The media is shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Jack Smith has the goods on Trump, and, holy cow, we had a traitor in the White House! And he committed crimes to both gain and try to hold office!
But our media continually ignores context: This is nothing new for Republican presidents.
What’s troubling isn’t so much Trump’s being busted for a very small slice of his multitude of crimes but that our media so consistently ignores the crimes of past Republican presidents as if they never happened.
For example, Tuesday was Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, but did you read in any media reports that the 1980 election was stolen from him by the Reagan campaign cutting an arguably treasonous deal with the Iranians to hold the American hostages?
Isn’t that important context when considering Carter’s legacy?
Or that the former president of Iran (who was there) outed the entire scheme, and that the former lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes (who was also there), also admitted the entire scheme to The New York Times?
Similarly, one of the mentions in Smith’s most recent recounting of Trump’s crimes around January 6 has an unnamed co-conspirator arguing that they needed to blow up the 2020 vote-counting process, much as Republicans had done in 2000: “When the colleague suggested that there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, [redacted] responded, ‘Make them riot’ and ‘Do it!!!’”
But does any media point out the context showing that this is nothing new? That the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot was largely orchestrated by now–Trump ally Roger Stone who, along with Bush’s attorneys John Roberts, Bret Kavanaugh (after his gig helping Ken Starr persecute Bill Clinton), and Amy Coney Barrett, worked to stop the Florida Supreme Court–ordered recount of the Florida vote?
More than a year after the election, a consortium of newspapers, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today, did their own recount of the vote in Florida—manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year—and concluded that Al Gore most likely did indeed win the presidency in 2000.
As the November 12, 2001, article in The New York Times read: “If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”
That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.
The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote that year by a half-million, and that five Republicans on the Supreme Court—along with a crime committed by Bush’s brother—denied him the presidency.
Surpassing anything Trump could have pulled off, Florida’s then-governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb Bush had his secretary of state, Katherine Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the 2000 election, but then—when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won—she invented a brand-new category of ballots for the 2000 election that she wouldn’t have to count: so-called “spoiled ballots.”
As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers it was part of finally recounted all the ballots: “While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.
“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”
George W. Bush “won” that election by 537 votes in Florida because the statewide recount—which would have revealed Harris’s crime and forced a count of the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore—was stopped when George H.W. Bush appointee Clarence Thomas (who should have recused himself) became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.
Katherine Harris’s decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary: There was no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it.
And then, of course, there was Richard Nixon, who was the first to commit treason in 1968 by contacting the Vietnamese to blow up the peace deal that President Johnson had negotiated that summer.
Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a personally richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then, causing the war to last another seven long years and killing more than 20,000 Americans and two million Vietnamese.
The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s U.S. agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese Embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out til November 2 they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.
Senator Dirksen: I know.
This is what Republicans have done ever since the 1960s. Power at any cost, regardless of truth, ethics, or the law.
Even Poppy Bush had his allies in Kuwait lie to Congress to justify his war against Iraq, which he hoped, like Reagan’s “little war” with Grenada, would guarantee his reelection.
Bill Clinton had an affair and tried to cover it up, but that’s about it for Democratic presidents since the Nixon era. They’ve otherwise been pillars of rectitude.
But the simple reality about the modern GOP—the simple context for Trump’s indictment—is that the last Republican president who wasn’t a criminal and didn’t commit treason by conspiring with foreign governments to acquire or hold power was Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.
Which raises the question: When Benjamin Netanyahu visited Trump last month at Mar-a-Lago, did they work out an October Surprise that might help out both of these now-indicted men politically? Has this year’s GOP candidate followed in Nixon’s, Reagan’s, and Bush’s footsteps?
It’s beyond time to tell the truth and provide context about the GOP and its candidates over the past 56 years. By regularly failing to do so, our media (and the Democratic Party) are doing both America and democracy itself a disservice.
Because, as the Trump candidacy proves, when Republicans’ crimes are not outed and punished, those Republicans simply come back and keep on criming.
