Trump: A Summary of Scandals
The top 4 or is it the top 5 scandals of the presidency? Besides the daily gibes and lies, what scandals form Trump’s major misdeeds?
Although virtually every day of the Trump presidency yielded its own scandal, it seems fair to say that four scandals stand above the rest. Here’s my summary, as of April 2022. Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen don’t make the cut.
- Russian interference in 2016
We know that the Trump campaign wanted to get the dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russian interests, and subsequent investigations show that Russian hackers helped to leak emails from the Clinton campaign in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The Justice Department policy may be that a sitting president should not be charged, but the Mueller Report clearly documented Russian interference, especially social media campaigns that pushed messages that
strengthened the fear of say, unrestricted immigration, and thus boosted Trump’s wall, or
deepened a suspicion that Clinton was an untrustworthy candidate either because she was a tool of corporate interests (a view prevalent among Bernie Sanders supporters)
or she was unlikely to prioritize the needs of minorities (cf. the lower African-American turnout compared to 2012 or 2020) Together, these helped Trump win his electoral college majority.
2. Ukraine and Impeachment I
We know that Donald Trump asked President Zalensky for a “favour” before releasing US aid that Congress had already authorized. The favour was to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s relationship with a Ukrainian energy company in order to embarrass Biden’s father Joe who was emerging as the likely Democratic nominee in 2020.
Trump denied this, insisting it was a “perfect phone call,” but the extortion attempt was confirmed by the call’s content, and by US diplomatic staff.
The impeachment itself was seen as a partisan battle. The Democrat-controlled House voted to impeach on December 19 2019, and the Republican-controlled Senate voted to acquit on February 5 2020. Staff who testified against Trump, such as the Vindman brothers, lost their positions. The current war in Ukraine has underlined the gravity of Trump’s attempt to pressurize Zalensky.
3. The Pandemic
Arguably, this is the one scandal for which Trump has been punished since it ensured that the 2020 election saw a record number of Americans choosing to vote by mail.
This public health emergency exposed two of Trump’s major flaws:
his inability to accept scientific data and detail and to communicate it accurately
and
his inability to show empathy or disguise the self-interest that guides his actions
Despite being told that Covid-19 was a dangerous pathogen and that masks and social distancing could mitigate transmission, Trump initially downplayed its severity in order to protect the economy and consistently undercut public health messages on masks and social distancing. During press briefings he would tout unproven cures and repeatedly promised that the virus would fade away despite mounting infections and deaths. Both in the White House and at his campaign rallies, he defied health guidelines that offered greater protection against the disease.
The latest CDC total for US deaths for Covid-19 is 981,197, with the bulk of these occurring during the last year of the Trump presidency. When the US is faced with a national catastrophe, it is normally the role of the president to lead the nation in grief and offer sympathy. Trump was particularly ineffective in this role.
Overall, he delegated responsibility to the state level and implied that federal assistance might depend on how “friendly” the state was to Trump. He even implied that the FDA’s testing policy to ensure the safety of new treatments like the vaccines was designed to prevent them becoming available ahead of the election; in other words, to damage his re-election bid.
Few governments globally can point to highly successful pandemic policies and not all the mistakes that pushed up US infections and deaths can be directly attributed to Trump, but his conduct remains scandalous.
4. January 6 Storming the Capitol and Impeachment II
For most of the 2020 campaign Donald Trump insisted that postal voting was unsafe and open to massive fraud and that it might be used to “steal the election.” This, in spite of the fact that he typically opted for a postal ballot himself.
At a press conference on September 23, 2020, he was invited to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and did not. As soon as it became clear that the counting of postal ballots was likely to result in a Biden win, Trump demanded that the counting must stop.
The Trump campaign filed a succession of legal suits challenging the results due to electoral irregularities. None were successful. Nevertheless, Trump and his associates widely publicized a variety of unsubstantiated and increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen.
State and local officials who validated the results and denied the accusations, including many Republicans in states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan were targeted via social media and suffered threats and intimidation.
Despite warnings that his refusal to concede and to facilitate a smooth transition to the Biden team was damaging to America, Trump persisted. He urged Michigan state law-makers to consider sending a different slate of electors. He asked Georgia’s secretary of state to find just enough votes to overturn Biden’s lead.
Trump called on his supporters to come to Washington on January 6 for a mass rally where he would lead them in stopping the steal. He publicly implied that Vice President Pence had the power to reject the electoral college votes from key states and either send them back for the state legislatures to reconsider or pass the election over to Congressional state delegations, a majority of which were Republican.
At the January rally, amidst inflammatory speeches, he told his followers they must fight. He promised he would march with them to the Capitol as they tried to make Congress “do the right thing” (he didn’t), but when they attacked the Capitol and threatened to hang his Vice President, he did nothing for hours to evict the protesters. His eventual video statement urging them to go home was mixed with praise.
The attack resulted in an unprecedented second impeachment which, like the first, saw party loyalty largely override oaths and principles. He was acquitted.
There is still an investigation and the evidence so far continues to support the view that Trump would have been content if the mob had blocked ratification and enabled him to stay in power. That, not the good of the Republic, was his priority. For most observers, this is scandalous.
However, across all four scandals, a larger issue looms. One reason why Trump genuinely believes that the 2020 election was stolen from him is that he received far more votes in 2020 than in 2016. He had highly charged mass rallies while his opponent had a few, anemic, socially distanced events. Since Biden’s inauguration, Republicans have largely accepted that Trump remains the leader of their party with both elected officials and party activists preparing for the mid-terms by wooing Trump and his following. After years of scandal, Trump is the opposite of toxic politically. Surely that is the biggest scandal of his presidency.
