Trump VP contenders audition for the liar-in-chief
steveschmidt.substack.com
Trump VP contenders audition for the liar-in-chief
Some of Trump's vice presidential hopefuls — Governor Kristi Noem, Senator Tim Scott and Senator Marco Rubio — made their rounds to the Sunday morning political shows yesterday. Their interviews were riddled with lies, evasive non-answers, and ridiculous hypotheticals. I had fun tearing apart their appearances, as they were speaking to an audience of one: the Liar-in-Chief Donald Trump.
This Clown Show of morons who are willing to debase themselves for the opportunity to have the Fat Man insult + ridicule them is beyond bizarro world. They should all be running away screaming trying to save what is left of their dignity.
In five years when Fat Man is dead and gone, what is this band of idiots going to do to try and regain control? The world is laughing at you - all of you MAGA lemmings
What we are seeing just about everywhere is the normalization of deviance. We didn't used to see deviant behavior on this scale until recent years. Deviance becomes normalized when people lose their moral compass in pursuit of political power, economic gain, or simply to feel good. It is the same kind of behavior that prompts dot-com entrepreneurs and business people to cut corners, massively. We saw paradigm of this behavior and last week's trial testimony of Hope Hicks, Donald Trump's former Communications Director and chief administrative spokesperson. I've been thinking about that all week, how she conditioned herself to reply to every discrepancy between reality and the Trump Administration's response to evidence that they had been misrepresenting just about everything that came out of the Executive Office of the President, and specifically the Oval Office. Hicks, herself, described their modus operandi as, "deny, deny, deny". This was evident from the very beginning, when right after the inauguration, Sean Spicer, enthused over the "huge"crowds that appeared on the National Mall to celebrate Trump's election victory. Everyone with a pair of eyes who commented on the sparse crowd celebrating the Trump Inaugural contrasted Spicer's enthused description of that mediocre event with its actuality. But that wasn't the point, as we soon learned. Around Trump, nobody could speak the truth and still claim to have a job the next day.
When Hicks took the witness stand last week to state in clear and certain terms that Donald Trump absolutely knew about the source and purpose of the money that was being paid to Karen McDougall, and Stormy Daniel to buy their silence about Trump's sexual encounters with each of them, she was responding to a witness subpoena, ably advised by her own privately hired attorney, about what she could say on the witness stand, and what she could not. Obviously, Hicks was well coached, undoubtedly having been prepped for her testimony by actually seeing copies of trial exhibits already placed in evidence by the prosecutor, that had the effect of reminding her to stay on the straight and narrow. And, as the prosecutor expected, because it is certain that either the prosecutor himself, or one of his staff attorneys, had interviewed Hicks ahead of time, and nail down the particulars over expected trial testimony well in advance of her appearance in court.
When it came time for Trump's attorney to cross examine Hicks, she unexpectedly, but quite conveniently, let flow of flood of tears which pause the trial for a few moments while she gathered her composure. Not a necessary finale to her trial testimony, but certainly effective. In the ensuing chatter online and on MSNBC, among other places, people wondered whether Hicks' lachrymose performance had been planned or otherwise calculated in advance of her testimony. Personally, I don't think so. It takes stage and screen actors a great deal of time effort and training to learn to cry on cue. I don't think that Hicks thought about how much how she would react emotionally in advance of presenting her trial testimony; and I do think that during the entire ordeal of sitting on the witness stand in full view of Donald Trump, the trial judge, and the jury, she was able to hold itself together just long enough to complete her testimony before cross-examination began. Obviously, Hicks' testimony was a body blow to the Trump legal team's theory of their case. It is equally obvious that Hicks had no opportunity to wander off script, because the documentary evidence accumulated by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's prosecutorial team hemmed in Hicks' anticipated testimony the way a stockyard fence hems in and guides animals to the slaughterhouse. On balance, I see Hicks' tearfulness as an expression of her emotional relief that her presence at trial would be over and done with within the next few minutes. And that's the way it happened. She gets to go home to the rich and bountiful life that is ahead of her. The prosecutor gets what he needs to fill in the blanks of his timeline about what Donald Trump knew at the time and when he knew it. And Donald Trump gets the consequences of what he so richly deserves.
A man like Donald Trump normalizes deviance, the way that other authoritarian leaders normalize the deviance that they bring to the politics of coercion, inducement through fear, or hope of reward that is so common in today's world. Authoritarians have no use for morality; it's all about application of the carrot and the stick and almost equal parts.
When I entered law school 58 years ago, for reasons I cannot fathom, we did not have a mandatory course on the obligations of the legal profession, and the ethical constraints under which attorneys are obligated to practice our profession. In June, 1970, when I was sworn in to membership in the California State Bar, we were handed a rather thick pamphlet that include the Rules of Professional Conduct. I remember thinking at the time, all of this would've been more effective if it had been included in a mandatory course during my first academic year of law school. And that seems to be a failing that we see all the way up to today's United States Supreme Court. Again, as I said, it's the normalization of deviance.