When Democrats investigate the administration — and they will — Republicans shouldn’t lift a finger to defend corruption, greed, or influence-peddling.
With Democrats firmly in control of both houses of Congress by large margins beginning in January, the investigations are coming. Subpoenas will fly, hearings will be held, court battles will be fought, and pardons dangled or issued as the Trump administration tries to resist this. Republicans in Congress, with diminished presence on the committees, will have little power to stop this, but they will be tempted to organize as Trump’s defense team.
The defensive playbook, used and refined for years now by both parties, is a familiar one. Attack the hearings as a witch hunt. Refuse to cooperate with the majority’s demands for documents and witnesses. Complain that the evidence is being distorted and taken out of context. Give speeches about how the other side did this too. Conduct sympathetic cross-examinations. Launch off-topic ad hominem attacks against the majority.
At times, defense will be warranted. Democrats will want to paint Trump policies in lurid colors that are often far removed from reality. They may make big, easily mocked mistakes of the sort that happen when a job suited for courtroom lawyers is done by speechifying politicians, some of them well into their dotage.
But Republicans should not just reflexively defend everything Trump. That is how they got into this mess. They should pick their battles. My advice on one choice they should make: Don’t lift a finger to defend corruption, greed, or influence-peddling. In fact, they’d be wise to get out front demanding answers, as Utah’s John Curtis has done.
There is plenty of it to investigate. That includes Trump and Trump’s family, from the multibillion-dollar Trump/Witkoff UAE cryptocurrency scam to Don Jr.’s Russian oligarch-paid wedding to all manner of messes made by Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski at the Department of Homeland Security, and on and on from there. Of course, there will be factional interests at play, given that anything touching Don Jr. gets to the heart of JD Vance–world. But let the chips fall where they may. Republicans have a winning issue in attacking benefit-program fraud, which has spun out of control for reasons tied intimately both to Democratic ideology about welfare programs and Democratic client politics. The issue would have sunk the whole Democratic ticket in Minnesota had it not been for the overwhelmingly blue national environment coupled with the early withdrawal of Tim Walz from his reelection race. Vance has made it his own signature initiative at the federal level. But you lose credibility in going after crooks and fraudsters — some of them who started as poor immigrants — if you defend the reek of self-dealing from your own people.
When Hernán Cortés had to flee Tenochtitlan with his men on La Noche Triste in 1520, some of the greedier Spanish soldiers tried to smuggle too much Aztec gold out of the city, couldn’t make it across the causeway, and drowned in the lake surrounding the city, literally weighted to their deaths by stolen gold. Republicans should let the crooks in this administration drown in their own greed.