Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Trump during a Fox News Channel town hall last week
If you came across Donald Trump’s recent tweet—“I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the last years. Sleepy Joe Biden will destroy both in very short order, and he won’t even know he’s doing it!”—your blood pressure may have started to rise. Trump was accusing Biden of doing the things he himself is guilty of (he has proposed cuts to both Social Security and Medicare) and was making a crack about Biden’s mental acuity, which is pretty rich coming from the “stable genius” who offers head spinningly bizarre and idiotic statements on a daily basis.
In your frustration, you may have said to yourself, “How does he get away with this stuff? If only someone could make the public understand what a hypocrite he is!”
That’s a completely natural reaction. Unfortunately, it’s based on a set of rules many of us still operate under, but Trump breaks quite deliberately.
Those are hardly the only hypocritical attacks Trump will make against Biden, should he be the Democratic presidential nominee. In fact, accusing Biden of Trump’s own failings will be a centerpiece of his reelection strategy.
Biden, Trump will say, is corrupt—though Trump is undoubtedly the most corrupt president in our lifetimes, if not in all of American history. He will pummel Biden for the fact that his son traded on the Biden name—even as Trump has appointed his own family members to key positions in his administration and uses the presidency to pad his own bank account. Trump will accuse Biden of being dishonest—even as he is the most dishonest politician not only in American history but probably in world history (over 16,000 false or misleading claims at last count). Trump will say that, for the bills he sponsored or things he has said, Biden is a racist and a sexist—even as he builds an entire presidency around bigotry and the number of women who have accused him of sexual misconduct is over two dozen.
It will drive you mad, which is just fine with him. But if you think he’ll be punished for it, you’ll probably be disappointed, and you misunderstand what Trump is doing.
Hypocrisy, as the saying goes, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. If you’re, say, Newt Gingrich impeaching President Bill Clinton for having an extramarital affair with a young staffer while simultaneously having an extramarital affair with a young staffer, you’ve reinforced if nothing else the idea that having extramarital affairs with young staffers is wrong.
For decades, journalists have been obsessed with identifying politicians’ hypocrisy and challenging them on it. Tim Russert practically made an entire career out of pulling up video clips of his interviewees and saying, “This is what you said last year to criticize the other party, but now you’re arguing just the opposite, because your party is the one doing the same thing!”
There are some key assumptions that undergird the hypocrisy charge. Intellectual consistency matters. There are abstract ethical, moral, and legal principles that should applied equally. If you criticize someone else for doing something of which you are guilty, you’ve revealed an important character flaw. If your hypocrisy is exposed, you should be ashamed.
In the pre-Trump era, Republicans accepted those assumptions, at least to a degree. It isn’t that they weren’t hypocritical, and plenty often, but they’d try to avoid the charge or insist when caught that their own situation really is different.
But Trump has taught them that shamelessness can be a kind of superpower. Because we in the press expect public officials to act ashamed when they’re caught in lies or hypocrisy, we don’t know quite how to handle it when they don’t. For instance, after the 2016 campaign, in which Republicans acted as though strictly following best practices in information technology is the most important qualification for the presidency, you’d think they’d take extra care to make sure that no one in the Trump administration would use private email for government business.
But they didn’t. At least seven top administration officials (that we know of) have used private email for government work. When it was revealed, they acted like they didn’t care what anyone thought about it, so buzz off. As a media strategy, it worked.
And when Trump accuses Joe Biden of being corrupt, he isn’t trying to uphold the principle that corruption is wrong. Quite the contrary. He doesn’t talk about the dangers of self-dealing politicians, or explain the damage corruption does to people’s faith in government. This is someone who says that “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas.”
No, what Trump is trying to convince people to believe isn’t that Joe Biden is corrupt and he isn’t, it’s that everyone is corrupt. So why bother caring about corruption? When he said “drain the swamp,” he didn’t mean make Washington cleaner, he meant that the other side’s influence peddlers and grifters and scammers should be kicked out, so their places could be taken by his side’s influence peddlers and grifters and scammers.
That isn’t to say Republicans, and Trump himself, don’t engage in some performative moral condemnation. But it’s so self-evidently ludicrous that it’s a kind of joke, meant to drive liberals crazy and leave conservatives laughing with glee. When noted self-made businessman Eric Trump criticizes Hunter Biden for using his father’s name to get rich, it’s what in professional wrestling they call “kayfabe,” the playacting everyone knows is playacting but you have to maintain for the purpose of the entertaining drama.
Republicans also know full well how easy it will be to get the news media to relentlessly “both sides” any and all of these controversies. Trump could accuse Biden of running a scam university and cheating on his wife with a porn star, and the headline in The New York Times the next day would read “Trump Hits Biden Over Democrat’s Finances, Marital Fidelity.”
The underlying message is what Trump uses to diffuse concern about his own misdeeds: Don’t be naïve, everyone is like this. Everyone lies, everyone is corrupt, everyone is as much of a moral monster as I am. All that matters is whose team you’re on.
Trump knows that his team will not abandon him no matter what—they don’t just tolerate his hatefulness and stupidity, they revel in it. But if he can convince Democratic voters that Biden (or Bernie Sanders, should he turn out to be the Democratic nominee) is even nearly as bad, a healthy portion of those Democrats may decide not to vote. That’s because Democrats still believe that it’s worthwhile to be honest and have integrity; if they decide their own nominee doesn’t, they may stay home.
That’s the beating heart of Trump’s strategy, and the real message behind all this hypocrisy: Stop caring, because nothing matters. In a campaign that will inevitably be close, if he can demobilize even a relatively small number of Democrats, it could be enough to bring him to victory.
