The president makes a bittersweet
concession to an American norm.
concession to an American norm.
Everybody lies. But American politics has long rested on a shared understanding of what it is acceptable to lie about, how and to whom.
One of the many norms that Donald J. Trump has assaulted since taking office is this tradition of aspirational hypocrisy, of striving, at least rhetorically, to act in accordance with moral values — to be better. This tradition has set the standard of behavior for government officials and has shaped Americans’ understanding of what their government and their country represent. Over the last four weeks, Mr. Trump has lashed out against any criticism of his behavior, because, as he never tires of pointing out, “We won.” In requesting the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, however, Mr. Trump made his first public concession to political expectations. Hypocrisy has scored a minor victory in America. This is a good thing.
The word “hypocrisy” was thrown around a lot during the 2016 presidential campaign. Both Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders accused their respective parties and the country’s elites of hypocrisy. As the election neared, some journalists tried to turn the accusation around on Mr. Trump, taking him to task, for example, for his stand on immigration. If Mr. Trump favored such a hard line on immigration, the logic went, should he not then favor the deportation of his own wife, Melania, who was alleged to have worked while in the United States on a visitor’s visa?
The charge of hypocrisy didn’t stick, not so much because it placed its proponents, unwittingly, in the distasteful position of advocating the deportation of someone for a long-ago and common transgression, but because Mr. Trump wasn’t just breaking the rules of political conduct: He was destroying them. He was openly claiming that he abused the system to benefit himself. If he didn’t pay his taxes and got away with it, this made him a good businessman. If he could force himself on women, that made him more of a man. He acted as though this primitive logic were obvious and shared by all.
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Fascists the world over have gained popularity by calling forth the idea that the world is rotten to the core. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt described how fascism invites people to “throw off the mask of hypocrisy” and adopt the worldview that there is no right and wrong, only winners and losers. Hypocrisy can be aspirational: Political actors claim that they are motivated by ideals perhaps to a greater extent than they really are; shedding the mask of hypocrisy asserts that greed, vengeance and gratuitous cruelty aren’t wrong, but are legitimate motivations for political behavior.
In the last decade and a half, post-Communist autocrats like Vladimir V. Putin and Viktor Orban have adopted this cynical posture. They seem convinced that the entire world is driven solely by greed and hunger for power, and only the Western democracies continue to insist, hypocritically, that their politics are based on values and principles. This stance has breathed new life into the old Soviet propaganda tool of “whataboutism,” the trick of turning any argument against the opponent. When accused of falsifying elections, Russians retort that American elections are not unproblematic; when faced with accusations of corruption, they claim that the entire world is corrupt.
This month, Mr. Trump employed the technique of whataboutism when he was asked about his admiration for Mr. Putin, whom the host Bill O’Reilly called “a killer.” “You got a lot of killers,” responded Mr. Trump. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” To an American ear, Mr. Trump’s statement was jarring — not because Americans believe their country to be “innocent” but because they have always relied on a sort of aspirational hypocrisy to understand the country. No American politician in living memory has advanced the idea that the entire world, including the United States, was rotten to the core.
A very different but equally jarring act of throwing off the mask of hypocrisy came from the first lady, who filed a libel lawsuit in which she alleged that The Daily Mail had hurt her chances of establishing “multimillion-dollar business relationships” during a period when she is among “the most photographed women in the world.” Mrs. Trump appeared to be affirming her intention to make a profit from the office of first lady. Around the same time, Mr. Trump was using Twitter to attack Nordstrom for dropping his daughter Ivanka’s accessories and clothing line, while his adviser Kellyanne Conway urged people during a television interview to buy Ivanka’s brand.
The following weekend brought a whole new kind of throwing off the masks, in the form of Facebook posts by guests at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. There was a picture of what appeared to be an emergency national-security discussion held at a dinner table in front of other guests. There was a selfie with a man who the photographer claimed was named Rick and served as the guardian of the “nuclear football.” This was government not merely demystified but denuded, trivialized. It was the vulgar opposite of hypocrisy.
All of this has proved too much not only for the shocked public but, it appears, for at least some of the members of the new administration. Ms. Conway was “counseled” after her impromptu commercial for the Trump brand, said the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. This was certainly a hypocritical move, considering that Ms. Conway had been following the president’s lead, but a hypocritical nod to decency is preferable to the blatant trampling of decency that preceded it.
Mr. Flynn has finally been fired as national security adviser. At his first solo news conference as president on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he didn’t think that Mr. Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador in December was wrong: It was Mr. Flynn’s having misled the vice president that got the national security adviser fired.
Hard as this was to discern amid all the lashing out at the news media and all the belated campaigning against Hillary Clinton, this explanation represented a step back from the we-won-and-therefore-we-can-do-anything stance. If Mr. Trump had stuck to the throwing-off-the-masks manner of addressing controversy, he could have argued that at the time of Mr. Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador, Barack Obama was a lame-duck president and everyone knew that Mr. Trump, once inaugurated, could revisit the issue of sanctions. This would have been true. He could have also resorted to his trademark what’s-the-big-deal approach to political reasoning: After all, Mr. Flynn has not been accused of divulging any secrets to the Russian ambassador (unlike a 2010 incident in which he was actually accused of sharing secrets). Instead of making any of these arguments, which would have amounted to asserting, once again, that the world is rotten, Mr. Trump opted for transparent and traditional hypocrisy: He claimed to disapprove of lying.
This may be the first time that the new administration has made a concession to norms, or at least appearances, of decency. As with any victory of hypocrisy, this one is bittersweet.
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