They’re merely noticing it.
They’re merely noticing it.
T he Republican Party’s 2024 aspirants are invested in perpetuating and, indeed, exacerbating a crisis of mistrust in America’s governing institutions. That’s not the subtext of Jennifer Medina’s New York Times profile of the GOP field; it’s the text.
There “is little doubt about the political incentives” that inform Republican presidential candidates’ attacks on the integrity of America’s “core institutions,” Medina writes. As polls show the public’s willingness to defer to the assumed probity of its establishmentarian stewards has reached “historic lows,” the GOP has capitalized on this trend by “exhibiting more doubt across a broad swath of public life.” From the mists of this paragraph emerge sages of expertise, all of whom cast shame on Republicans. The conduct of the party’s candidates “has alarmed” good-governance advocates. Their willingness to entertain their voters’ concerns could have a “long-term impact on American democracy.”
Medina’s piece devotes particular attention to how Republicans talk about the dispassionate and impartial conduct of justice in the United States. It marvels at the irresponsibility displayed “even” by the field’s more reliably cautious candidates. From Nikki Haley warning of the IRS’s failure to observe neutrality to Mike Pence’s complaints about a “two-tiered system of justice,” with “one set of rules for Republicans, and one set of rules for Democrats,” Medina observes that the experts are beside themselves over a campaign that “has reached new and conspiratorial levels.”
This analysis gets the sequence of events backward. Republicans have not fabricated the dearth of public confidence in the enterprise of self-government. They’ve done little more than notice it.
For example, Hunter Biden’s attorneys are justifiably perturbed by the implosion of a federal plea agreement that would have immunized their client against a variety of charges involving the failure to pay certain taxes. “That included language that said the U.S. wouldn’t criminally prosecute Biden further over the conduct at issue in either the tax or gun cases, a provision which Biden understood to mean the investigation was over,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The government now insists that was never the case, though that is a mistake anyone might have made given the unusual accommodations the Justice Department tried to provide the president’s son.
With the plea deal in tatters, the DOJ has now named the very prosecutor who allowed the statute of limitations to elapse while investigating Hunter Biden over the course of four years to head a special-counsel investigation into Biden’s conduct, violating the standard that traditionally ensures independent prosecutors come from outside the Justice Department. Given the DOJ’s willingness to court at least the appearance of impropriety, what are Americans supposed to think is happening here? “It’s bad for everyday Americans who ask the question, ‘Can I trust the DOJ?’” Senator Tim Scott said on Friday. “The answer is emphatically no.” Medina’s piece presupposes Scott’s “more-in-sorrow” tone is a contrivance, but sorrow is the least we can expect from someone who believes they are witnessing the corruption of the conduct of justice in real time.
When Haley poses the rhetorical question to voters, “Does anyone believe the IRS won’t go after Middle America?” she’s not mobilizing a thoughtless rabble. She’s staking out a position reinforced by the evidence of our own memories.
Few scandals focused Republican minds like the May 2013 apology from IRS official Lois Lerner for the “inappropriate” scrutiny she and her division applied to tax-exempt-status applications submitted by conservative groups. The White House later admitted that White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler had been informed of the IRS scandal a month before Lerner made it public, and the administration confessed that there had been internal discussions around defusing the political impact of the scandal prior to that revelation. In 2017, Lerner’s mea culpa was lent more credence after a federal judge signed off on a settlement compelling the IRS to “express its sincere apology” to the right-leaning groups singled out for excessive scrutiny.
None of this is likely to ring a bell for Democratic partisans. In the interim, we’ve been treated to a variety of rationalizations designed to convince voters that the IRS’s admittedly scandalous conduct wasn’t scandalous at all. In certain rarified quarters, to dwell on the mistreatment right-wing groups faced at the hands of one of the nation’s most powerful law-enforcement agencies is to expose yourself as a kook. How are Republicans supposed to react when their political opponents attempt to retroactively condition them into believing that the IRS’s abuse was a figment of their imaginations?
Medina singles out Ron DeSantis for special opprobrium over his criticisms of the U.S. military. “The military that I see is different from the military I served in,” DeSantis told Fox News Channel. “When revered institutions like our own military are more concerned with matters not central to the mission — from global warming to gender ideology and pronouns — morale declines and recruiting suffers.” His allegations are blamed for contributing to the decline in Republican voters’ trust in the armed services. But there is ample evidence that America’s recruitment challenges are driven to some extent by social engineering in the armed forces.
An October 2022 poll conducted by the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness found that 68 percent of veterans said they’d witnessed the politicization of the military, and another 65 percent said they didn’t particularly like it. Sixty-eight percent of service members polled said that experience influenced their willingness to encourage their children to serve in uniform. Given the degree to which family connections to the armed forces inform a volunteer’s willingness to serve, this sentiment contributes to America’s readiness risks as much as any other factor.
The Times’ takedown of the hopelessly paranoid Right likens these Republican complaints with the baseless charges involving electoral malfeasance in 2020, which Donald Trump and his allies litigated to death in the courts and continue to retail on the stump. The objective is as transparent as it is tawdry: The Times is asking its readers to subordinate their powers of discretion to a political imperative, one that would attribute all the GOP’s complaints about the politicization of institutions and the misconduct of their custodians to the paranoia of the party’s base voters.
This is advocacy disguised as journalism, and it does Democrats no favors. The social pressure on Democrats to avoid describing in plain terms what we are all witnessing robs them of the vocabulary necessary to navigate the national conversation about the trust crisis. Indeed, the Times’ subtle effort to manipulate the public into believing Republican claims are wholly illegitimate is a symptom of that very crisis.
It’s not just Republicans who are noticing how far off the rails America’s governing enterprises are skidding. But if they’re the only political actors willing to frame the problem accurately and in ways that voters will recognize, Republicans will own the issue.