A New York Times panel reports that President Donald Trump’s unique fondness for yes-men making him a kind of Geiger counter for identifying miscreants.
“You know, one of the things I think the second Trump term is showing is that Trump is performing a function of ‘the great illuminator’ of the true core of people,” said Times Columnist David French. French cited as example U.S. AG Pam Bondi’s recent attempt to dodge lawmakers’ questions about why she halted a federal investigation into associates of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“The most telling moment [in her testimony] was when she tried to stop questioning about Epstein, which was ostensibly the subject of the testimony, by saying the Dow was at 50,000 … which is about as relevant as saying, ‘Why are we talking about Epstein when the Knicks won last night?’” said French. “ … [H]e really is putting in front of Pam Bondi: ‘Hey, Pam, here is your job in one corner. And here in the other corner is reason, logic, morality, and decency. You have to give up all of those things. But if you do, you can continue to be the attorney general of the United States.’ And this is the test he’s putting in front of basically everyone in Republican politics right now.”
Times Opinion Columnist Jamelle Bouie agreed, saying Trump has “selected for people whose sense of morality … is somewhat deficient.”
“Pam Bondi, [who is] not known for running a clean A.G. office in Florida, right? She’s not known for being a super scrupulous person. So, she’s primed to do exactly what Trump wants her to do,” Bouie said, adding that this effectively weeded out more scrupulous people in the administration and created a kind of distilling process for sleaze.
“The practical purpose is that when you’re asking the attorney general to do things like prosecute members of Congress, or asking the attorney general to do things like investigate the partners of people killed by your government — as was the case after Renee Good was killed — what will happen is that the good faith, highly competent, patriotic prosecutors that work for you will quit. They don’t want to do that. They want to do the thing that they signed up to do, which was enforce the law and try to bring some measure of justice to people who have been victims.”
But competence is inversely proportional to corruption, warned Bouie, so the resulting “hollowing out” of the DOJ has also left it “unable to do its actual job.”
“Well, you do wind up with this cycle where … people who have a moral core or who have a respect for our kind of government and the Constitution [leave]. And then the Trump administration continues its hiring of people who, let’s just say, have a certain ethical flexibility, and whose guiding star is the political whims of an autocratic leader, as opposed to any kind of actual values,” said Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle.
“And those people are often bottom of the barrel,” Bouie said.
“I mean, the incompetence that we’re dealing with here, it’s not just corruption — it’s corruption plus staggering levels of incompetence. And when you combined them all, you reach almost the incompetence-corruption singularity, with the effort to indict the six Democratic members of Congress,” said French. “I mean, that was impeachable stuff. That is absolutely impeachable stuff. It’s not just a direct attack on a competing branch of government. It’s also a direct attack on free speech, just basic free speech. I mean, this is about as core of speech as you can imagine.”
