CSotD: Political Assessments
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Adam Zyglis accuses Donald Trump of profiteering in office, and suggests a number of reasons he gets away with his grift, including the Supreme Court’s grant of immunity, his subjugation of the Department of Justice and the loyal support of the MAGA movement, all of which are factors in it, to be sure.
The grift isn’t hard to prove. The latest twist in this ongoing saga is that Trump has decided probably not to keep the Qatari jet that taxpayers have upgraded for a billion dollars or so, but to leave it in service and take one of the original Air Force One jets as a display at his presidential library. The decision is not final, but the question still lingers, “Who said you could do either?”
His loyalists are delighted that he doesn’t collect his presidential salary, but fail to see that his weekend trips to Mar A Lago cost far more, while his pet construction projects are an enormous burden on taxpayers. And then there are the endless sales of Trump merch, and contributions to his sons and his son-in-law from foreign investors. And marketing of crypto. And so forth.
Zyglis is riffing on a famous Thomas Nast cartoon, and while the accusation of graft is well-placed, the suggestion that Trump is in this alone is a contrast with how Nast enumerated and depicted specific members of the Tweed Ring, a wider, more organized system of graft. Trump keeps things mostly in the family, while Boss Tweed was only the leader, not the sole beneficiary, of the boodle collected at Tammany Hall.
But the details are less important than the de-pantsing of the corruption, and little reform is possible without that.
The story that Nast’s cartoons brought Tweed down oversimplifies the matter. His cartoons were a powerful weapon, as Tweed himself admitted, because they reached people who weren’t likely to read the detailed articles with which they appeared.
Nast was an editorial cartoonist, in the sense that his cartoons were drawn in support of major articles. He was adding fuel to a fire also being kindled in print.
By contrast, there are only rare times these days when a cartoonist is enlisted to join in an editorial crusade, because (A) there aren’t as many cartoonists on staff at individual papers anymore and (B) there aren’t a lot of newspapers that dig into things on a crusading level.
When I was lecturing high school students on political cartoons, I used MSNBC and Fox to explain the 19th century partisan press because they weren’t living in a world in which most cities had two papers, one liberal and one conservative. And as that world faded and competing newspapers combined into one, their first promise to readers was to present both sides.
We’ve seen the milquetoast both-sides coverage that often results from that pragmatic marketing approach.
And so today passionate cartoonists stand alone, while others moderate their views to gain sales to those cautious newspapers.
Rogers is a notable exception, having famously lost his job for expressing strong opinions that clashed with ownership, and here he cites Trump’s desire for IRS immunity with a reminder that it was tax evasion, not bootlegging or murder, that landed Capone in Alcatraz. The comparison is greatly enhanced by Trump’s frequent, awe-struck invocations of “the great Alfonse Capone.”
In the movie version, Capone’s ally, Frank Nitti, was able to wipe out the bookkeeper and forestall Capone’s conviction. In the real world, however, an active FBI on a mission to clean up crime had a clear path to do so.
The lines are not so clear-cut at the moment, or perhaps they are, but not in a way that Telnaes sees as a credit to our government. There was a time when the Justice Department enforced the law even against the president, and attorneys general resigned rather than aid Nixon in his attempts to cover up his criminal activity.
In the current administration, there’s little subjective interpretation required: The government has sentenced dissenters to long prison terms, killings of protesters by ICE have gone unprosecuted, and commutations and pardons are granted to those who violently attempted to overthrow the government at the behest of the president.
The spinning sound you hear comes from the graves of old-school Republicans, some of whom served on the Senate Watergate Committee.
They are a far cry from the modern party, which drove from its ranks the only two party members who served on the J6 Committee and which now stands by passively as their leader rewards attempted rebels and undermines the civil rights their party had once championed.
Horsey joins Rogers in the comparison of Trump to an organized crime lord, and he’s not the first to refer to Todd Blanche as Trump’s consigliere, a word associated with a mafia chief’s lead attorney. The knife and gun on the desk add to the picture of someone for whom the Art of the Deal consists of shady, one-sided coercive bargaining.
Bennett’s depiction of the vote that sent Blanche’s nomination to the Senate is suggestive of a less deliberate approach to things than Zyglis, Rogers and Telnaes imply.
A number of Republicans may be repelled by Blanche’s nomination, but we’ll see how many are so appalled that they break ranks, versus how many hold their noses and obediently pull the lever as they have been ordered to.
Things won’t be resolved in November, or, given the changes now embedded, maybe even in 2028. Those old-school Republicans would hardly recognize the party that has helped double the national debt in a decade and persists in spending additional millions to encase in gilt anything that holds still long enough, to erect ballrooms, helipads and triumphal arches, and to build billion-dollar Trump-Class battleships that would be useless, bloated targets in a 21st century war.
Our national debt has gone from $19,264,939,000,000 in 2016 to $39,065,421,000,000 this quarter. Four of those 10 years were under Biden and included both a pandemic and a recession, but, in any case, the interest payments alone are stunning and there’s no sign of spending brakes, except on benefits to children and the poor.
And we know they don’t count.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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