Watching our president-elect compare our intelligence agencies to Nazis on Twitter and at yesterday's press conference must have produced feelings of vertigo in many observers across the political spectrum. It is not unprecedented for presidents to come to loggerheads with the intelligence community, but for our elected executive to go full Godwin nine days before being sworn in must set a new record for speed of descent. The only thing more dizzying than the event itself has been the cloud of commentary surrounding it, especially from those who have risen in the president-elect's defense.
It is true that the privately produced dossier leaked by Buzzfeed that occasioned Mr. Trump's remarks is an ethically and journalistically dubious document. But, after he campaigned on the "facts" that Senator Cruz's father had assisted in the assassination of JFK, or that "thousands and thousands" of Muslims had celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11, or that "millions of people" voted illegally on November 8, et cetera, anyone who could listen to Mr. Trump declare that "it's a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public" without feeling some degree of nausea has a seriously skewed sense of plausibility.
This is not meant to excuse Buzzfeed or the media more generally by appeal to some perverse notion that two wrongs make a right. But however ill-used Mr. Trump may have been in the recent media fracas, little can change the fact that he came to the table already sorely bereft of the moral authority necessary to respond to the situation, and proceeded to make matters worse in his usual fashion. A politician who had, in all other ways, behaved in impeccably statesmanlike manner, who then compared the intelligence services to Nazis in the face of this crisis would lose all credibility in the eyes of the public and the political establishment. That otherwise serious commentators feel enabled to defend Donald Trump in this instance arises only from the fact that we have been conditioned to expect so little from Trump through long exposure, and that is a problem.
Presidents routinely come under gratuitous, libelous, and insulting attack, and are occasionally compelled to respond. President-elect Trump has so debased his own public persona and so squandered his own credibility that he comes into office completely destitute of the type of political capital needed to defend the dignity and standing of his office in the usual manner. Moreover, with each new crisis he digs the hole in which he is trapped even deeper. The contrast between his response (for example) to libelous attacks on Ted Cruz ("you can't knock the Enquirer") and on himself ("are we living in Nazi Germany?") reinforces the by now deeply-ingrained impression that nothing matters to Donald Trump apart from his own interests and position. To compare your own momentary discomfort to the worst genocide in history, especially when it arises from practices in which you yourself have frequently indulged, is to declare to the world, "For me, nothing is sacred....apart from myself."
Those of us who have opposed Donald Trump are looking forward to four years of pleas and accusations centered on the general theme of "giving him a chance." While it is true that he is the President-elect of the United States, and that to be a patriotic citizen requires that we all give Donald Trump a "chance" to succeed in office, we should be clear about what such a chance entails. Mr. Trump comes into office under a cloud of disrepute of his own making. He has profaned the principles on which our Republic is founded and forsworn the trust of the electorate he is charged to govern. He labors under an onus of redemption, and unless and until he atones for his many political transgressions by dint of long effort and restraint, he can not expect to receive any normal level of respect or deference from anyone, much less from his political opposition.
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