Tag: Bill Clinton

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.

IT’S TIME TO ATONE FOR BILL CLINTON’S SEXUAL HARASSMENT

If our come-to-Jesus moment on sexual harassment is going to amount to anything other than a passing blip, we need to accept the painfully awkward truth that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency for carrying on a sexual relationship with an intern.

For 20 years, we have fooled ourselves into a false state of moral ambivalence over Clinton. We gave a pass to a popular president whose uncanny ability to compartmentalize turned him into a role model for every would-be sexual harasser. This is not a time to let old wounds fade away. There can be no healing for what ails us until they are reopened and appropriately treated.

The only prominent Democrat who has had the courage to speak this truth is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. In an interview with the New York Times podcast, “The New Washington,” Gillibrand was asked if, based on what we now know about inappropriate sexual behavior, Clinton should have resigned when his relationship with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, came to light. In a rare move for a member of Congress, the senator sat in silence while formulating her answer, which was: “Yes, I think that is the appropriate response.” Within hours, the Democratic establishment pounced. Philippe Reines, a long-time political operative for the Clintons, sent this tweet to Gillibrand: “Over 20 yrs you took the Clinton’s endorsements, money and seat. Hypocrite. Interesting strategy for 2020 primaries. Best of luck.”

That is precisely the kind of party line, patriarchal , protect-the-good-old-boys thinking that has allowed sexual harassment to run rampant in most of our male-dominated institutions, which is to say 98 percent of them. Look, Bill Clinton was guilty of classic, textbook sexual harassment. It was not a close case. Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern. Clinton was the president of the United States. It’s hard to imagine a greater power disparity. When White House aides grew suspicious of the relationship, Lewinsky was forced to move from the White House to the Pentagon. When she complained, Clinton promised to bring her back after he won reelection. Her employment conditions were based on a sexual relationship with the leader of the free world.

Incredibly, there was no serious push to remove Clinton from office for this gross abuse of power. Yes, he was impeached by the House and acquitted in the Senate, but the charge was lying about the sex, not engaging in it with an intern. Once framed as a fidelity issue, as in a married man lying about having sex outside the marriage, Clinton’s defense garnered empathy in Washington political circles, even among conservative Republicans. The only problem was that it shouldn’t have been about lying; it should have been about a boss having sex with an intern.

So, does any of this really matter now? Yes, it matters mightily because the Clinton-Lewinsky episode is the original sin supporting a perverse double standard when it comes to sexual harassment and misconduct by elected leaders. In just the past few weeks, this amazing reckoning over sexual behavior has banished all sorts of private sector A-listers to the has-been junk heap of fallen careers: Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, etc. Yet, Roy Moore, accused of stalking and fondling teenage girls as young as 14 when he was in his 30s, may well be elected to the Senate from Alabama later this month. Many Alabama voters say they don’t approve of Moore’s conduct but they like his politics. Sound familiar? That’s what a lot of presidential voters said last year when they elected Donald Trump after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct, and he was heard on tape boasting of such behavior. And, of course, that’s what many of us said back in the 1990s about Bill Clinton: he might be a cad, but he was a good president who led us through two terms of peace and prosperity.

Of course, there is more than Monica Lewinsky in this story. Clinton’s accusers of sexual misconduct have told stories ranging from rape to groping. Sadly, these women became pawns of anti-Clinton conservatives because nobody else would hear them out. The Clinton team attacked them relentlessly, not unlike what the right is doing now to Roy Moore’s accusers. Remember this line from former Clinton staffer James Carville?: “If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

People ask why women wait so long to report sexual misconduct. Knowing that they would be called trailer park trash probably had a lot to do with it. Now is the time to the bury that repulsive form of advocacy. Here’s what else needs to go: the notion that a leader’s politics should mitigate against serious and proven transgressions of sexual misconduct and harassment. There is no other way to assure that our workplaces and our governments are free from the toxicity of sexual harassment. There can be no more passes for voting the right way.

If we are really ready to move beyond ruthless victim bashing, and deal head-on with the insidious forces of sexual misconduct, we have to own up to the fact that Bill Clinton didn’t deserve, and shouldn’t have been given, a pass. His choice to have sex with an intern was as disqualifying for retaining his office as it would have been for a corporate executive who engaged in the same behavior.

At some point in this fast-moving morality play on sexual misbehavior, there is apt to be more focus on those still-pending accusations against Donald Trump. If Democrats want to engage in that dialogue with any respect and credibility, they need to follow Sen. Gillibrand’s lead and acknowledge the obvious: Clinton should have resigned. That’s the only way the terrain moving forward is going to be changed.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES? TRUMP DODGES BOTH

Washington is once again awash with talk of presidential falsehoods. One Republican senator decried Donald Trump’s “flagrant disregard for the truth.” Another said the president is “utterly untruthful”. A neutral fact-checking service says close to 70 percent of Trump’s statements it examined were false.

Trump calls his tax plan a “middle class miracle” that will be “fantastic” for workers and make the rich pay more, when it actually does just the opposite. He says former president Obama never phoned families of fallen soldiers, when the record is replete with such calls. Major media organizations have kept a running catalog of the president’s false statements, now deep into four figures (here, here, here and here). Evidence of the president’s estrangement from the truth is so overwhelming, that a substantial majority of Republicans think he is a prolific liar, but still support him.

Yet, the Donald’s problem is not that he lies a lot. It’s that truth is utterly without value or meaning to him. The president is simply agnostic on the subject. Truth and falsity are equally irrelevant in his world. The words that flow from his mouth and Twitter app, are visceral, not factual. They are servants to his limited, binary emotional wiring: they either heap grandiose praise on himself or viciously attack others. It matters not one iota to him whether those words are true or false.

In fact, many of Trump’s falsehoods are not lies. Lying is a conscious act of deception. That means a liar must know the truth in order to deceive an audience with the lie. Think about some of the president’s classic claims: Mexico will pay for it; the New York Times is failing; Obamacare is dead. This is not a guy who methodically determines the truth and then disguises it with a lie. He simply goes with whatever jumps into his head, with whatever sounds good to him, with zero regard for the truth of the matter.

When, in 1972, Richard Nixon said he had no knowledge of the Watergate burglary, he was lying. When, in 1986, Ronald Reagan said he did not trade arms for hostages, he was lying. When, in 1998, Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, he was lying. These men knew the truth and strategically replaced it with a lie. They were not the only presidents to have done so. But Trump is in a league of his own. Truth does not matter to him. He doesn’t know what it is, and has no desire to learn. This makes him, as noted philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed, a “greater enemy of truth” than a mere liar.

Trump’s former butler, Anthony Senecal, read a published claim by his boss that some of the tiles in the Mar-a-Largo beach club had been personally designed by Walt Disney. Surprised by that revelation, Senecal asked Trump if that was really true. His response: “Who cares?” That pretty much captures this post-truth presidency. The leader of the free world, our commander in chief, the keeper of the nuclear codes, cares not one whit about truth.

Let me introduce you to someone who does care. Her name is Shannon Mulcahy. She is a 43-year-old single mother trying to support herself, two kids, a disabled grandchild, and two dogs in a small town near Indianapolis. Until a few months ago, Shannon worked at the Rexnord factory in Indy helping produce the Cadillac of steel bearings. She’d been there for 18 years. In an interview with the New York Times and the newspaper’s Daily podcast, Shannon said she loved the work as much as she did the good pay and benefits provided by her union contract. Last October, Rexnord announced that it was closing the plant, laying off its 300 employees and moving the work to Mexico. Shannon rushed to her car in the employee lot and started crying. Just like that, her middle class life began to crumble and she had no idea how she was going to support her family. Then came the tweets from candidate Trump, blasting Rexnord by name for “viciously firing all of its workers” and moving to Mexico. “No more,” tweeted the candidate.

Shannon never paid much attention to politics but had voted for Obama. Donald Trump and his tweets captured her attention like no politician ever had. He gave her and her coworkers hope at a time they needed it the most. “All of us were hopeful,” she told the Daily. “A lot of us there at Rexnord was thinking that he could actually step in and stop what was going on there. (If) he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants, right? I mean he’s kind of like a cowboy. He says things that a lot of past presidents wouldn’t say. The way he talked about American jobs and all that, I was thinking this could be the opportunity where . . . you know, a lot of our jobs come back from overseas. That would be awesome.”

So Shannon went political. Trump was her lifeline to a job that put meaning in her life and food on her family’s table. She conducted her own social media campaign on his behalf. She was thrilled when he won and then waited for him to come riding into town on his white horse to save the factory. It was like waiting for Godot. The cowboy never came. The plant closed. In a year filled with disillusion, Trump was just one more hard knock for Shannon. “After he got in there,” she said, “he done forgot about us and we don’t matter anymore.”

Sadly, Shannon, you never mattered to him. Nothing matters to this man except himself. Certainly not truth. His words have no shelf life. They exist only in the impulse of the moment. He makes us all long for the good old days when presidents only lied every once in a while.

IT’S NOT JUST TRUMP – OUR WHOLE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

Our body politic is totally messed up. If a family member was as out of control and dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress, we would have staged an intervention long ago. Could it be that we are so sidetracked by the aberrant, maniacal antics of an unhinged president that we can’t bring ourselves to focus on the much broader problem of a broken system?

It is, after all, difficult to have a serious conversation about realigning the architecture of governance over the constant din of presidential tantrums, tweeted threats of nuclear annihilation and never-ending Russia investigations. Yet, if we step back from the chaos of the moment and examine how we got there, this glaring truth emerges: Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of our problem. It may be hard to remember, but our democracy was pretty out of whack before the Donald landed in the White House. In fact, that’s how he got there.

The heart of our systemic problem is a deep toxicity of tribalism that has coagulated in the veins of our politics, blocking the free flow of creative, constructive, problem-solving solutions. For most of this country’s history, elected representatives from both parties were able to tackle major issues through a rugged-but-productive give-and-take. It wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. All that slowed to a crawl, then to a virtual stop, over the past decade.

A 2014 study examined the productivity of Congress over the years by measuring the number of major issues that body failed to address. It found that the volume of gridlock had doubled since 1950, with 75% of key legislation dying by deadlock. Things have only gotten worse. Despite single-party control of the House, Senate and the presidency, not a single salient issue has been resolved this year. Small wonder that 80% of Americans disapprove of Congress. Even before last year’s election, 70% of Democratic activists said they were afraid of Republicans, while 62% of the GOP said they were afraid of Democrats. That’s a level of hyper partisanship never before recorded or experienced.

Analysts offer a multiplicity of causes for this congressional quagmire. Among them: growing income disparity, free-flow of corporate money in campaigns, racism, and an expanding right flank in the Republican Party, exacerbated by gerrymandered reapportionment and primary battles between the GOP mainstream and the right. On top of those factors, the relative parity between the two parties creates an intense competition. The result is that making the other side look bad is more important than passing productive legislation.

Although this strategic dysfunction set in well over a decade ago, it was not openly acknowledged. That all changed in 2010 when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell came out of the closet and announced that his top legislative goal was to make sure then-president Obama did not get a second term. It’s been downhill ever since. A new breed of hardline conservatives, ranging from the Senate’s Ted Cruz to the House’s Freedom Caucus, got elected by bucking the Republican establishment. As the Wall Street Journal noted, these folks think nothing of closing the government over the debt ceiling or Planned Parenthood without the slightest expectation of success. Such “unbending opposition,” says the Journal, “is not a means. It is an end in itself.”

It was in that kind of atmosphere, that the Democrats, enjoying a rare bicameral majority in 2010, did something that had never been done in modern congressional history. It passed a major bill, the Affordable Care Act, without a single vote from the opposition party. The Republicans seized the moment, coined the term “Obamacare” and have been staging exorcisms ever since. Obama became the source of all evil for those on the right. Trump didn’t write that script. He just picked it up and went with it. Meanwhile, particularly in the last two years of his presidency, Obama gave up on an intransigent Congress and used executive orders to put as much of his program into place as possible. He sealed a deal with Iran on his own, created a legal status for the dreamers, issued numerous rules and regulations on the environment, and negotiated the Paris climate change pact.

“We have a president,” Trump said during his campaign, “that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.” Last week, Trump signed his 49th executive order, the most of any president (at this point of his term) in more than 50 years. He has managed to reverse the bulk of Obama’s executive actions. At this moment, Obamacare continues to breathe only through the ineptitude of its would-be executioners.

This schizophrenic approach to governance is not what the founders had in mind. Yes, power needs to change hands at the direction of the electorate, but the entirety of our domestic programs and commitments to other countries has never been discarded en masse. Until 2010, every major legislative package (Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, etc.) was passed with votes from both parties. None of those laws were repealed when control of Congress changed.

Partisanship is an inherent component of our democratic process, but partisanship on steroids, divorced from cooperation and constructive engagement, is a lethal anathema to good governance.

An amazingly prophetic George Washington, in his final address as president, warned that extreme partisanship would lead not just to a revenge-seeking loop between the parties, but ultimately to authoritarianism. Said our first president: “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to see security and repose in the absolute power of an individual (who) . . .turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As if he had the vision of 2017 in front of him, Washington then suggested that this evil of hyper-partisanship will open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Before it’s too late, we need to return to a political system where the needs of the people outweigh the needs of the politicians.

WARREN HARDING IS NO LONGER THE WORST PRESIDENT

It may have escaped your attention, what with Rocket Man and the Dotard flexing for nuclear war, but historians are pretty sure that Donald Trump has already overtaken Warren Harding as the country’s worst president. This has no doubt brought Harding his first good night of eternal rest since dying in office in 1923.

In many ways, the 29th and 45th presidents are starkly dissimilar. Harding drank too much. Trump, in his singular gift to humanity, is a teetotaler. Harding was suave and debonair. Trump is puffy and orange. Harding was known to woo and enchant women with romance. Trump grabs them the wrong way. Harding was prone to honest self-reflection, having once said, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” Trump stares down his massive failures and declares his reign to be “the best presidency ever.”

Yet, both men entered the White House through amazingly similar routes. Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling treatise on the ups and downs of intuitive decision making, “Blink”, devoted a section to Harding as an example of the down side. Harding, the author noted, never distinguished himself when he was in the Ohio legislature or the U.S. Senate. Instead, writes Gladwell, a political sponsor pushed Harding to run because he “looked like a president.” Those looks were enough to get him the Republican nomination at a brokered convention in 1920, and, from there, the presidency. The charisma and presidential confidence that voters saw, however, was a mere façade. Harding lacked the capability of functioning successfully as a president.

Although the Donald hardly brought a Mount Rushmore face to the ticket, he had something just as powerful as Harding’s presidential aura. As a blustery business mogul, Candidate Trump was rude, crude and mad as hell. Eschewing all forms of political correctness, he denigrated every minority group imaginable and ripped into establishment elites for coddling them. For a good chunk of voters, it was a different kind of love at first sight. To the disgruntled, disaffected and disenfranchised – mostly older, angry Caucasians longing for the good old days when white privilege actually counted for something – Donald Trump was their Warren Harding. It wasn’t his looks. It was how he acted, what he said, his anger, his persona. He was one of them, their only hope to take a rapidly changing country back. But there was a problem, the same one Harding’s supporters faced: a deep void behind the veneer. There was no substance, intellect or skill to convert an illusion of competence into effective governance.

And so we have, in the ninth month of this administration, a new paradigm of presidential paralysis, a bizarre, needy codependency between the president and his not-so-merry band of malcontents. It’s a vicious cycle of dysfunction, in which Trump responds to each failure with an outrageous act that disgusts most people, but is lovingly devoured, like a piece of red meat, by his faithful base. As a result, he loses support from moderates and independents, while holding on to a “strongly support” base of around 20%. He keeps on stumbling because, among other reasons, it’s hard to move political mountains with that kind of math. And, with each failure, he trots back to his base with another piece of red meat. Rinse and repeat.

For example, take the crazy NFL brouhaha. Trump had been having a bad week. Yet another shot at Obamacare repeal appeared dead on arrival. He took heat for softening on the dreamers and working with Democrats. The right was all over him for backing an establishment Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. So he rips into the NFL for not firing the “son-of-a-bitch” players who kneel during the National Anthem. By all objective accounts, the move was a disaster. Players, coaches and even team owners who had supported Trump, linked arms before Sunday’s games to protest the president’s comments. Predictably, his base loved it, which meant that Trump was ecstatic. “It’s really caught on, it’s really caught on,” Trump said at a conservative White House dinner Monday night. “I said what millions of Americans were thinking.” Meanwhile, days before his NFL rampage, 66% of Americans told pollsters that Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it.

Solidifying the love of those closest to you, even if others disapprove of your actions, can be a commendable personal trait. But it is not particularly useful in the pragmatics of electoral politics. Every recent president has attempted to broaden their appeal, despite loud outcries from their base. George W. Bush’s pro-immigration stance, and his successful push for a Medicare drug program, infuriated his base but drew in more moderates. Liberals are still complaining about Bill Clinton’s welfare reform move that got him more support from the right. Many on the left, including the Congressional Black Caucus, were privately outraged with what they felt was Barack Obama’s failure to do more for the people who helped him get him elected. Yet it was important to Obama to be more than a black president. He, like his predecessors, wanted to expand his support and broaden his base. That’s what makes presidents more effective.

Trump is forever stuck in campaign mode, a one-trick pony who excels at creating outrage just so he can bask in the glory of a shrinking fringe group. He’s had their adulation since the birther days. They still chant “Lock Her Up” at his rallies because nostalgia feels so much better than the dismal reality of failure. Like Warren Harding, Donald Trump fooled a lot of people into thinking he’d make the perfect president. Unlike Harding, however, Trump fooled himself into believing the same thing. That’s why he has to keep performing for his base. Their applause is what makes his act possible. Without it, the curtain will eventually fall.

TRUMP’S ONLY SUCCESS: LOWERING THE BAR FOR PRESIDENTIAL BEHAVIOR

If there is a twelve-step program for superlative dependency, someone should throw Donald Trump an intervention. Can you imagine his first support group meeting? “Hi, my name is Donald, and I’m a hyperbole abuser. In fact, I am the most marvelous, magnificent, outstanding hyperbole abuser who was ever born.” Needless to say, his road to linguistic recovery will be long and winding.

According to the Donald, every person he has hired or appointed is absolutely fantastic, even those he later fired or forced to resign. He claims (incorrectly) to have signed more legislation in his first six months than any other president. He once gave an unremarkable, but relatively gaffe-free, speech to a joint session of Congress. He claims it was the best oration ever uttered in the House chamber.

The same is true on the flip side. Trump never experiences run-of-the-mill adversity. It’s always horrendously horrible, beyond all compare. In what had to have been the absolute least uplifting commencement address on record, Trump told Coast Guard Academy graduates in May that he is the world’s most mistreated pol. Here’s how he characterized his allegedly unparalleled plight: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Never mind that other politicians – at home and abroad – have been assassinated, kidnapped and imprisoned. Donald has to endure CNN and Saturday Night Live. Cue the violin section. Boo hoo. Boo hoo.

Actually, Trump, in many ways, is the most Teflon president in modern history, a rare superlative he’s likely to reject. Throughout the campaign, and during the first six months of his presidency, he got by with more atrocities, flubs and mistakes than any of his predecessors. Who else could have mocked John McCain’s war record, belittled a Gold Star mother and revealed a proclivity for sexual assault, only to go on and become president? Trump entered the office with an expectations bar set so low a Trinidad limbo dancer couldn’t shimmy under it.

Let’s take a close look at just one class of White House transgressions, and compare the repercussions for Trump with those of his predecessors. Numerous presidential tongues have taken bad slips when it comes to declaring a person’s guilt or innocence. This can be quite problematic since the government’s prosecutorial arm – the U.S. Justice Department – serves under the president’s command. Legal experts, including Harvard’s Noah Feldman, say it is an impeachable “abuse of authority” for a president to accuse someone of committing a crime without evidence. It has happened not infrequently over the years. And, in every instance prior to January 20, 2016, the gaffe provoked an immediate dustup of criticism, usually followed by some sort of presidential mea culpa.

In 1970, President Nixon said Charles Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders.” Since Manson’s trial had just gotten underway, the president’s declaration of guilt caused considerable pandemonium. Nixon apologized and walked his premature verdict back. In 1980, President Carter accused former attorney general Ramsey Clark and nine other Americans of a crime for defying his order to stay out of Iran. Carter’s declaration of guilt triggered a huge political blow up. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe called his remarks “a terrible blunder.” In 1988, President Reagan stunned his staff when he declared that Oliver North was not guilty in the Iran-Contra scandal, days after a grand jury indicted North on 23 charges. In 1998, President Clinton drew heavy criticism for saying that he didn’t think there should be a plea bargain in the Unabomber case because the defendant, Theodore J. Kaczynski, “if he’s guilty, killed a lot of people deliberately.” In 2009, President Obama opened a week-long media frenzy when he said the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department acted “stupidly” in the arrest of a black Harvard professor who was trying to get into his own home. Obama also took flack for implying that the alleged architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks would be found guilty and executed, should he be tried in U.S. Courts.

Trump, of course, soars far above the separation of powers concept, moonlighting as a wannabe Judge Judy. He pronounces someone’s criminal guilt on a near daily basis. Using Twitter as his gavel, the Donald dispenses his verdicts with terms like: “guilty as hell”, “totally illegal” and “so illegal”. The president has dispersed imaginary convictions for Hillary Clinton, her former campaign manager, John Podesta and his brother Tony; Obama and his former national security advisor, Susan Rice, and his former attorney general, Loretta Lynch; and recently fired FBI director James Comey. Just this morning, he accused his own attorney general and the acting FBI director of ignoring Hillary Clinton’s unspecified and unproven “crimes”. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has managed to issue these totally bogus claims of criminality against his political opponents with total impunity. In fact, they have become a staple of his presidency, akin to an innocuous proclamation for, say, National Condiment Appreciation Week.

Aside from a couple of obscure blogs, like the one you’re reading, there has been no public clamor about Trump bludgeoning his opponents with presidential criminal convictions. Yet, a single similar transgression by previous presidents kept the chattering class in a constant scold for days. This is just one of many ways in which this president has been held to a far lower standard than those who preceded him. There is an abundance of deficiencies that would invite rapt attention to any other president, but where Trump gets a pass. Like his speeches with the prosaic quality of a telephone book, his five-word sentence fragments that are utterly without meaning, his inability to know just what it is he doesn’t know, and his innate lack of intellectual curiosity.

Unfortunately, there is a lesson here for future presidents: If you want to deflect attention from your inherent inadequacies, be sure to collude with a foreign adversary, obstruct justice and tell lots of lies. Nobody will notice the other foibles.