“The Deal of the Century” and the Crisis of the New Millennium

A member of the foreign press walked into the breakroom set up for reporters at the White House. He approached a counter where several takeout meals sat waiting for their owners. He took a salad, sat down and started eating.

I saw it and thought little of it until a network photographer approached him and challenged the reporter as he ate. Turns out it wasn’t his food. One of the technicians who’d been working since dawn had ordered the meal. Now she had no food.

“Why did you do that?” asked the tech, visibly frustrated. The correspondent had little to offer except to say that if anyone was bothered, then he’d gladly pay for the meal.

“That’s not the point,” the technician said; the woman whose meal it was would now have to wait another hour. The move was rude, he said. Why did the reporter think he could do it?

“Mike said I could do it,” the reporter said. No one knew who Mike was. When pressed to point him out, the reporter said he didn’t know what he looked like, but he reassured the technician that Mike gave him the okay.

A few minutes later the technician turned to me as I shook my head. He asked, “Does everybody around here lie?”

As if to answer his question, that same day President Donald Trump and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in the East Room of the White House to announce “The Deal of the Century,” between the Israelis and the Palestinians. There were no Palestinians at the White House to agree to the deal, and indeed they roundly rejected it when it was announced. But who could ever forget the optics of a president currently on trial for impeachment sharing the stage with a foreign prime minister under indictment for corruption trying to sell a peace plan that hurts peace, but helps out the two corrupt world leaders under scrutiny?

The lying didn’t end there. Down in the basement of the Senate, Republican defenders of the president were busy all this week adapting their impeachment defense at the expense of their previously told lies.

Senator Ted Cruz, whose first love is apparently a microphone and camera, lectured the press on “situational ethics,” claiming our ethics change per circumstances while he exercised his own. He refused to talk about Ambassador John Bolton testifying, instead telling us what a great job the president’s defense team was doing in showing us there was no reason to impeach a president who’d already been impeached.

He went on to tell us that the House never bothered to call Bolton when they had a chance, and why should the Senate have to bail out the House when they didn’t do their job?

Of course the House did call Bolton to testify, who threatened to sue. The president was afforded due process in the House, though Cruz and others continue to claim otherwise. But the most interesting part of Cruz’s rant came when a reporter asked him about nepotism. Cruz accused the reporter of wanting to put his young children in jail.

Not to be outdone, Alan Dershowitz was busy on the Senate floor: “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest,” he said, “that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Using that logic, Nixon and Clinton could’ve both survived impeachment inquiries claiming they were merely acting in the public interest. Of course Dershowitz later tweeted, “They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his re-election was in the national interest, he can do anything. I said nothing like that, as anyone who actually heard what I said can attest.”

So it looks a whole lot like he tweeted out one lie to explain a previous lie. Don’t get tired, because the lying doesn’t stop there either.

Trump’s defenders struggled hard against a growing tide of pressure to call witnesses in the impeachment trial and in so doing changed the president’s defense on a daily basis. While initially crying “No quid pro quo” and urging people to read a transcript—which was never provided—and claiming the president had a “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian president, the GOP defense has changed dramatically.

Now the president’s defenders claim it is the Democrats who are trying to steal an election and that even if Trump coerced Ukraine for political favors, it isn’t a removable offense.

The stunning hubris in such claims is frightening in what it portends. Under the GOP defense, Trump and future presidents would have nearly unlimited powers to manipulate and lie to the American people—merely in order to keep their power.

“For the sake of argument, one could assume everything attributable to John Bolton is accurate and still the House case would fall well below the standards to remove a president from office,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said. Those in his office claim it is his “definitive” statement concerning impeachment.

So in the future, any president can coerce, intimidate and then later lie about coercing or intimidating foreign leaders to further their own political ends and that is not only not an impeachable offense, but perfectly acceptable.

Hell, it means Trump can tap into Russia, China and anyone else for help in 2020. He could literally stand at the street corner turning tricks for cash and nothing could be done about it.

Congressman Adam Schiff, the lead case manager for the Democrats, rejected the notion, saying “None of the founders would have accepted that kind of reasoning.”

But Schiff is handicapped by sticking to the facts—as are the rest of the House case managers. The GOP defense team and the senators who are shilling for the administration are not limited by such constraints.

According to Congressman Eric Swalwell, it isn’t even that the GOP members of the Senate are choosing party over country; they are, he told me, “choosing their job over their country. What if they don’t have a job in the Senate?”

Sadly, Swalwell may be onto something. There are members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who couldn’t get a job mopping floors if they weren’t elected officials. Which brings us back to Senator Cruz and others who have taken their opportunity to obliterate the truth. They claim the Democrats were wrong saying the president stonewalled attempts to get witnesses and information. “That was not the president’s response,” we were told.

When I asked Trump last April on the South Lawn about cooperation with the Democratic investigation he told me point blank, “We’re fighting all the subpoenas.”

Going back to November 7, 2018, the day after the midterm elections, Trump not only described his party’s loss of control of the House of Representatives as a victory, but when I asked him if he could cooperate for the “good of the country” with the Democrats should they begin to investigate him, he flatly said “No” and implied he’d be on a “war-like footing” with the House.

The truth is far uglier than most of us want to contemplate. We sit still or even argue about the nuances of public policy and actions of this president without coming to grips with something that is painfully obvious now: We are witnessing the destruction of the government of the people and replacing it with the monarchy of the past we fought a revolution to overthrow. Earlier this week Chris Hayes from MSNBC tweeted about the “ugly truth at the core of all of this: the president actually can do whatever he wants—rob, cheat, steal, murder—if he can hold 34 senate votes.”

In the case of the foreign correspondent at the White House lying to obtain a meal, at least he offered to pay for it when he was caught lying—and no one was willing to back his lie.

In the case of the President of the United States, Trump has never admitted to the more than 16,000 false or misleading things he’s said, never offered to pay for one of them. Everyone in the GOP seems willing to back his lies for the sake of their own jobs. At the end of the day, no one defending the president seems to care about the consequences.

So, what makes a man like Trump? What makes him do the things he does? Perhaps Val Kilmer, as Doc Holliday in Tombstone, said it best. A man like Trump “has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.”

At the end he’s seeking revenge for “bein’ born,” as Doc says—and we’re all paying the price.