Republican efforts to normalize Trump's plans to not divest himself from his myriad businesses (and, thus, myriad opportunities for self-enrichment off his presidency) continue to get stupider.
And apologies for not using a properly pundity word instead of "stupider." Maybe something like intriguing or controversial or unusual, but when you have to go back to the time of slaveholding and a barely-functional national government in order to justify why Donald Trump can profit off White House visitors staying at his own personal Washington hotel two centuries later, then calling such an argument unusual or controversial or anything other than the semi-coherent dribblings of a professional moron would fail to get the point across.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said on Wednesday that he does not think Trump needs to disentangle himself. “To be fair to him, he’s not a guy who made his money out of doing business with the government, particularly,” he observed.
Cole added that he thinks Trump’s team is “trying to be careful,” because “opponents will try to put the worst aspersions” on anything he does. “I don’t expect the family to get out of a family business, for goodness sake. I mean, you read much history, George Washington was still pretty active in managing Mount Vernon when he was president of the United States.”
By this time next year, Tom Cole will be explaining that it's all right for Donald Trump to keep three dozen child slaves chained up the the White House basement because by God, it's what George Washington would have done.
If we travel forward in history to, oh, say any reasonably recent time, the more modern rules have changed considerably since the time of Mount Freaking Vernon. (President Jimmy Carter was famously required to sell his Georgia peanut farm, lest the presidency be held in the pocket of Big Peanut.) It has been a well-established requirement of the modern presidency, at least until a month ago, because until a month ago it was taken largely for granted that our sitting president was at the very least not allowed to be crooked.
Rep. Tom Cole, for example, is part of a Republican House that melted themselves into bubbling puddles over even the perception of "pay to play" concerns in the Clinton Foundation—but now are pooh-poohing concerns over foreign dignitaries currently funneling cash into Trump's own businesses. Cole was personally quite chagrined over the "irresponsible" mixing of private and work emails on Clinton's mail services, but Donald Trump continuing to turn an actual profit on everything from his transition meetings to his own Secret Service protection is, Cole opines, not much to get worked up about.
The short version is that Rep. Tom Cole, like other House Republicans, appears to believe the rules that existed just a few weeks ago should no longer apply to Trump, because Trump is ... what? Too rich to comply? Too Republican to comply? Too crooked to comply, therefore requiring Tom Cole and the rest of his party to bend to declare Trump's new behaviors acceptable rather than, in holding him to account, embarrassing the party?
It's not yet been explained just why the laws and ethical norms that Donald Trump doesn't want applied to him should not be applied to him. We only know that if you go back 200 years or so, things were different, and so perhaps it would be "unfair" to hold him to last October's anti-corruption standards. Trump is clearly incapable of acting with integrity, it seems, and so the Republican Party will meet him wherever he ends up and declare that that place is now where "integrity" lies.
Which, of course, is crooked. Even Nixon couldn't get away with that, but Nixon had honest Republicans watching his actions from the House and Senate. Trump has only Republicans like Tom Cole.