We’ve seen any number of public political blowups lately in which, whether out of frustration, intention or distraction, one side just seems to make up allegations in hopes that the facts will catch up.
From vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that turn out to be bad contracting work to criminal cases alleging wide anti-Donald Trump electoral conspiracies that repeatedly fall apart for lack of evidence, we allow ourselves to get much more focused on the shiny new allegation than on building the case towards finding blame.
Roy Cohn-trained Trump has made a political career or two of doing so, of course, with public campaigns against the Central Park Five’s pre-judicial guilt findings and Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but continuing even this week with resignation of yet another would-be prosecutor who cannot find evidence to match Trump’s insistence of a “Grand Conspiracy” to have launched an investigation of Russian attempts to influence his 2016 election campaign.
Trump Trump’s focus on finding criminal fault with “enemies” include the case alleging that former FBI director James B. Comey Jr. wanted to assassinate him by photographing seashells arranged as “86 47” on the beach, and the unending efforts to seek perjury charges against former chief government virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Special Counsel Jack Smith.
It is the nature of what our politics have become.
Each step downward toward blame-first politics makes the next yet more slippery and easier.
Ludicrous Jack Smith Hearing
Whatever the intended purpose of bringing Smith before riled Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the effort was a laughable failure. Republicans angrily pursued Smith for obtaining congressional phone toll records – not their content, a standard investigative tactic to verify testimony about those calls before and on Jan. 6, 2021, but they never came close to challenging the meat of Smith probe of Trump’s leading role in the insurrection attempt.
Indeed, charges were dropped after a Justice Department order following a Supreme Court decision effectively granting Trump preemptive immunity for official acts. Still, the facts have never changed despite Trump’s attempts to rewrite history either about Jan. 6, 2021, nor about Trump’s holding classified information held in bathrooms and ballrooms at Mar-a-Largo.
The hearing was so short of evidence that Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri embarrassed himself and colleagues as he accused Smtih of perjury over attending a basketball game in Georgia as a pretext for some conspiratorial link-up with state prosecutors there also pursuing Trump. Schmitt cited emails and smirked, until it became clear through questions from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. that the game was wrong. Smith had not been at a basketball game played by the Atlanta Hawks, but in Maryland, at another game involving the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.
Even if it had been true, Schmitt looked foolish proving a point that went nowhere.
On Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche attacked federal judges in Minnesota, accusing them of bias after they spoke out in news interviews against evidence-free immigrations that they had been forced to hear.
Meanwhile, it is Blanche who has called his own fight with courts a “war.” Blanche wants an investigation of those judges and for them to recuse themselves in immigration cases but sees no hypocrisy in having been Trump’s personal defense lawyer. As deputy attorney general, Blanche told a Federalist Society event in 2025 that the administration was at “war” with judges he called activists, Bloomberg Law reported.
Meanwhile, of course, there are no federal charges in the fatal deaths of citizen protesters at the hands of border patrol agents in Minneapolis.
Of course, it is Blanche who has oversight of that case in Florida where now two prosecutors have walked away claiming that there is no evidence of a conspiracy that Trump wants to find.
Pretending at the Institutions Too
The Washington Post brings us reporting to show that the Kennedy Center was solvent when Trump took over. Trump removed the professional staff, insisted on choosing the entertainment offered, and was surprised to see revenue, donations and bookings plummet.
Now we face Trump demands that because the law won’t allow him to put his name on the building, he may just raze the institution, which he claims is hopelessly in debt and failing.
The Post examined 15 years of the institution’s confidential board documents and tax filings, showing that since taking over the center, the institution has borrowed everything its bank would lend it, dipped into money donors had given on the condition it never be spent and written off pledges from supporters who stopped paying. Trump said the center was “losing hundreds of millions of dollars” when he took over, and his board has warned of “bankruptcy.”
Not to get lost in the details, there are kernels of financial dispute here, but Trump’s version does not account for his own role in cutting development staff or spending the endowment money of the National Opera or many other things that The Post lays out.
Suffice it to say, it is a lot easier to make up the financial problems than it is to document them. In like fashion, a Federal Reserve watchdog found no criminal wrongdoing by former chair Jerome Powell in its investigation of the central bank’s expensive headquarters renovation, according to a report released on Wednesday. The findings effectively clear Powell after the Justice Department opened an unprecedented criminal investigation into then-Fed chair, which became public in January.
The report did find need for better supervision, but no criminal violation, as Trump had pressured to determine.
Naturally, there is no apology to Powell nor to those fired from the Kennedy Center, to the former Olympian who faced criminal vandalism charges for examining peeling paint, nor to Fauci or Special Counsel Smith.
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.