Trump’s team of felons ‘is what it is,’ says Sen. Pat Roberts. But what is that?
Republicans who’d rather not talk about President Donald Trump’s team of felons are either awfully silent this week, or are sticking to the sort of Delphic-but-down-home pronouncements that are a Pat Roberts hallmark.
“It is what it is,” the senior senator from Kansas said this week. This was after the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted of bank and tax fraud and Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations he said he’d committed at Trump’s direction. It is what it is; who could argue?
Perhaps this was a winking reference to Bill Clinton’s long-ago response, when asked whether he’d lied in grand jury testimony when he said “there’s nothing going on” between him and a former White House intern: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
As you may recall, Republicans were all kinds of agitated that the same Oval Office that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t disrespect by removing his suit jacket was being sullied by someone who would behave so scandalously, and then perjured himself by denying it. Especially by today’s #MeToo lights, they weren’t wrong.
Now, however, hardly anybody with an ‘R’ after his name blinks at the perfidy of a president who has repeatedly changed his story about illegal payments to the porn actress and the Playboy model who say they had affairs with him not long after his son Barron was born.
In a Thursday interview with Fox News, Trump admitted ponying up hush money he’d previously denied even knowing about. The payments, which would be unlawful if made to influence an election, “didn’t come out of the campaign. They came from me” and so were legal, he argued.
He reasoned, incorrectly, that payments that didn’t come out of campaign funds couldn’t possibly violate campaign laws, and that in any case, “campaign violations are considered not a big deal, frankly.”
One of the president’s only Republican critics in the Senate, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, said of Cohen and Manafort that “neither one of these felons should have been anywhere near the presidency.”
Only, Team Trump was lousy with the ethically impaired: The president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials, as has Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos. Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, who worked for Manafort, has pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and lying to the FBI.
The first member of Congress to support Trump, New York’s Chris Collins, was recently indicted on charges of insider trading and lying to federal agents. And the second to jump on the Trump train, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, was indicted on charges that he and his wife spent more than $250,000 in campaign funds on vacations and other personal expenses.
Earlier this week, a Trump speechwriter was fired for his ties to a white nationalist event. In March, a longtime personal aide was pushed out while under investigation for “serious financial crimes.” And in February, the president’s staff secretary resigned after reports that his two ex-wives had accused him of domestic violence.
Others who have exited the Trump administration include aspiring kleptocrats Scott Pruitt, who ran the EPA, and Tom Price, who ran Health and Human Services. Both may have wanted to curb government spending on others but believed fervently in spending public funds on themselves.
This is not a complete list. But all of the above, certainly, “is what it is.” And what it is, as Trump World’s record of corruption continues to grow, ought to be met with more than a shrug.
This story was originally published August 23, 2018 at 6:29 PM.