After Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spent his Sunday show time insisting that he hadn't seen the whistleblower complaint on the contents of Donald Trumps call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and so therefore could not possibly comment on the unfolding scandal, we soon learned that the ex-House Republican was in fact listening in on that very phone call when it was made. Pompeo intentionally misled the public about his actions and his involvement; in his previous life as Benghazi! conspiracy fanatic, such behavior from a public official was unacceptable to him, criminal, a conspiracy, and so forth. Now that he's one of Trump's right-hand men, lying to the press and the public counts as just another weekday.
The Washington Post, which continues to run circles around The New York Times in reporting on the widespread crookedness of the Trump inner circle, puts this in its proper context. It is not that a panicked Pompeo was momentarily at a loss for what to say: Trump's top officials have an extensive history of lying outright to the public.
From former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's denials of an ongoing Trump family separation policy to former Attorney General Jeff Session accidentally "forgetting" meetings with a Russian official to now-Attorney General William Barr's [sweeping hand gesture here] to Vice President Mike Pence regularly making claims that turn out, oopsie-doopsie, to be inoperative, the conservative White House's top ranks have misled the public repeatedly, and incessantly, since the first days of the administration. It is a direct result of the Republican adoption of Trump's own strategy of simply lying outright to make an uncomfortable fact or scandal go away; that, or Trump and his top strategists have a master eye for plucking out and elevating the most dishonest Republican voices. Or both.
But it's perhaps Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross' behavior that's the most instructive. Ross' lie is a doozy. Ross told both the public and the courts that it was the Justice Department, not him, that pressed for the addition of a citizenship question on the 2020 U.S. census. This was a direct lie: Evidence was soon uncovered to prove that Ross had personally requested the change. It was not a truth-shading or a bit of dodging omission. It was a straight-up lie about his own key role in a decision of major public consequence, and to this day he has not been held to account for it. Not even a little.
It is not that Donald Trump is a singularly corrupt and incompetent president. If that were all the nation was facing, it could be and would have been dispensed with long ago; Democratic and Republican lawmakers would have banded together to eject him from office and the problem would be, after a half-decade of trailing court cases was unraveled, solved. But Trump is leading a White House of long-known Republican names who themselves, from Pruitt to Pompeo and Zinke to Barr, have embraced a strategy of bending laws and ethics rules as far as they would go, then going farther, after open public party insistence that non-Republican governance was, in the end, simply illegitimate. Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate have spent the entirety of the administration defending those acts, and nullifying attempts to enforce prior ethical norms.
There is reason to remove a half-dozen members of Trump's Cabinet from office. There is reason to charge several of them with criminal acts. Cleaning up the rank corruption of the Trump White House does not begin or end with Trump. If we are serious about restoring the ethical and legal boundaries that existed before Republicans painted over them with a thick tar of indifference, there must be consequences for betraying the public trust.