[David M. Drucker] US politics reaches peak whataboutism

US President Donald Trump commuted the seven-year, federal prison sentence of acknowledged criminal George Santos because, as he explained in a Truth Social post late last week, the disgraced former New York congressman “had the Courage, Conviction and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Democrats are sticking by Jay Jones despite revelations that their nominee for Virginia attorney general once sent text messages fantasizing about murdering a Republican lawmaker. Jones also expressed hope that harm would come to the GOP lawmaker’s wife and children because, as the National Review reported, “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Neither of the political parties, it seems, are capable of policing themselves. Or perhaps more accurately, they don’t want to police themselves.

“Irrespective of your political party, your political party does a better job of policing the other side than policing itself,” Jim Brulte, a former chair of the California Republican Party, told me.

It wasn’t always thus.

In 1991, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was running for governor of Louisiana as the de facto Republican nominee. A prominent White supremacist and antisemite, Duke feigned reform, claiming he had “undergone Christian conversion that steered him away from his past bigotry,” as the New York Times reported. Although it likely meant handing the Democrats a governor’s mansion ahead of his 1992 reelection bid, President George H.W. Bush didn’t flinch.

“When someone has a long record, an ugly record of racism and of bigotry, that record simply cannot be erased by the glib rhetoric of a political campaign. So I believe David Duke is an insincere charlatan. I believe he’s attempting to hoodwink the voters of Louisiana, I believe he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for.”

That was then. Today, American politicians — which, granted, have relied on hypocrisy to survive the way fish rely on water — seem to have dropped any pretense of standards. Unless, of course, they’re talking about the other guy.

The Democrats are perfectly willing to criticize Trump and other Republicans for rhetoric that ranges from provocative to incendiary to — occasionally — quasi-inciteful. But there’s been no movement to push Jones out of the Virginia attorney general’s race in response to his egregious text messages.

Republicans, meanwhile, have in some instances scoured the Internet to find social media posts critical of Charlie Kirk (assassinated in a horrific act of political violence) to punish people who aren’t even public figures. Yet some in the GOP can’t bring themselves to condemn the antisemitism, homophobia and racism uncovered by Politico in a group chat of young Republicans, some of whom hold prominent posts.

That includes Vice President JD Vance, who went out of his way to excuse the behavior of the Republicans who participated in the group chat, while insisting that Jones did not deserve the same grace. This attitude now predominates among Democrats and Republicans.

Now and then, there are exceptions. It was New York Republicans in the House of Representatives who pushed for Santos’ Dec. 1, 2023, expulsion from the chamber. Similarly, some Republicans have denounced the group chat participants, and some Democrats have criticized Jones.

But it’s not the norm. And that’s a problem — at least for Democrats, party operative Michael LaRosa told me.

“Democrats, sadly, have fallen into a trap of hyper-tribalism that has worked out fantastically for Republicans. Our unwillingness to police our own has led to defending truly gross behavior or even defending unpopular systems like the federal bureaucracy, illegal immigrants who are proven human traffickers, or lawbreaking rioters,” said LaRosa, a veteran of President Joe Biden’s White House staff. “Being reflexively opposed to Trump or Republicans is more important than common sense.”

Democrats who share LaRosa’s concerns often point to President Bill Clinton’s famous “Sister Souljah moment” during the 1992 presidential campaign, when he risked angering Black voters, a crucial component of the Democratic coalition, to criticize a Black female rapper for inflammatory comments in which she appeared to encourage the indiscriminate killing of White people. Some Republicans like to say that the erosion of this approach to politics accelerated when Democrats refused to punish Clinton for the extramarital affair he engaged in as president — and his lying about it afterward.

“If you go back to the ‘90s, you can see where Clinton laid the foundation that if you stay in office, you can ultimately make it about the other party,” Brulte said. He’s not necessarily wrong.

The accumulation of decades of refusal to hold themselves and their allies accountable means that few political figures — and zero political parties — have the credibility with voters to declare any behavior or rhetoric off-limits. And Democrats wonder why Republicans won’t throw Trump overboard. Someday soon, Republicans might wonder the same thing about Democrats and a Democratic president. ‘Round and ‘round the whataboutism goes.

David M. Drucker

David M. Drucker is a Bloomberg columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.

(Tribune Content Agency)