The Scandal

The thing about any Trump administration scandal is that the mere existence of the administration is a far more gigantic and consequential scandal than any of the thousands — thousands is seriously understating it — of individual scandals that make up the administration’s day to day operations.

A particularly surreal aspect of all this is that it becomes inevitable that focusing on this or that particular aspect of the comprehensive scandal that is the very fact of the administration’s existence seems, on some level, like a kind of sanewashing.

Yeah this particular right here is in fact horrible, but it’s ALL horrible — indescribably (I’m using this term quite literally) horrible, like nothing we’ve ever seen in this country before.

The Signal texting scandal would needless to say be an administration-destroying scandal in a normal American presidential administration, but are at this point, to quote the noted political theorist Marcellus Wallace, pretty fucking far from normal. Treating it as particularly notable, under our present circumstances, strikes me as similar to treating a particular murder carried out by the Sinaloa cartel as particularly notable.

The Sinaloa cartel murdered somebody yesterday, and they’ll murder two people today, and somebody else on Friday, because it’s the Sinaloa cartel and that’s what they do. That’s any individual Trump administration scandal.

Oh look: Trump’s top henchmen committed a massive breach of national security in the stupidest way imaginable. That particular thing happened because the government is currently in the hands of a completely inept criminal gang, and that’s the kind of thing they do, because of course that’s what these sorts of people do, all the time. It’s not even really news, or it’s only news in the dog bites man sense of the term. . . . In other words the scandal is that somebody like Pete Hegseth is Secretary of Defense, because somebody like Donald Trump is president, and stories like this are a COMPLETELY INEVITABLE consequence of those larger facts. When an arsonist lights a house on fire, the story isn’t that the house is burning. The story is the arsonist.

The only real difference between the Trump administration and the Sinaloa cartel is that Sinaloa cartel is vastly more competent in its criminality than the Trump administration, who are not only criminals, but indescribably clownish and inept criminals.

Or to put it in more politically salient terms, to focus on something the Trump administration did and call it a scandal is like focusing on something the Nazis or the Stalinists did and calling it a scandal. The scandal is the Nazis. The scandal is the Stalinists. It’s not the one thing, it’s the whole thing, every goddamned day, because a criminal regime is a criminal regime, and the real scandal is that it exists, and that we’re living in it.

. . . So apparently even Waltz himself is going to suffer no consequences for this:

President Donald Trump stood by his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally added to a private, high-level chat on the messaging app Signal where military plans were being discussed.

“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump said Tuesday in a phone interview with NBC News.

This has already become just another authoritarian flex: We can do whatever we want and you can’t do anything about it.