Greg Sargent: Trump's corruption will get worse. His own advisers just showed how.

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/19/trumps-corruption-will-get-worse-his-own-advisers-just-showed-how/

By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer

Feb. 19, 2020 at 10:10 a.m. EST

The debate over William Barr’s future as attorney general is unfolding in an alternate reality -- in a place where it’s considered an open question whether President Trump will continue trying to corrupt law enforcement right out in plain sight.

In this magical place, Barr’s loyalists can leak word that, by golly, Barr just might quit if Trump keeps publicly trying to manipulate ongoing cases. This is meant to insulate Barr from Trump’s taint.

But in the real world, here’s what’s staring us in the face: For Trump, the very public nature of his efforts to corrupt law enforcement is a key feature of those efforts, not a by-product of them that he pathologically can’t control.

Whatever sense of obligation Barr takes from this, if any, it imposes a grave imperative on the rest of us, to communicate it to voters and articulate what can be done about it.

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Yep.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. Billy Barr's Dirt Services (formerly, DoJ) and Moscow Mitch love the corruption.

The GOP has become the nation's biggest threat.

[Mike 03]

2. Okay maybe so. But there are a lot of psychiatrists who would

beg to differ, at least about Trump's ability to control his impulses and formulate a plan. The "plan" usually emerges after Trump does something grandly stupid and his enablers clean up the mess and attempt to justify what just happened.

[dalton99a]

3. "It's only going to get worse"

In their excellent new book on the institution of the presidency, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes argue that all of this amounts to the realization of an actual presidential vision for federal law enforcement that departs from the one that reigned for many decades.

As they write, that older vision was based on a norm, which was obviously not always honored, that dictated the following: “Law enforcement does not serve the will of those in power.”

Trump is erasing this principle, while illustrating there are no penalties for doing so:

Perhaps most important of all is Trump’s simple demonstration of the idea that a president can involve himself in specific law enforcement decisions and not face immediate and catastrophic political consequences. If the next president decides that he too wants to jettison the FBI director and pick her own, Congress will be hard-pressed to object. Trump has put on the table a radical departure from the orthodox understanding of the proper role of the president’s political preferences in law enforcement investigations and prosecutorial decisions. Whether Trump’s conduct ultimately reinforces the orthodox understanding, erodes it, or upends it entirely will be largely a function of the extent to which the political system tolerates or punishes him for it.

This imposes an obligation on the rest of us. As Jeffrey Tulis writes, the depths of Trump’s corruption simply require the Democratic presidential candidates to step up their efforts to use their current media exposure to draw public attention to it. The Democratic House must fully exercise its institutional oversight powers to further expose it.

This is imperative, Tulis notes, precisely because Trump “has been so successful in normalizing” his corruption and “in coopting his party to enable it.”

Crucial to this mission has been the very public nature of this corruption. And while Barr might be cynically pretending otherwise, it’s only going to get worse -- and more public -- from here on out.

[calimary]

4. And the question is not only "how do we stop this" but

“how do we deal with what’s left, AFTER trump ‘n’ comp have blown it all up and burned it all down?

Actually I can think of a bunch of questions. Like - How do we recover?

And CAN WE recover? Is it even possible?

Once we’ve tasted anarchy, what happens then? Do we recover from it and try to rebuild, repair, and restore? Or do we embrace it as our “new normal” and just stagger like unrepentant drunks into historical oblivion? Do we just opt for finding justifications for making it somehow okay?

What will be left, after this sordid period ends? Anything salvageable? Or do we even care about this stuff anymore?

Only thing I can think of that seems certain: it won’t be the same America anymore. Certainly not the one most of us grew up loving.