Mr. Trump and the mostly men he has appointed to office often behave as if rules did not apply to them. That has been part of his appeal. He absconded with boxes of classified documents after his first term. He faced accusations of sexual harassment and some of abuse and was even found liable in civil court for one of the abuse allegations — only to be elected to a second term, thanks in part to male voters. After running on a platform of getting tough on crime, he spent his first days in office pardoning various supporters and lackeys for a host of crimes they committed, including violent ones.
The Trump administration is a group for which hypocrisy is well honed and projection is practically an art form. The president’s opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts has been a cornerstone of his second term, because, he says, it results in unqualified people being hired and promoted simply on the basis of their identities. His current cabinet is among the whitest and most male of the past several decades; it is also the collectively least qualified in the modern era. Elon Musk, the unelected megabillionaire Mr. Trump charged with weeding out government inefficiency, has fired thousands of government workers, despite having no experience in government himself; he has virtually no relevant qualifications for his job, even as he tells federal workers they’re unfit for theirs.
There is a “heads I win, tails you lose” quality to all of this. When Mr. Trump ran against Mrs. Clinton, he promised to drain the swamp and take on the “deep state” that he said protected her and targeted him. Once in office, he behaved abhorrently, flouting ethics rules, blurting out classified information and recently pausing the enforcement of a law that had barred American companies from bribing foreign officials. The supposedly unclassified messages in the Signal chat, now published in The Atlantic, include internal deliberations over whether to strike in Yemen or wait, as well as specific times of what were meant to be surprise attacks — the kinds of things that, if leaked in advance, could put American forces in serious jeopardy and, one imagines, land the leaker in prison.
And yet even after this significant breach, the Trump team’s story is that no wrongdoing occurred and that the creatures of the swamp are again conspiring against Mr. Trump and the people he represents. The common theme here is that someone else is always at fault: Either that someone else is committing a crime or, in arguing that others might have done so, is using lawfare and fake news to undermine the real good guys. Innocence is based not on the facts but on who is being accused. The one unbreakable rule seems to be that Mr. Trump is always innocent.
Pointing to the umpteenth hypocrisy seems vanishingly unlikely to finally break Mr. Trump’s spell over the Republican Party or make his most loyal supporters question their devotion. But most regular Americans really don’t like hypocrisy, especially when the stakes are as high as they are here. Even if it changes nothing, it is always worth countering duplicity with truth. And it is always worth demanding integrity from our leaders — even, and perhaps especially, from the serial hypocrites.
