Dem
51
GOP
49
Donald Trump combines three things: norm breaking, convention flouting, and hyperpartisanship. They have all been on display this week. In fact, they have been there from the start. Nevertheless, many observers of politics subscribe to the "politics of revelation theory." They react as if stone was being carved away to reveal a statue, especially with regard to Trump That's really not true. Trump's the same guy he's been for decades, including his ideas on race, immigration, paying debts, and following the law.
Even if Trump hasn't changed, what is interesting is how people react to him. From the Access Hollywood tape, to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and all the rest, Republican politicians refrain from criticizing him. The media just describes his latest offense against decency and labels it "unprecedented." It is called "norm-breaking." It is never called "republic-breaking." Tuesday's events followed the usual pattern.
At the heart of the story is that partisanship overwhelms everything. Trump's approval ratings in office barely went up or down. Naturally, he was a Republican the whole time. Why should they have budged? Events, policies, and economics don't matter. Only partisanship. Nothing that happened on Tuesday will change that. Americans prefer to defend their teams rather than preserve democracy, although this clearly holds more for Republicans than Democrats.
Could the indictments finally break the pattern? After all, the indictment (and conviction) of high-ranking officials is nothing new. Here is a list of over four dozen federal officials who have been convicted of crimes. They include eight senators, 34 representatives, as well as judges, cabinet officials, and others. At the state level, it is even worse. Here is a list of state officials convicted of corruption. It includes 11 governors (with Illinois leading the list with three specimens), 12 statewide elected officials (AG, SoS, etc.) and 91 state legislators. Many more were indicted but escaped conviction, sometimes on technicalities. While no president has ever been indicted, prior to Trump, the indictment and conviction of senators, representatives, governors, and state officials is actually quite common. None of these have ever broken the chokehold partisanship has on the country and there is no reason to think one more indictment, even of a former president, is going to change that. The beat goes on.
One person who ought to be worried about Trump's indictment is Joe Biden. Once he is out of office, he will become a target. There are 30,321 district attorneys in the U.S. Of them, 54% are women and 76% are white. We couldn't find statistics on how many are Republicans, probably because many of them are nominally nonpartisan. But probably north of 10,000 are (de facto) Republicans. All it takes is one to say: "They indicted one of our people, so I will even the score and indict one of theirs." He or she then makes up some charge (e.g., "failed to defend the border") and we get a new circus. Pretty soon every ex-president gets indicted. This could be an opporunity to break the hold of partisanship on everything, but we are not optimistic and neither is Julia Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University, who wrote the article linked at the start of this item. (V)