The American Right Is Littered With Cautionary Tales

Donald Trump’s corruption has been infectious.

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“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”—Lord Acton

The remarkable thing about this last grotesque chapter of Donald Trump’s presidency is how much he has proved Acton both wrong and right.

Few axioms are more popular among pompously earnest pundits and politicians than Lord Acton’s line about power. Acton surely believed that power corrupts. His real indictment, however, wasn’t of the wielders of power, but of those who enabled them. He decried those who exempted the powerful from the rules that bind the rest of us. “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it,” Acton wrote in the same letter.

In one sense Trump proved Acton wrong. Power didn’t corrupt Trump. It merely gave his corruption room to run, like handing an inveterate drunk driver a bottle of Jack Daniels and a monster truck to play with.

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  1. Charles Gonzalez

    Jonah is absolutely correct - rarely to agree with 100% of what he says, but he spot on with his description of the reality - I believe that our two party system is has mostly worked for 150 years. I believe that a strong and dynamic opposition party is a necessary ingredient of our politics. What we have now is an opposition party that is on the cusp of a civil war. The Republican Party has no ideas, abandoned the values and principles that guided it for 50 years and is comprised of hypocritical opportunists more interested in securing Trumpian votes than leading their nation. As an independent voter who voted for Reagan, Bush and McCain, this party is a joke not worthy of respect let alone my vote.

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  2. Wes Jenkins

    I have said since 2017, it was not Trump that scared me but all the acolytes that kept feeding the ego. So now instead of Trump we need to be concerned with 70+MM who will always believe they were cheated. Johnson, Cruz, and Hawley in promoting the lies of the Orange One knowing they were false should just resign

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    Philbnichols

    Jonah Goldberg, could you please have a conversation with your friend Michael Brendan Dougherty over at NR, and this
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/a-mostly-peaceful-maga/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=first
    is why. He sounds like he's caught up with 'the white man's fever'!

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  4. Eklees


    After the horrific killings, riots and urban destruction that occurred in 1968, along with the travesty of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Democrats proceeded to lose the presidency 16 of the next 20 years. It took nearly a generation for the Democratic party to wander out of that desert.

    I suspect (maybe even predict) that the Republican party will wander in that same desert after this disastrous year. People don't remember facts all that well - but they remember how they felt. Two, four or ten years from now the negative feelings associated with 2020 and the Trump/Republicans will still be felt and will affect elections.

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      Narwhal

      Seems plausible. But, while some people felt revulsion at what happened today others did not. The 2024 Republican primary will be a sight to behold.

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      Zach Larsen

      This is so true he has spent weeks if not months yammering about this being the day he and his supporters would fight. Where were the extra police? Who decided not to send backup to the capital the morning of the confirmation of the electoral college? It is an outrageous failure and the people responsible must pay for this.

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      Man-Eating Cow

      It's the same story since 2016. No one took him seriously then, either.

      The lesson is that even incredibly bumbling, incompetent people can do incredible damage if we fail to believe they're capable of it.

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      Narwhal

      Not just the Capitol police, the Secret Service. The VP was there and it was a joint session of Congress. Was VP-elect Harris also there?

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      John Y.B. Hood

      I agree completely. The DC police and mayor and the Capital police did a very poor job planning for this predictable situation. There is a long list of things they should have done differently, but I will just name one: barriers should have been set up last night to keep protesters well away from the Capital steps. All the outrage directed against Trump and his minions is completely appropriate, but it should not distract us from the failure of the DC and Capital police to prevent a situation that was eminently predictable.

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        rlritt

        My son says the DC police are complicit. I hope not. They may have to get some Republican lawmakers and law enforcement to have Trump arrested and taken from the White House.

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        1. CW

          Watch DC police open the gates for the insurrectionists. The Capitol building was breached because it was allowed to be breached. Each and every one of them should be fired.

          https://twitter.com/midlifewomanon1/status/1346938214867738625

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            Narwhal

            The only defense I can give is that they pulled back most of the Capitol police to the building prior to doing this. Seems plausible given how few officers are in that scene and how many were in early videos of the same area.

            But, that doesn’t explain why they weren’t better prepared for a predictable and preventable circumstance.

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    Narwhal

    Mitt the Mormon vs Josh the moron from Missouri. I don’t think that would be a friendly boxing match. It does make for an interesting dichotomy.

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  7. CatoTheElder

    The concatenation of Jonah’s column, the (attempt) by the House and Senate to take up the final counting and acceptance of the Electoral College Votes, and the disgusting, vile, dystopian rioting and assault on the Capitol Building mark a point in time which historians and others will be recalling, for innumerable reasons, many unimaginable now, for decades, perhaps centuries.

    The United States of America now seem only tenuously, superficially united, whilst the citizenry is anything but. We have a president who incited a mob into riot and forceful invasion of the Capitol *while occupied by both houses of legislature* which resulted in the fatal shooting of a woman who was part of the mob. That same president continues to spew ridiculous fabrications claiming election fraud and refuses to accept that he lost the election. His corruption is as near absolute as can be imagined. It is not clear that he possesses the mental wherewithal to continue in any appropriate way in his role as president and commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military.

    If there be a peaceful, Constitutional way for President Trump to become, as soon as tomorrow morning, ex-President Trump, without inciting more riots and violence, it should be taken up and the act completed. I believe that there are legitimate ways in which it can be done. The only argument, as far as I can see, is about the wisdom of doing it in a way which could further inflame passions.

    This has all gotten well and truly out of hand. It’s not a game. This isn’t some little deviation from the normal ways of things. Whether we should be in a crisis or not, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of one. How things are dealt with now, tonight, and in the near future will affect a great number of things, including how well and how quickly the populace can settle back into a peaceful, reasoning, democratically governed citizenry instead of the hyperpartisan factions we now see.

    Vice President Pence, Senator McConnell, members of the WH cabinet, Representative Pelosi and Senator Schumer and others have in front of them not just an opportunity to lead in a time of crisis, but a crisis in which calm, effective, wise leadership is dearly needed. They and others are responsible to stand up and lead—not as Republicans or Democrats, but as leaders of government, leaders of a citizenry needing calm reassurance that there really are adults in key places now exerting control.

    I ask all of religious nature to ask their god or gods or whatever higher power they worship to give the United States, its leaders, and its people the wisdom, guidance, and abilities to see this thing to a good and fitting conclusion. I ask all others to set aside any partisan fervor and look for ways to support a calm, peaceful, open and responsive legislature and executive branch that together take us through another peaceful transition of power in our governance.

    Let us come together. Let us once again be Americans first, holding and respecting the rights and privileges that citizens of the republic obtain, along with the responsibility to act calmly, prudently, wisely, and justly, always in properly principled fashion, sometimes in compromise, and never abandoning our loyalty to the virtues that got us here.

    May God bless America. Please. We need it.

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      Dina

      Trump should be impeached and removed from office at once. If his acts over the past week don't warrant it, then nothing does. Let the chips fall where they may.

      I'm going to keep posting about this.

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      Narwhal

      And Carthage must be destroyed.

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      1. CatoTheElder

        Well, of course! ;-)

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      Dina

      Trump should be impeached and removed from office at once. If his acts over the past week don't warrant it, then nothing does. Let the chips fall where they may.

      I'm going to keep posting about this.

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        Man-Eating Cow

        Well, yeah. If this isn't an impeachable offense, what is?

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  8. Kevin H

    The small silver lining in all of this is that it has been an incredible clarifier of who has principals and who is more interested in the power. I don’t doubt that Cruz as an example has conservative principals but he either lacked the character to stick with those principals or rationalized compromising them in the short term thinking that in the end he can always return to them but that sadly isn’t the way principals work.

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    Narwhal

    I think we now know what Trump meant by the “next step that was in process” in his call to Raffensperger.

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  10. Jaybrown

    The eventsof today (so far) show that Jonah is far too easy on Trump here.

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