Allowing Trump's Corruption To Become Normal

In a rant yesterday, I wrote about how the media has helped normalize the extreme and radical nature of the Republican party. The anti-democratic nature of the party, their habitual lies, and the extreme cruelty reflected in its most extreme form by the AHCA gets lost in either tactical discussions or a desperate search for false equivalence.

We can see a similar issue with Donald Trump. Let’s just take today’s news about the Kushner family hawking high dollar investments from rich Chinese in order to sell visas to this country. The pitch they made specifically pointed to the access the family had to the administration and Trump himself via Jared Kushner. In addition, the pitches in China occurred one day after Trump signed an extension of this visa program as part of the budget package that kept the country running through September. The visa program was set to expire with the budget agreement passed last December but was again included in this latest budget agreement. It seems hard to believe that the Kushner family company could organize a pitch like this in China with simply one day’s notice so it was obviously tipped off in advance that it would be included in the continuing resolution. The obvious question is who tipped them off.

You might notice the headline to the Washington Post story that I linked to which is “China Pitch By Kushner Sister Renews Controversy Over Visa Program For Wealthy”. Of course, the real story in the actual article is the fact the Kushner’s sister was directly selling her access to her brother and to Trump administration. Having been caught red-handed doing so, a Kushner Companies spokesman said, “apologizes if that mention of her brother was in any way interpreted as an attempt to lure investors. That was not Ms. Meyer’s intention.” Yeah, right.

Then this morning, Trump tweeted this in anticipation of Sally Yates testimony, “Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Council.” In any other world but the one we live, that would be a clear case of the President trying to intimidate a witness before Congress. But it is just written off as another case of Trump simply mouthing off, a simple case of bad manners. It is not. It is a part of a pattern of trying to influence witnesses and the judiciary similar to his attacks on Judge Curiel before the election and judges who struck down his travel ban afterward.

The media likes to obsess about one issue for a short time and then move on to something else. It is not prepared for the daily corruption and abuse of power that Trump creates, making it hard to stay on focus. The Russia investigation, as important as it is, is the only story which has proven to have legs with the media so far. But the corruption of the Trump administration is an ongoing affair. The ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in DC and elsewhere, the hawking of Mar-a-Lago and Ivanka Trump’s book by the State Department, the trademarks provide by foreign countries, the refusal to abide by ethics rules, and the refusal of Trump’s family that have official duties to divest have created a situation where rules and norms are being broken every day to enrich Trump and his family.

Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” In many ways, the same thought applies to Trump’s corruption. It is so constant and ongoing that it becomes nearly background noise. But it is not normal and it should not allowed to become so.