A Republic of Excuses

For the last week, all of political media has been aroar with news, leaks, innuendo, and no small amount of hand-over-mouth, scandalized titillation over White House assistant Natalie Harp. 

Harp, a 35-year-old former OAN anchor, fervent election denier, and all-around mysteriously present figure, has done herself no favors. Her odd, uncomfortable behavior has suddenly become easy fodder for the tabloid appetites of the political press. Her supposed allies have made it worse. The president and his surrogates have been pitching an unholy fit about Jon Ossoff—the most proximate catalyst for the uproar—because, they claim, in mentioning her name the way he did, he insinuated something inappropriate, perhaps sexual, about Harp’s relationship to the president. 

I won’t deny that the implication of possibility was there, but given the very strange facts of the matter, I don’t think shining a light on her role in the White House is out of bounds. I also seriously doubt the relationship is sexual, for whatever that’s worth. The president seems a bit beyond that stage of his life to me, and the particulars of the case seem to rhyme a bit more with a “worshipful servant” or “stay-at-home-daughter” model of female servanthood, increasingly common in the Christian Nationalist atmosphere that circulates in Trump’s White House.

But Natalie Harp isn’t really what we’re talking about here. Her strange role in the administration is just the most visible and aberrant example of a much more common, but broadly ignored, problem. Because see, another odd detail of her case is that she has repeatedly refused to follow through on the (likely minimal) procedures to obtain a security clearance in this White House. Maggie Haberman also reported that Harp sometimes serves as a channel to gain direct access to Trump, including for foreign leaders. There’s no innocent explanation for this confluence of facts. Leaving aside her eccentricities, her odd ever-presence, she is an extremely obvious, highly visible security risk, standing right behind the president at all times. She has unique proximity to the enormous power of that office, she is absolutely up to something unhealthy for the republic, and no one has done anything about it for over a year and a half. 

Worse, no one will even admit to the scale of the failure here. They never will. I don’t believe they have the ability anymore. At best, they’ll shrug and defer to the president as though his judgment is beyond question, and no one will question their judgment for it. More likely, they’ll prevaricate, equivocate, and manipulate their way through whatever TV hit has them facing uncomfortable questions—which they will be allowed to do. Repeatedly.

Zoom out. They’ve been doing this all along and getting away with it. They exhausted the public’s attention span on the Epstein files so thoroughly that Todd Blanche, a man who seems to be clearly engaged in illegally concealing them from Congress and the public, is now Attorney General. Senators who voted to confirm him are allowed to pretend it’s completely unreasonable for them to assess future risk based on the recent past, or indeed, the ongoing present. At Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. is presiding over an unprecedented retreat from modern science, and predictably, previously defeated diseases and parasites are storming through the abandoned gates of American medicine. When questioned, he goes on the attack and is allowed to win. Pete Hegseth concealed the destruction of a resupply base, which led to thousands of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln being unable to make port for well over 200 days, degrading readiness to the breaking point. He remains Defense Secretary. In fact, he seems to be tilling the soil for a 2028 presidential run by calling American veterans and troops heinous slurs in Iowa.

Listing the crimes and moral violations of this administration is a futile exercise. They are without end. In the best possible future, with the roadmap to something like good followed immaculately, we will still be uncovering crimes committed in the last two years for the next fifty. They likely include racketeering, fraud, bribery, kidnapping, false imprisonment, unlawful search and seizure, insider trading, emolument violations, and countless further crimes the volume of which would make this sentence more cumbersome than a sane reader would ever voluntarily bear. And of course, the entire decadent, perverted edifice hangs from the nail of January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump, a mob, and a gaggle of co-conspirators attempted to overthrow American democracy. All parties to that ultimate sin have either been pardoned or were never charged. You could be forgiven for wondering if they succeeded.

Welcome to the republic of excuses. You will not like it here and it will get worse until we get better. You will not like getting better, but you will like becoming worse much less.

To get better, we need to talk about elite impunity. Here, I use the term “impunity” as a more precise alternative to “corruption.” Corruption exists in every human system thus far devised. But if that system is functioning well, when it’s discovered, corruption is punished and its victims are made whole. It’s always a problem, but problems can be mitigated, solved, or dealt with. Impunity is a step beyond that. Often several.

Impunity is a disease. It spiderwebs through the drywall of a republic, pushing slick fingers of decay into every corner and crack, finding weak spots and creating new ones, always extracting, always hungry, forcing its way down through the foundation and back up into the rafters, like vampire vines strangling the very walls into a claustrophobic stupor until the whole house dies, and the walls fall in on themselves. Impunity feeds on persistent failure. One missed opportunity for justice sets an unwritten precedent for another, which sets the expectation for the next, which makes the next virtually mandatory, which means all subsequent failures to hold corrupt elites to account are suddenly vital to the good order of society. Impunity rewrites the lived reality of the republic, gradually transforming it into a gangster state governed as much by patronage and bribery as it is by violence. Whole companies become mere organs of their dictatorial CEOs, whole states are broken to the hand of their governors and  part-time legislatures. Eventually, the whole country is captured in a variety of webs with an assortment of lazy spiders plucking the strings and wondering who to eat. 

Each stage of the metamorphosis feels natural as it happens, building as it does on recent experiences. After all, if George W. Bush has to face an investigation for his administration’s open torture policy, it could mean any American president might have to face accountability to the law one day. Perish the thought. Perish it, burn its body, roll the ashes up in a blunt, and smoke them over the bonfire of the republic.

You can place the start of the impunity crisis at many points in recent history. You could find it beginning on January 6, 2021 and keep it limited to what I think could be fairly described as a particular era of American elite impunity. You could roll it back to Trump 1 for the criminal mess he made of that term. Bush and his torture policies, or the lies that justified our invasion of Iraq, would be another plausible launchpad. Maybe the failure to impeach Reagan for the Iran-Contra Affair is more your speed. Personally, I like to rock it all the way back to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. I find this both comprehensive and defensible. Many of the freak cadre nursing sour hearts after the collapse of Nixon went on to shape the next generation of Republican politics with their leftover grievances, eventually leading us here. Believing the minimal consequences Nixon faced for criminal behavior to be a grave offense to the dignity of themselves as the natural masters of the republic, they pursued a politics to ensure such accountability would never come for a Republican president again. It has not. They were like prophets, in that way.

Wherever you place your starting point, we are at an endpoint now. Like the man said, the center cannot hold. I don’t believe in destiny and I don’t engage in prophecy, so I make no claim as to whether the approaching end is the end of this cycle of elite impunity, or the republic itself—but it will be one of the two. We are at the cliff’s edge and looking down. The natural end of a world built on the assumption that no one with power should ever need to fear the people or our laws stares up at us, our heads swirling with apocalyptic vertigo.

And still, excuses fill the air around us. Few seem able to countenance an America that holds its elites accountable to the law. Our failure to remove Trump from office after January 6 left a wound in our republic that is far from finished bleeding.

It’s eating us. I find no accident in the confluence between this era of elite impunity and the parallel growth of wealth inequality. A body politic that cannot bring its elites to justice for criminal behavior would struggle to regulate their gravity in the market. Much has been made of the malaise we seem to suffer. Spend much time on social media at all and it won’t take long to learn how many people believe everything is getting worse. For the entirety of this decade, stable majorities have believed the world was collapsing around them, no matter what traditional indicators demonstrate. 

I agree with Fukuyama. There is a fundamental need for recognition that drives us just as much as the need for food, water, and shelter. I’m not religious, but I do think there is an emergent property of the human mind that could be called a soul, and this soul longs chiefly to be recognized as human-qua-human, by other humans. The liberal republic, with its constituent values of liberty, equality, and solidarity, allows us to actualize this deep human need on a near-universal and expanding level. With the tools of popular sovereignty, we can create an expanding zone of human solidarity, never perfect but always perfectible, that assuages our universal need to see each other as like among like. As kin. As the universal commonwealth.

Elite impunity poisons the republic. Subtly at first, then violently. It comes asking for outrageous gifts in exchange for unkeepable promises, accumulating more and more as it goes, until finally, at the first sign of pushback, it summits the whole republic and, to use the creature’s own words, “feeds it to the woodchipper.” The gibbering pentecostal madhouse of corruption that is the second Trump administration is nothing less than an attempt to mulch our civilization so that we may be recycled into something that better flatters a small class of oligarchs so maladjusted that they’ll make Rasputins out of emotionally unstable sycophants who are willing to do nothing but fluff them as a career choice. We don’t have to submit to that.

The good news is that impunity begins with a single failure that sets a precedent. It can be undone with a single success. The difference is entirely in the choice we make when the moment arrives. We should choose otherwise this time.

Featured image is President Trump Delivers Remarks at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference