The Ethics Zugzwang Of Trump vs. The Democrats, Part 2: How Can The Same Democratic Party Strategy Be Designed To Help Trump And Hurt Him At The Same Time?

/ Jack Marshall

This is not the Part 2 of the three part series I initially planned: I have a laborious post on the way discussing various esteemed lawyers’ analyses of the legitimacy or lack of same in the most recent Trump indictments. But Ann Althouse yesterday flagged a New York Times article headlined “How Trump Benefits From an Indictment Effect/In polling, fund-raising and conservative media, the former president has turned criminal charges into political assets” and commented, “Good. I’m glad this is backfiring. I have never been a Trump supporter, but I hate the criminalization of politics.”

As do I, and as commenters here have made clear, many believe that the best way to punish the Democrats for their unprecedented legal pursuit of the ex-President (which began when he was President-elect in 2016) is to, once again, elect the object of their undemocratic, indeed Soviet-style, assault on democracy as a protest and demonstration of contempt.

That may be appetizing, but at what price? More than once, most recently here, I have analogized the shock election of Trump in 2016 to the climax of “Animal House”:

Electing Trump certainly seemed stupid. Yet it served a purpose, indeed several purposes, just like the “stupid and futile gesture” that is the climax and operatic finale of “Animal House,” when the abused members of Delta House turn Faber College’s homecoming parade into a violent riot…

Voting for Trump was an “Up yours!” to the elites, the sanctimonious media, the corrupt Clintons, the hollow Obamas, and obviously corrupt Democrats like Pelosi and Harry Reid, machine Republicans like Mitch McConnell, and pompous think-tank conservatives like Bill Kristol.

As I wrote on the same theme right after the election,

“Americans got tired of being pushed around, lectured, and being told that traditional cultural values made them racists and xenophobes. They decided to say “Screw that!” by electing a protest candidate whose sole function was to be a human thumb in the eye, because he was so disgusting to the people who had pretended to be their betters. Don’t you understand? It’s idiotic, but the message isn’t. It’s “Animal House”! and “Animal House” is as American as Doolittle’s Raid….In Germany, The Big Cheese says jump and the Germans say “How high?” In the US, the response is “Fuck you!” Obama never understood that…. I love that about America. And much as I hate the idea of an idiot being President, I do love the message and who it was sent to. America still has spunk.

But you can’t keep justifying repeats of the same stupid and futile gesture. Eventually, you have to get serious. (The Capitol riot was a more literal emulation of Delta House’s protest, but even more stupid and futile.) That so many people are actually considering a sequel is evidence of just how difficult it is to determine what the “right thing to do” is when ethics zugzwang looms. It can’t be the right thing to let the strategy adopted by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (aka. “The Axis of Unethical Conduct,” or AUC) in the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck succeed, but if the cure—re-electing Trump, another thumb in the eye— isn’t worse than the disease, it’s still reckless, risky and irresponsible.

So now what? The Ethics zugzwang theme is magnified by the competing theories about what the Democrats hope to accomplish by prosecuting Trump for anything they can think of. Is it as simple as trying to use the justice system to remove him from the field? Is the AUC really that stupid and naive? Of course this strategy enhances Trump’s status with those inclined to support him, just as the bogus impeachments did. Nah, it must be that the Left is playing three-dimensional chess…you know, like the deranged Custer of “Little Big Man…

I really don’t know what’s going on, and the many commenters on Ann’s post don’t agree either. For example….

  • “The idea they’ve created a folk hero seems to have escaped the Democrats.”

  • “What I want to see is Democratic outlets like the NYT struggle with the real implications of Trump’s support going up after the indictments—it can’t be dismissed as merely MAGA cultists standing by their man god. If his numbers are going up, it’s because people who did not particularly like him, did not support him, are now supporting him. It cannot be a function of Trump’s cult of personality. But they won’t wrestle with that fact because they are cowards who don’t want to face the ugly truth of how ugly they are.”

  • “I believe that keeping Trump in the spotlight is what the Democrats want. They believe Biden will beat Trump but lose to other GOP hopefuls. The question is, are they right? (They are also beating up on DeSantis and other lesser GOP candidates. They have billions to spend on slandering all of them.)”

  • “The NYT is being oblivious: Democrats want Republicans to nominate Trump, know that the indictments will help this happen and would not be indicting Trump if he wasn’t running for president again…”

  • “I disagree. The indictments would have occurred even if Trump had retired from political life. The left, and many establishment Republicans, hate him beyond reason. They’ve been demanding this for six years. Nor do I think that this is a plot to boost him during the primaries. He was already ahead in the primaries prior to the indictments. This is entirely about their anger towards Trump for beating Hillary and embarrassing all of them.”

  • “Is it the criminalization of politics? Didn’t Mitch McConnell, after Jan 6, give as one reason not to convict Trump after the second impeachment that Trump would be held accountable in another forum, meanin pretty clearly a criminal proceeding. Are you against all criminal indictments of politicians, with being a politician then meaning an immunity from criminal law? 1000s of people have been indicted for their actions on Jan. 6. All, or mostly all, non-politicans. But the guy who called them forth, their leader, should be immune, while his followers go to jail?A bit of history on whether leaders should be subject to law. In the middle of October 1648, it had still not been decided what should happen to the dear King, who was in captivity, having been defeated at arms. Part of the Parliament wanted to reach a deal with the King, whereby he would give up many of his powers, but would be put back on the throne. The Scots wanted him to become a Presbyterian, and go back on the throne. A group of solidiers in Cromwell’s Army offered a petition to the head of the Army, Lord Fairfax, expressing their earnest desire “that impartial and speedy justice may be done upon all criminal persons and … that the same fault may have the same punishment in the person of King or Lord as in the person of the poorest commoner.”

    “Within three months of this petition, the King was tried and executed. Would that the spirit that animated these common soldiers 370 years ago in England still lived on today.”

  • “Backfiring? It’s their precise intention; they want Trump to be the Republican nominee in 2024 far worse than they did in 2016. They’ve learned nothing and forgot nothing.”

  • “the former president has turned criminal charges into political assets”

    “Not so much “the charges” as the realization that the regime wants to take him down, forcing us to take sides. It’s part of their strategy, of course, but also unavoidable for those of us who’d prefer to see Trump go away: we despise progs more….

    “Mr. Trump was the victim of a justice system hijacked by Democrats”

    Right. And Dems like it…

    “I’m glad this is backfiring. I have never been a Trump supporter, but I hate the criminalization of politics.”

    I appreciate Althouse’s view. It’s a good sign. Althouses voting against prog depredations, en masse, consistently, squashing them, would be a better sign.”

My position remains that another “Animal House”-style stupid gesture is madness, and those who care about punishing the AUC need to resign themselves to doing it the old-fashioned way: by finding a qualified, trustworthy, effective and ethical candidate for President, working for him (or her), voting for that candidate, and taking the White House.

Donald Trump is an impediment to that, regardless of what the Democratic strategy is.

30 thoughts on “The Ethics Zugzwang Of Trump vs. The Democrats, Part 2: How Can The Same Democratic Party Strategy Be Designed To Help Trump And Hurt Him At The Same Time?”

  1. Maybe you should inform the GOP that calling all the Trump supporters degenerates doesn’t make us cooperative.

    https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/12/desantis-trump-iowa-00110963

    “Matt Wells, the Washington County, Iowa, chair for DeSantis’ super PAC, fumed as he looked up.

    “Trump people are degenerates,” he said.”

    Find a candidate that isn’t a stooge of the establishment and I’ll consider voting for someone else. Until then, my ethics alarms have been snoozed.

    Reply

        • What advice would that be? Don’t treat the voters like bugs you want to step on? If that isn’t obvious from basic common sense, then I think the campaign is already lost.

          Reply

          • Sometimes someone needs to be willing to state the blatantly obvious that no one else has the courage to speak?

            I might have told this story before, but we were in turnarounds in 2016, and it had the largest scope of work we’d ever had in a turnaround by a wide margin. We expected thousands of contractors and a very tight window. A couple of weeks before the turnaround started, we got cold feet and halved the work, with the intent to do the second half of the work the next year. Even then, it was still a large turnaround with a tight window. And then, as turnaround started, crack spreads started looking really profitable, so much so that every day we came out of turnaround early would net us multiple millions of dollars in profit. So management started pressing everyone to work harder and faster. And people started getting inured on the job. Our operations manager came into the daily operations meeting fuming about the increase in injuries and expressed how he couldn’t understand what was happening, and he was ready to start sending contractors home if they couldn’t get their act together. No one said anything in response for a time. Then I piped up, saying, “I know I’m mainly just a computer monkey, but it seems to me that when we have the largest turnaround scope ever, to the point that we have to postpone a lot of it until next year just to make the workload fit in the schedule, maybe insisting on getting the word done ahead of schedule is sending the wrong message to people.” Almost everyone in the room nodded in agreement. They knew what was up, but they didn’t dare say what everyone knew.

            Reply

            • The GOP hates it’s own voter base. That moves beyond stupidity into malicious refusal to do their job, which is to represent the voters. There are multiple groups in the Republican voting base with slightly varying priorities and policy preferences, and the GOP hates all of them. They seem to think their job is to “fix the voters” rather than represent the voters. Pointing out the obvious is not going to fix something like that. They are not ignoring the elephant in the room, they ARE the elephant in the room.

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  2. My wife and I will be voting for DeSantis in the primary, unless some amazing candidate suddenly enters the race, but if Trump wins the Republican primary, I’d have to vote for him over Joe. Or any Democrat, at this point, since the Democratic Platform is rife with issues that are diametrically opposed to my worldview. (Yes, Republicans support some things which I find unacceptable, but nowhere to the degree the Democratic party does.) The choice of Trump at that point is almost entirely to block the Democrats from the White House. However, Trump does have something now that he didn’t in 2016, which is a track record of actually accomplishing some of the things we hoped any Republican president would. So maybe electing him again wouldn’t exactly be a re-run, or be intended as the thumb-in-the-eye. But in the measure of picking the lesser of the two evils, that doesn’t make Trump somehow good. So I would hope that by the time we get to the primaries, we can have an even lesser evil bump Trump out of the race.

    Reply

  3. Regarding the comments on Ann’s articles, I think the truth is a combination of all the points the commenters made. I think Dems/left is attacking Trump to prop him up so he’d win the GOP, counting on the fact that he’d lose no matter who the Dem candidate is; I also think they would’ve gone after him even if he had retired, for two main reasons: 1) to make an example of him for all and every future out-of-the-establishment candidates (esp. populists), and 2) as a service to their supporters who they have riled into insane TDS based frenzy—they have to give those blood thirsty fanatics some flesh and blood.

    As to your point about Trump, other than what he did the last two months (ate election night 2020), I think he was pretty good president, especially consider the environment he had to work in (the perpetual “Russia collusion” clouds, constant MSM baiting and viciousness, vile treatment by all Dems and many GOP, etc.). Yes some of it is on him (he can be his own worst enemy), but no president (or any politician) has been treated worse than he was, by the MSM and the political establishment (and seeming most of the executive bureaucracy). The way Trump was treated was and should be national shame, especially after living through 8 years of underserved, ass licking of the Obamas by those same groups. I think many people are seeing that now.

    Finally, as to his conduct the last two months, while I don’t agree with many of the things he did or said, I do excuse him (and I didn’t vote for him) because he felt he was robbed, and I agree with him—the election was clearly and unequivocally rigged (if not straight out stolen) by Dems, big tech, MSM and many elements in the government working together to do so (manipulating the news, changing election laws/rules, mass mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, etc.).

    Reply

    • Finally, as to his conduct the last two months, while I don’t agree with many of the things he did or said, I do excuse him (and I didn’t vote for him) because he felt he was robbed, and I agree with him—the election was clearly and unequivocally rigged (if not straight out stolen) by Dems, big tech, MSM and many elements in the government working together to do so (manipulating the news, changing election laws/rules, mass mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, etc.).

      What he did was payback.

      How can payback possibly be wrong?

      Reply

        • Do you remember Maraxus?

          Ethics Dunces: ABC News, Jonathan Karl and the Sunday Morning “Roundtable”

          You’ve asserted that public officials must be held to a higher moral standard than the rest of humanity. First, I’d like to know why that is the case.

          – Maraxus

          She did uphold the law. She was arrested, went to court, pled guilty to the charges (i.e. she accepted responsibility for her actions), and was punished accordingly. She could have pulled a Perry and attempted to use her position to get out of the DUI charge, but instead she had enough integrity to accept responsility for her actions.

          – Maraxus

          See, when we elect a district attorney, we trust them to do one thing: prosecute crimes. So long as they prosecute crimes, and do that properly and well, they’re doing what we asked them to. They are doing the bare minimum of what we expect from them- correctly using the powers of their office to perform the assigned duty. Driving drunk may reflect poorly on the DA’s character and mean they should not have been elected… but it doesn’t mean they have failed to do the actual job the public trusted them to do. We didn’t elect this DA to be sober, we elected them to prosecute cases.

          – Maraxus

          Seriously, she made a bad decision and followed it up by doing the right thing. What’s blowing my fucking mind is apparently we have shitheads on this board that are attempting to justify Rick “The Dick” Perry making a blatant attempt to shove a shill appointee into one of the few effective anti-corruption enforcement agencies in the state of Texas.

          – Maraxus

          Plus, if you actually read my arguments (which I doubt), you would have to notice that IT DOES NOT MATTER whether Lehmberg has lots of integrity or no integrity. Perry is not being charged with “thinking Lehmberg has no integrity.” He is being charged with misusing the power of his office and threatening to misuse taxpayer money, in order to coerce an elected official into acting in a certain way.

          – Maraxus

          It DOES NOT MATTER that you think Perry was justified in doing so because this particular elected official was dishonorable and inferior. It is not Perry’s place to hire or fire Lehmberg, and it is not his place to threaten to defund a law enforcement operation in an attempt to blackmail her into resigning against her will.

          – Maraxus

          Your appeals to “common sense” do not impress me. Give me a good reason why a moral failing, which incidentally has nothing to do with investigating corruption, should automatically disqualify a person from holding office. You assert without cause that this is the case. Please provide evidence that Lehmberg’s DUI has harmed the PIU’s integrity in any way. If you can’t do this without repeating some version of your “DUIs are rly bad guys” silliness, then maybe you should just go away.

          – Maraxus

          And here is the money quote

          And as for The Hammer, that’s true. He did get his conviction overturned by the Texas Supreme Court, an elected body that consists almost entirely of conservative Republicans. They didn’t think DeLay actually did all that stuff, and Texas doesn’t really have much in the way of campaign finance laws anyway. It makes no matter, though. He was still a cancerous growth on Congress’ asscheek, begging for a public fall from grace. And when he got convicted the first time around, we as a nation are better off for it. Ronnie Earle did humanity a favor when he realized that DeLay broke campaign finance laws, and he did us an even greater one when he got DeLay convicted. Whether or not “justice” was actually served against him isn’t so important. The fact that he no longer holds office though? That’s very important.

          – Maraxus

          And here was my first comment on this.

          It blows my mind there are people who actually think like this.

          – Me

          And you replied

          Me too. Yikes.

          – You

          And then I quoted maraxus again.

          Of course! And the people on the Travis Commissioner’s Court would have tossed Lehmberg out on her ass a long time ago. They’re not doing it because there are, frankly, more important things at stake. In a state like Texas where the GOP has historically run roughshod over the Dems, they cannot afford to lose powerful positions like this. Considering the number of cases coming out of the PIU, including, incidentally, a Perry-allied ex-official who channeled millions of dollars to some of his big contributors, the Travis DA’s office has more influence than just about any Democrat in the state. If Perry didn’t have the right to appoint her replacement, and he almost assuredly would have appointed a fairly right-wing replacement, I’m sure the Travis County Dems would like to tell Lehmberg to take a short walk off a long pier. Unhappily, there are more important considerations at hand.- Maraxus

          This happened nine years ago. It is beyond debate that the Democratic Party has become the party of Maraxus.

          And they must be stopped at any and all costs!

          Reply

    • Saying “except for the last two months” is the equivalent of “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

      Many of Trump’s policies were successful. That’s exactly half of being President. The other is its “King” function, representing the nation and the office, honoring the system that brought him to power, unifying the country, ensuring that the nation is stronger and more united for his being President.

      Trump paid no attention to that aspect of his job at all, and it is a vital part.

      Reply

  4. Much of this distrust can be squarely laid at the Department of Justice, when it investigated to give the illusion of credibility to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fable of “Trump Colluded with the Russians®™ to Steal the 2016 Election”. As Michael Tracey pointed out, as late as 2018, two out of three Democratic voters believed that the Russians actually altered the vote totals.

    And then of course there is what happened to Kevin Clinesmith. an FBI lawyer lying to a FISA court, given the damage it would due to the reputation of federal law enforcement, would be easy justification for a prison sentence and disbarment. Neither happened.

    The Justice Department, right now, has the credibility of Wanetta Gibson. That will have repercussions for decades to come.

    To top this off,

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/immediate-disqualification-conservative-law-professors-say-constitution-bans-trump-from-presidency/ar-AA1f79GR?ocid=weather-verthp-feeds

    Fourth, Section Three covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order, including many instances of indirect participation or support as ‘aid or comfort.’

    There is nothing originalist nor conservative about William Baude, Michael Paulsen, or Steve Calabresi.

    As a matter of fact, according to this rationale, a local election official could exclude FJB from the ballot on the argument that FJB provided aid or comfort to the Taliban!

    If you have to bend and twist the law to go after someone you do not like, maybe you are the bad guy!

    Reply

  5. On a related note.

    https://reason.com/2023/08/14/owner-of-kansas-newspaper-dies-amid-shock-and-grief-after-police-raid/?comments=true#comment-10196836

    .
    “People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man — some of those protests became violent. But to compare the actions of people protesting mostly peacefully for civil rights to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores the very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”

    Reply

  6. None of the sane, competent Republicans are currently running for the GOP nomination. I wish there was, but there ain’t. Given the choices Trump falls into the category of al the other choices are worse. It isn’t about ethics at the moment, which is a cope out, but it is what it is. Ethics and Relpolitik don’t always coexist.

    Reply

  7. What is the downside to Trump? Yes, he is a boor and doesn’t come from the right breeding to be President. However, can you say that his presidency was worse than Biden’s? All the ‘appropriate’ candidates will give you the same presidency that the Biden presidency has. Maybe I just don’t come from the right class of people, but I don’t understand how typical New Yorker braggadocio is worse than getting us into a war in Ukraine, destroying our energy infrastructure, ruining the economy, projecting to the world a doddering fool in charge of the nuclear button, weaponizing the government against the people, and sniffing children any chance he can get? It isn’t Trump v. some imaginary ‘appropriate’ and civic minded president, it is Trump v. ‘Biden’. Since we now all know that the unelected bureaucracy is running everything, we know that anyone but Trump as president is just the status quo, same as we have now.

    Reply

  8. The piece and the comments it generated smack of a mosh pit. True to zugzwang (Thanks for the introduction to that word; it’s application here was masterly.) form everyone qualifies their meek voice of guarded approval for Orange accomplishments (Thankyou, you do acquiesce that governance is half the job . . ) with all the self-professed virtue of the circle jerking media dems. Truth of the consequences? We’re voting straight ticket, becoming that very thing that is a .. disgusting .. widespread feature of America’s recent politics: block voting AGAINST someone. Call it ‘lesser of evils’ or ‘the devil you know’, call it deplorable, or as ingenious a slur as Joe Biden can come up with – “ultra maga republicans” – let’s all take time out to smile warmly at Joe and make excuses for him or make apologies, Obama-aic style (shame everyone else), for him . . Speak to his dementia? That’s ageism. Speak to his anti-American policies? That’s criminal. No, it’s worse than that, it’s blasphemy. (Witness RFK Jr.’s treatment as we speak.) Make of an American a victim, even an Orange American abused non effing stop, and Americans will step in to help. This isn’t rocket science, nor is it gestalt politics. It’s an American spirit.

    Reply

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