Under Trump, the Swamp Is Draining
A grifter president has inspired an elite housecleaning.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
CreditIllustration by Jeffrey Henson Scales, photographs by David Nunuk/All Canada Photos, via Getty Images; Damon Winter/The New York Times; Jeenah Moon; and Al Drago for The New York Ti
Impeachment is a political act, and the endgame of the Robert Mueller investigation may not deliver the stark evidence that would remove Donald Trump from office. But this week’s activity on the Mueller beat — the guilty plea from Michael Cohen, the pardon-angling from Paul Manafort, the ongoing Austin Powers antics of Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone — is further confirmation that Trump is one of the most impeachable presidents we’ve ever had.
It isn’t just that he’s already implicated in actions (for instance, paying off a porn-star mistress in possible violation of campaign-finance laws) that a hostile Congress might reasonably cite as a reason for impeachment. It’s that the whole Trump operation, now lying exposed on Mueller’s table — the shady business empire, the constant practice of deceit, the dim-bulb hangers-on — screams corruption in a way that few politicians’ circles do. With Trump there is no pretense of respectability or rectitude. There is only the open, shrugging grift.
This shrug makes it hard for his critics to fathom how the Trump campaign ever persuaded anyone that its candidate would actually “drain the swamp.” Some of the liberal fixation with fake news reflects an attempt to explain Trump’s anti-corruption pitch as just a fraud that voters swallowed (or were force-fed by the Russians). And indeed, a portion of Trump’s supporters choose to live the fantasy worlds of Pizzagate and QAnon, where the most impeachable of presidents is as a white knight taking on a fictive ring of pedophiles.
[Listen to “The Argument”
A grifter president has inspired an elite housecleaning.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
CreditIllustration by Jeffrey Henson Scales, photographs by David Nunuk/All Canada Photos, via Getty Images; Damon Winter/The New York Times; Jeenah Moon; and Al Drago for The New York Ti
Impeachment is a political act, and the endgame of the Robert Mueller investigation may not deliver the stark evidence that would remove Donald Trump from office. But this week’s activity on the Mueller beat — the guilty plea from Michael Cohen, the pardon-angling from Paul Manafort, the ongoing Austin Powers antics of Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone — is further confirmation that Trump is one of the most impeachable presidents we’ve ever had.
It isn’t just that he’s already implicated in actions (for instance, paying off a porn-star mistress in possible violation of campaign-finance laws) that a hostile Congress might reasonably cite as a reason for impeachment. It’s that the whole Trump operation, now lying exposed on Mueller’s table — the shady business empire, the constant practice of deceit, the dim-bulb hangers-on — screams corruption in a way that few politicians’ circles do. With Trump there is no pretense of respectability or rectitude. There is only the open, shrugging grift.
This shrug makes it hard for his critics to fathom how the Trump campaign ever persuaded anyone that its candidate would actually “drain the swamp.” Some of the liberal fixation with fake news reflects an attempt to explain Trump’s anti-corruption pitch as just a fraud that voters swallowed (or were force-fed by the Russians). And indeed, a portion of Trump’s supporters choose to live the fantasy worlds of Pizzagate and QAnon, where the most impeachable of presidents is as a white knight taking on a fictive ring of pedophiles.
[Listen to “The Argument”
