There Are No Heroes Here

W hen my wife and I recently sat down to watch Netflix’s true-crime documentary series — a genre we typically enjoy — about the rise and fall of the infidelity-facilitating website Ashley Madison, we had reasonably high expectations. The stakes in that drama couldn’t be higher. Millions of people risked their marriages by uploading their most intimate secrets onto a website operated by a multimillion-dollar enterprise upon which hundreds of livelihoods depended. When the service was hacked, it threatened the integrity of those marriages, the jobs of those who catered to their clients’ desires, and the still nascent concept of cybersecurity itself. The series should have clicked with us, but it didn’t. We quit after one episode.

While the stakes were high in the abstract, our investment in them was minimal. There were no heroes in this tale — no protagonists to root for, only a constellation of egotists whose self-absorption led them to destroy their personal relationships and do violence to the institutions around them, about which they cared little. Maybe the series got better from there, but we’ll never know. That service, its victims, its hackers — they all deserve one another, to say nothing of the consequences their unscrupulous actions brought down around them.

Much the same could be said for the pallid morality play to which heavy-breathing partisans insist we are all now privy. Among committed Democrats and their allies, Donald Trump’s conviction in a Manhattan courtroom is “justice done.” They appear to believe we should be grateful to them for the unprecedented actions they took to get at Trump however they could, unleashing unknowable forces in the process, forces that our generation and those that come after us must now contend with. Thanks so much.

Likewise, the American Right seems inclined to beatify Trump — a man possessed of such incomprehensible venality and recklessness that he would put the country through his personal drama. He must be made into, if not a paragon of virtue, at least a sympathetic victim. What twaddle. It’s possible to believe, as I do, that Trump was railroaded on charges for which no one else would be prosecuted — much less in the sordid way it was prosecuted, which is why we have appellate courts in the first place — and still deny him the role of savior. On the right, however, that appears to be a minority viewpoint.

Take, for example, an illustrative conversation on the Megyn Kelly Show between NewsNation host Dan Abrams and Kelly herself — two people I sincerely admire and to whom I am grateful for their guidance at various points in my career. Their conversation hit a snag when Abrams alleged that, whatever the merits or lacks in Trump’s conviction, “there was definitely wrongdoing” on Trump’s part. Kelly objected. “What was it?” she asked. At this point, host and guest talked past each other, with one focusing on the supposed legal infraction Alvin Bragg set out to prosecute and the other arguing moral constructs. But they both got back on the same page soon enough. “I’m talking about the $130,000 to keep [Stormy Daniels] quiet to protect his campaign,” Abrams said. “It’s not immoral,” Kelly replied. “There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Nothing.”

There is, of course, a lot that is “immoral” in Trump’s conduct. He had a series of affairs, the one in question taking place while his wife, Melania, was still caring for their newborn son, Barron. He was extorted into paying hush money to his paramours, which he did by compelling his subordinates to go out of pocket to pay his debts, apparently without reimbursement. Then he sought to hide the evidence of it all only to spare himself the discomfort of being confronted with his own misconduct. Each and every person in this narrative is an inveterate liar. The only reason we can assume any of them are telling the truth about these events is their willingness to fork over cash in service to their own interests.

Indeed, as Andy McCarthy capably demonstrated, it was likely Trump’s dogged refusal to confess to his own infidelities, which, as Andy puts it, are “notorious and not credibly deniable,” that helped the jury conclude that prosecutors were unraveling a conspiracy of sorts. No one with an ounce of civic propriety would have continued running for the White House under these circumstances, irrespective of the fact that Trump’s prosecution was objectively unjust. Nor should anyone feel compelled to evaluate Trump’s behavior in a vacuum. He has openly bragged about his willingness to flout the law and violate the unfortunate souls in his orbit to satisfy his own appetites — up to and including violating the sacred oath he swore to protect and defend the Constitution. “I’m being indicted for you,” the former president likes to say. For some reason, millions of Republicans who would never engage in the disreputable practices in which Trump indulged find this line compelling. Forgive me if I am unmoved.

The behavior of the Manhattan district attorney’s office is just as condemnable, as are the antics of the court officers who abetted its misconduct. Bragg has recklessly undermined the public’s faith in the independence of the American legal system by committing himself to an admittedly political prosecution of the former president. In the drive to establish Trump’s criminality for no higher purpose than to advance Democrats’ political objectives, a collection of Democratic operatives bent and broke the rules governing more disciplined prosecutors. And like some on the right, the demands on partisans with skin in the electoral game have led them to enthusiastically endorse the grotesque moral and professional compromises that produced this outcome.

Again, just by way of revealing example, observe the response to the jury’s verdicts by Andrew Weissman — a famously aggressive prosecutor who played a key role in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s alleged (and since debunked) connections with Russia. Now an MSNBC commentator, Weissman has abandoned even the pretense of neutrality. On set, he reveled in Alvin Bragg’s gamesmanship, and he confessed he has a “man crush” on Judge Juan Merchan because the judge put his thumb on the scale to influence proceedings against Trump. To hear Weissman tell it, Merchan is the antidote to the “distrust in our legal system” that is exclusively “fomented by Donald Trump and others” in his camp. Not hardly.

Weissman can luxuriate in that delusion if he likes, but it is self-deception with an odious purpose. His partisanship retroactively confirms all the Right’s worst suspicions about the partiality of the justice system. His canonization of the malefactors in this affair will only convince those outside his political tribe to embrace the very moral relativism he displays, to put their faith not in institutions or conventions but in raw power. To get to Trump however they could, the people Weissman lauds took a wrecking ball to the invaluable institutions we were blessedly bequeathed by our forebears. And they expect us to be grateful for it.

There are no heroes in this story. Donald Trump, Alvin Bragg, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, Juan Merchan, David Pecker, Matthew Colangelo, Karen McDougal — all miscreants, all acting in their own self-interest with total disregard for the well-being of others, all of whom deserve one another. We will now reap the whirlwind they’ve sown for us. The only victims in this tale are those of us who had nothing to do with it. We can mourn the consequences that will flow from this exhibition of competing narcissisms without trying to convince ourselves that there is righteousness to be found somewhere in this melodrama. There is none. Both parties to this dispute put their own interests ahead of the country’s. They have not earned our admiration. Only our contempt.