We don’t need criminal courts to tell us they’re dishonest, boorish, and unfit to serve in elected office.
We don’t need criminal courts to tell us they’re dishonest, boorish, and unfit to serve in elected office.
N ow that everyone’s favorite Real Housewife of Capitol Hill has taken his drama elsewhere, it is worth taking time to reflect on the lessons of George Santos’s tenure.
Santos, of course, was expelled from Congress last week and is now free to convert his career from subtext to text: Instead of merely pretending to be a reality-show star, he can go full Blagojevich and begin a career of competing with other disgraced politicians for cash and attention. In joining the full-time narcissism economy, Santos will merely be doing what so many politicians want to but haven’t yet. There will undoubtedly be more.
Despite protestations that Santos was finally shown the door because of “gay stuff,” he was in fact tossed out when evidence emerged that he had broken numerous federal laws. Nonetheless, Santos and his defenders protested that the House vote to remove him was based on “mere allegations” and said it would “haunt them in the future.”
But even with Santos gone, the whole sordid affair leaves some unsettling questions. After all, more Republicans voted to keep Santos in office than voted to remove him. And just weeks before, Santos had survived a vote to expel him, with the pro-expulsion votes failing even to reach a simple majority, much less the two-thirds threshold needed to boot him out.
Of course, in criminal matters, we have the presumption of innocence, and Santos will have his opportunity to defend himself in several courts. But, contra Santos and a majority of House Republicans, “innocent until proven guilty” cannot be the standard by which we allow individuals to serve in Congress. It is, of course, a high standard we use in criminal matters to determine whether people lose their freedom. For elected officials, there should also be standards to prevent boorish, meretricious buffoonery.
Simple decency should determine whether someone who gained a congressional seat through fraudulent means will write the laws by which we all must abide.
Nevertheless, at least half of the nation’s Republicans are gripped by the idea that someone who has been charged but not yet been found criminally liable is somehow admirable as a result. They continue to support a former president facing four criminal indictments and a total of 91 felony counts. During his entire tenure in politics, Donald Trump has benefited from believing he has been “exonerated” when he eludes the consequences of his actions.
When special counsel Robert Mueller refused to recommend criminal charges against Trump, MAGA-world pitched it as a “complete exoneration,” despite details in Mueller’s final report that demonstrate appalling behavior by Trump and his associates. (Such as when Trump clearly tried to obstruct justice by ordering White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller.) In later testimony before Congress, Mueller clarified that the report was not an exoneration. Just because Mueller didn’t find enough evidence to charge Trump with collusion and obstruction didn’t mean a great deal of untoward activity didn’t take place. But Trump’s acolytes aren’t interested in standards of honesty and decency.
And, of course, when Trump escaped punishment after his two impeachments, he claimed victory and accused those seeking to hold him accountable of engaging in “witch hunts.” Never mind that in voting to exonerate Trump, GOP senators like Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas were also voting to clear themselves of their own dishonest stances on January 6; just because two-thirds of the Senate didn’t remove Trump from office doesn’t mean he didn’t engage in behavior that would have shamed any other president into resigning.
Trump’s followers see him as persecuted, so every time he wriggles out of legal consequences he seems stronger and more resolute. The underlying behavior is beside the point.
Suppose Trump had never been impeached or investigated. Imagine that he hadn’t been charged in four courts, including for mishandling classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election.
All of his other non-criminally-charged behavior is just as disgraceful. We don’t need a court to litigate the words that come out of Trump’s mouth, such as when he calls Americans “vermin” or suggests an Atlanta district attorney has had an affair with a gang member or when he calls his challenger for the Republican nomination in 2024 — his former United Nations ambassador — a “birdbrain.”
Or, consider Trump’s new January 6 talking point — that his supporters were simply engaging in a peaceful protest when a progressive writer, John Nichols from The Nation, climbed atop some scaffolding and urged the revelers to attack the U.S. Capitol. I happen to know Nichols, and the idea that a wispy, bespectacled columnist could trick a peaceful mob into attempting to overturn an election is truly deranged stuff. (Aside from the fact that he was watching the riot from Madison, Wis.) If an elderly relative had pitched such a story at a family meal, I would make sure he had plastic utensils so he didn’t hurt himself.
This is why the whole idea that we should withhold judgment of politicians until we see what happens in court is a fool’s errand. We didn’t need to wait for federal court hearings to know George Santos was a preposterous fraud, just as we already know Trump is a dishonest gasbag.
And, of course, this sudden desire for criminal leniency on the part of Republicans is the exact opposite of what Trump has pushed for his entire life. In 2022, he referred to America as a “cesspool of crime,” suggesting that police forces bring back “stop-and-frisk” policing to deter violence. In 1989, he famously took out a newspaper advertisement urging the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” a group of young black and Latino males convicted of raping and beating a female jogger; they were all subsequently exonerated. And when looters caused damage in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, Trump tweeted a famous quote from former Miami police chief Walter Headley, who had used the phrase in putting down unrest in 1967.
But when law enforcement cracks down on Trump himself, he acts as if it’s an outrage. And he continually vows to jail his political opponents.
“Not yet convicted” cannot be the standard we use to determine the worth of the elected officials who govern us. In the end, we don’t need a court to determine that Trump and Santos are unfit for office. All we need is a microphone and for them to open their mouths.