Around the time former President Donald Trump was indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records and other forms of financial skullduggery in New York, I had a chance encounter with a Trump supporter.
She was a middle-aged woman who worked at a blue-collar job. We happened to be at the same place when coverage of Trump’s indictment popped up on a nearby TV screen.
“It’s just awful the way they’re treating that poor man,†she said.
I sighed.
Then I said that if she or I had misrepresented our net worth to get a loan or evade taxes, we would have been hauled before a judge long before Trump had been.
“(President Joe) Biden does it,†she fired back. “So do the Obamas and the Clintons.â€
I asked for her evidence of that.
She said she’d seen stories on right-wing “news†sites saying that.
If those stories were true, I said, now that Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives and have full investigatory powers, such accusations should be easy to prove.
Joe Biden has made public 25 years of his tax returns. They’re fair game for anyone—even political opponents—to go over with both microscopes and X-rays.
The Obamas and the Clintons also made their tax returns public when they were in the White House. Now that both couples lead foundations, the law requires them to make those foundations’ tax records public, too.
If conservatives haven’t been able to demonstrate that Biden or the Obamas or the Clintons have engaged in financial corruption and such corruption does exist, they need to hire better investigators and forensic accountants.
In fact, I pointed out, there has been only one president in the past 50 years who refused to make his tax filings and financial holdings public.
Donald Trump.
If, I concluded, there was evidence Joe Biden, the Obamas or the Clintons had committed tax fraud, I’d want to see them hauled into court, too. I wasn’t fond, I said, of the idea of having people with fortunes at their disposal shifting more of the financial load for running and defending the country onto my shoulders.
She went silent, then changed the subject.
I doubt I persuaded her.
In that right-wing media bubble where she spends much of her time, repetition takes the place of proof, and mere assertion is given the same weight as actual evidence.
That is the challenge Trump partisans face.
Inspired by their leader, they keep advancing “what about†arguments unsupported by facts or, more often, propped up by stray bits of information wrenched out of context—and then wonder why the rest of us aren’t convinced.
Worse, they contend that Trump’s political opponents should be held accountable for their alleged bad acts, but that Trump somehow shouldn’t be for his.
Then they accuse the rest of us of either bias or blind partisanship.
It’s bad enough that people who pay only cursory attention to issues of law and public policy plant their flags this way, but what makes it worse is that leaders who should know better—who, in fact, do know better—do the same thing.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has staked his just-announced presidential candidacy on his supposed unswerving devotion to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. At the same time, Pence says Trump, his “former running mate,†violated both the Constitution and law.
Yet somehow, Pence reasons, Trump should receive a pass and not be held accountable for assaulting the Constitution he took an oath to defend.
Nor is Pence alone in torturing both law and logic this way.
Trump’s chief rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, accuses the Justice Department of having a two-tiered system of prosecution, one that applies a different standard to Trump than it did to Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden.
Hillary Clinton went without complaint to testify before Congress about her dealings. Hunter Biden is the subject of a Justice Department investigation and likely soon will face tax and weapons charges.
DeSantis, a Harvard law grad, knows these things.
As does Pence.
But they focus their attention on confirming fallacies rather than following facts, especially when those facts tell an uncomfortable story.
Then such conservatives can’t figure out why they attract so few new converts to their cause.
