Waiting for Joseph Welch
The indictment of Trump will be no Eliot Ness moment.
We were used by [him], but that’s the nature of reporting and television especially. It was a terrible dilemma. I’m sure every responsible news office in the country was worrying, ‘How the hell do you handle this kind of stuff when you know the son of a bitch is lying? You have to say what the guy is saying, but we couldn’t catch up with his lies fast enough before another one came out, so we were giving him this buildup. The more you wrote about him, even attacked him, the more powerful he became. This is what demagoguery is all about. The hope is eventually you catch up with the truth, but meanwhile the devastation that takes place last a long time.”
(Joseph Wershba, See It Now Reporter, on Joseph McCarthy)
When you grow up with television memory can be tricky. I know I saw Oswald shot because my father and I were watching tv together at the time. “Daughter”—he called me that when he was about to say something of great moment—“You just watched history made before your eyes.” Over the next few days, we saw that history made over and over, which was a novelty in itself. Replays—groaningly frequent—are now standard stuff in a 24-hour news cycle. In the fifties, however, the evening news was only on once a day, and it took a truly extraordinary event to interrupt regular programming with replays.
So I know I saw Oswald shot. But I’m not so sure about the McCarthy hearings. I would have been 6 and a half years old, so I undoubtedly didn’t understand any of it. I would have been engrossed in something else—coloring, maybe, trying hard to stay inside the lines and create the masterpiece that I always expected of myself, searching for the Burnt Sienna crayon, maybe. Still, in some dim way I must have heard the famous words:
"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.… Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyer's Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long lastr? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
For a long time now, we’ve been longing for another moment like that, which with one blow would send the edifice of authoritarianism crashing down—or expose a President’s corruption, as we had witnessed during the televised final six days of the House Judicial Committee’s deliberations over Nixon’s impeachment. When the Committee brought three articles of impeachment against Nixon and the House voted to have the entire impeachment trial televised, Nixon resigned in a prime-time television address. He saw the cards for indictment were on the table. But also, after his fatal, sweaty showing during the Kennedy debates, he had learned to respect the power of television and the damage a televised trial could do to any standing he might retain in the history books.
At one point, we thought Robert Mueller might provide our Joseph Welch moment: The Report that would expose Trump once and for all. We waited and waited, and enjoyed a clever video in which Mr. Prosecutor Mueller, like some modern-day Elliot Ness, collared all the crooks from Flynn to Trump.
Our pulses quickened and our hearts gladdened when we heard The Report was about to be released. But Mueller, bless him, thought history was still written with a quill pen. He actually expected Americans to read 400 pages of dense prose and do the right thing by it. He didn’t “get” television at all. But disastrously, Donald Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr, following the Roger Ailes playbook, did. Trump and Barr understood that the phrase “No Collusion,” said often enough before a viewing audience, could easily defeat evidence and argument.
Watching Bill Barr replace Mueller’s painstakingly prepared, factually impeccable report with televised lies was especially deflating for those of us left-wing boomers whose politics had been grounded in the written word: Marx, The Port Huron Manifesto, Herbert Marcuse. Yet we are also children of television. So, we harbored the fantasy of a politically disruptive report delivered by a hero who, in a devastating moment of televised honesty and courage, would save us from our increasingly surreal “normalcy.” TV, as we were growing up, was full of transforming moments like that, both fictional and “real.” We weren’t ready for the possibility that the same televisual world that helped end a war via images of burning monks and fallen student protestors would also give us Donald Trump.
The failure of the Mueller report was a profoundly deflating and depressing moment, and for many of us a turning-point. It may be difficult to resurrect the memories of how hopeful we were, as there have been many mini-repeats since then and we’ve become jaded. At least, I have. Actually “jaded” is way too pale a word. I’m over hoping, period. My husband and I have periodic disagreements about this. He thinks everyone, including Trump’s supporters, are bored by him, and that boredom (ironically, as it’s been cultivated by the tv culture that brought us Trump) is going to bring him down politically, even if there’s no Joseph Welch moment. My brain shuts down whenever he says things like that. I could produce counter-arguments, but really, what’s the point? Rational analysis just doesn’t cut it anymore. I’m amazed that other writers, who like me have spent most of their lives analyzing, are still writing prognosticating books about where we are and we we are heading. I myself have no fucking idea. I usually end these discussions with Edward saying something like “I hope you’re right.”
In this bizarro moment, it seems especially perverse/appropriate that Trump may be indicated for the most pathetically mundane of all the crimes he has committed. Even worse, it seems almost tailor-made for Republican talking points. They are so brilliant at turning the bullet back against us. As in: “When Bill Clinton lied about his sex life, you didn’t call for him to be jailed!” (Forgetting, of course, that many of his enemies did want him—and later his wife—locked up for even less.) The false equivalence between lying about sex and covering up a campaign-coordinated hush payment is too subtle for most people to follow—or care about. And the Republicans have already shown that when it comes to sex they are capable of gross hypocrisy. Their family values were oh, so offended when it came to Clinton’s consensual (if inappropriate) affair—and of course they have no problem legislating bedroom behavior that they don’t approve of. But Trump can grab as many pussies as his grubby paws can manage (too disgusting to conjure a more precise image) and it’s just boys will be boys. And this wasn’t even rape or even harassment! She was a porn star, for God’s sake. Big fucking deal.
The most irritating part of the whole thing is that if it was just “about sex,” I’d be inclined to agree with the Republicans (putting the hypocrisy to one side.) But of course, it wasn’t “just about sex” or even “lying about sex.” If it was, it wouldn’t be among the crimes Michael Cohen was charged with. (He pled guilty to several charges, the relevant one being payments to women to conceal their affairs with Trump in advance of the 2016 election “in order to influence the election.” He also specified that he did so in coordination with one or more members of the campaign.) What Clinton did was to deny an affair ferreted out by an over-zealous investigator; there was no coordination with his campaign, no hush money, no connection (except in the most attenuated sense) with an upcoming election. Yet the two cases are ripe for spinning as “the same thing”—simply because sex was involved. And because sex was involved, it’s easier, too, to portray it all as a partisan witch-hunt. Unsurprisingly, that’s how the Republicans are playing it. That’s how they play every charge against Trump, but a “lie about sex” especially lends itself. McCarthy, this morning, was morally outraged over Trump’s “unequal treatment under the law.” He didn’t mention Clinton (it’s Biden they are after, and so—absurdly—the “unequal treatment” he’s referring to is about Hunter Biden.) But just give them a little time.
As many commentators have pointed out, however you spin this particular charge it pales beside Trump’s other crimes. So it seems as though even as he faces indictment—and even if he’s found guilty of this charge, whatever it turns out to be (and we don’t know yet)—he’s off the hook yet again. He’ll still be able to run for POTUS. He most likely won’t even spend a night in jail. It isn’t going to be the great comeuppance we’ve been dreaming about since the Mueller investigation. The mainstream media, capitalizing on Big Breaking News, keeps using the word “arrested,” conjuring images of Trump in handcuffs and emphasizing how “unprecedented” it will be if a former POTUS is indicated. Yes, it will be unprecedented. But it isn’t going to be Eliot Ness descending on Mar-A-Lago.
I’m not saying charges shouldn’t be brought.
I’m saying this is no Joseph Welch moment.
Irony. Roy Cohn was McCarthy lawyer, then Trump's favorite lawyer. He counter sued whenever Trump was sued, running out clock, driving up legal costs for suing party. Trump still does that today.
Some news commentators are figuring that all the various prosecutors are waiting for someone else to start the indictment ball rolling ... so at least it is starting.
And the full story of the Stormy sex night involved other sex workers. Trump tried to make it a threesome. DeSantis is mouthing off about the porn star angle, so he just might keep at it.
Also, a news program reported on a Texas County that went 96% for Trump. Those interviewed were switching to DeSantis.
Lots of cards in the air.