Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, points out something that has thus far gone unremarked by much of the press. As evidence of Trump’s criminality grows more acute in the impeachment inquiry, the Republican noise machine, their media outlets and spokespeople have begun ramping up the tried and true recourse of anti-Semitism. More specifically, Trump’s circumstances are being blamed on a concerted attack by a Jewish cabal, led by one Jew in particular, George Soros.
Goldberg’s entire op-ed, titled “Shame on Us for Getting Used To Trump,” is wide-ranging and worth reading in its entirety. She notes that some media outlets have criticized the lack of “drama” in the hearings thus far, citing two reporters from Reuters who labeled the hearings “consequential but dull,” as if their sole purpose was to entertain or titillate us like some sitcom or reality-show contest, as well as an NBC news analysis claiming the hearings lacked “the pizazz” to hold the nation’s interest. If we have fallen to a state where we must be “entertained” by a criminal inquiry of our elected officials, Goldberg posits, then we are already more than halfway along the road to a wholesale Idiocracy—and we’ve only got ourselves to blame.
It’s certainly true that there were few new revelations on Wednesday, since transcripts of the witnesses’ closed-door testimony had already been released. But if the facts at hand have not shaken the country to its core, that’s not the fault of Democrats on the Intelligence Committee. The responsibility lies with us all for letting this lawless, kleptocratic presidency become normalized.
Her larger point—which leads us to the right’s increasing efforts to spread anti-Semitic conspiracies—is that we cannot allow people who have voluntarily chosen to wallow in Trump’s disgrace to set the standard for what is and what is not acceptable behavior in our society, let alone what is or is not worthy of impeachment. Trump devotees, like Reps. Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes, or outright collaborators like Sen. Lindsey Graham, don’t get to redefine right and wrong.
...[I]t is a monumental mistake to allow people who will accept anything from Trump to set our standards for acceptable public behavior. By any normal metric, this week’s news — the impeachment hearing, the Stone trial, the mortifying Erdogan meeting, not to mention new revelations of the senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s white nationalism — was sensational and historic. The fact that Republicans are insisting otherwise is a sign of the depths of our political crisis. Each one of us must choose whether to treat their mulish disloyalty to their fellow citizens as a given, worthy only of shrugs, or as a shocking affront that demands redoubled political action.
Goldberg’s right. If we allow obviously corrupted people like Nunes, Jordan and Graham to set the goalposts as to what is or is not acceptable, we risk forever losing whatever decency that we, and by extension, our Republic, still possess. They are enabling and normalizing criminality. This President now stands credibly accused of extortion, bribery, fraud, assault and even rape, and they have nonetheless rushed to his defense.
Yet it’s even worse than Republicans simply trying to defend the indefensible.
As Goldberg has written in the past, and as has become increasingly obvious, the playbook that Republicans are following is one followed by Russia, by Central and Eastern European tinpot dictators. That’s a playbook that always, invariably, comes back to anti-Semitism. We have already seen it rear its ugly head in conspiracy theories that the right is promoting to discredit witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, notes Paul Waldman, writing for the American Prospect..
In her testimony, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill described the smear campaign spearheaded by Giuliani against then-ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch this way: “This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories” that included “the idea of an association between her and George Soros.”
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Hill testified that Soros was a frequent element in charges made against her as well: that she was “a Soros mole in the White House” and that the financier was behind a conspiracy in Ukraine to attack Trump. This is something Giuliani has repeated in public as well.
Goldberg observes that the drumbeat of anti-Semitism from the right is rising proportionally to the amount of damning evidence mounting against Trump, with Fox News as the primary source of amplification.
Now the claims are getting louder. On Wednesday night Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, two attorneys who’ve served as conduits between Giuliani and corrupt Ukrainian interests, appeared on Lou Dobbs’s Fox Business show, where diGenova said, “There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department.” On Thursday, the white nationalist Representative Steve King tweeted out a picture of Soros’s son, claiming, absurdly, that he was the whistle-blower. (King later deleted it.)
So now, thanks to the Republican Party, the right is channeling the same casual embrace of corruption, the same winking at criminality, the same attacks on truth and fact, even the same embrace of anti-Semitism when parochial interests are being threatened, that we see in “squalid second-rate oligarchies like Russia and Hungary,” as Goldberg puts it.
And this has all happened in record time, thanks to one thoroughly rotten, amoral man and the wholehearted embrace of his corruption by one of our two major political parties. But, as Goldberg notes, we have the power to put a stop to it, right here, and right now.
There is nothing Democrats can do to make their Republican colleagues side with upstanding patriots like Taylor and Kent — who embody the virtues conservatives once venerated — over their dear leader and the mad rantings of his worshipers. All they can do is make plain the choice America faces between hewing to ideals that everyone in public life once at least pretended to revere, or consenting to their defilement. Either Americans will reclaim their birthright and become a liberal democracy again, or not.
Donald Trump has presented all Americans with the same choice: Either we remain true to the values the country is supposed to represent, or we go down the same road as Russia, devolving into a depressing, corrupt and cynical kleptocracy.