberal industrial complex in their attempt to destroy Kavanaugh by any means necessary shocked me into the realization that as much as I can’t stand Trump, I would probably have to vote for him only out of self-protection.

Note the last sentence of the above quote.

The Author, Mr Dreher, does a discussion of the situation in France, where the mobs in the streets of Paris have forced the Government to back down from a proposed gasoline tax increase.  Then he ends up as follows:

What I’m getting at is asking what comes politically when most Americans lose faith in the ability of our elites to make things better?  I fear that on the Right, we’re going to have to deal with the myth that Trump would have succeeded had the swamp not stabbed him in the back.

This is a tricky question, because it asks if the People are so upset that they are prepared to take to the streets, as the "Yellow Vests" did in Paris the last three weekends.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff