Artists put finishing touches to wax figures of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump as Madame Tussauds prepares to reopen after Covid lockdown in England. (Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty)
“This has nothing to do with vendettas or witch-hunts or partisan advantage. This is very simply about the rule of law, and the survival of the American system of justice. This is what the Constitution demands,” - Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1998.
“A president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct, deceit, abuse of power, and contempt for the rule of law cannot be a good president,” - William Bennett in his 1998 book, “The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals.”
There was a period during the Clinton scandals — and how quaint they now seem — when the question of presidential character became an earnest subject of conversation. Everyone knew that Bill was at best parsimonious with the truth, and also deeply shitty toward women — but that he was also a pretty capable president, and a charmer to boot. Were his flaws so bad he had to be impeached? Or was he just, in the words of Bob Dole, a “likable rogue”?
Most grownups understood — and understand — that the character of a successful politician may actually require a certain amount of roguishness, an ability to cut a few corners, tell small lies, or strike unsavory deals. Only the truly uptight right — remember Bill Bennett before his Trump degeneracy — insisted on the unbreakable connection between indecent private character and an abuse of public office.
And now we have Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. And the ghost of Bill Bennett seems to have a point, doesn’t he? This past week saw two official reports into the abuse of their respective offices, and their lavish lying about it. The Smith indictment alleges that Trump knew full well that the documents he took from the White House and stored haphazardly at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster were highly classified and not his own. But rather than hand everything back, Trump ignored the best legal advice, lied to his own lawyers, ordered an underling to move boxes to conceal them from the FBI, and threw out his usual barrage of excuses, distractions and falsehoods.
In an eerily similar fashion, the British parliamentary committee set up to investigate whether Boris Johnson lied to the House of Commons about his breaking of social distancing rules during Covid, published its final report this week. It’s as authoritative as the Trump indictment — first-hand witnesses, photos, sworn testimony, due process. And it too focuses on a very basic fact: just as Trump knew he was not authorized to keep top secret documents, so Johnson knew that crowded office-parties were quite clearly banned across the UK. But this awareness of the rules did not stop either man from flagrantly breaking them — and then complaining of a “witch-hunt” when called to account.
The parliamentary report is written in bloodless English prose, but the text seethes. Here is an official quoted in the report on what it was like working in Number 10 at the height of the lockdown, when pubs were shut, family gatherings banned, masks were mandatory, and Brits were unable to visit their loved ones in hospital:
[I was asked] whether we should be wearing masks and was told that the scientific advice was that there was ‘no point’ and had ‘very little effect on the spread of Covid’. This was all part of a wider culture of not adhering to any rules.
No 10 was like an island oasis of normality. Operational notes were sent out from the security team to be mindful of the cameras outside the door, not to go out in groups and to social distance. It was all a pantomime. Birthday parties, leaving parties and end of week gatherings all continued as normal.
Boris’ defense? He had no idea that work parties were somehow off-limits, and had been authoritatively told they were fine, which was the basis of his repeated insistence in the Commons that all the socializing had been cleared in advance: “Why would I have set out, in the Chamber, to conceal my knowledge of something illicit, if that account could be so readily contradicted by others?” he wrote this week, in a self-loving screed. “Why would we have had an official photographer if we believed we were breaking the law? … The committee is imputing to me and me alone a secret knowledge of illegal events that was somehow not shared by any other official or minister in Number Ten. That is utterly incredible.”
And it would be “utterly incredible” — unless you had a pulse and two ears at the time, because the ban on workplace parties was incandescently clear to the entire country. (Boris’ bullshit brings to mind the Chappelle drunk-driving punchline, “Sorry officer, I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.”) When the Queen had to sit alone at the funeral of her husband, it was obviously not ok for the prime minister to have “bring your own booze” parties at Number 10. In the words of the report,
a workplace ‘thank you’, leaving drink, birthday celebration or motivational event is obviously neither essential nor reasonably necessary. Mr Johnson is adamant that he believed all of the events which he attended and of which he had direct knowledge were essential. That belief, which he continues to assert, has no reasonable basis in the rules or on the facts.
Similarly, there really is no reasonable basis in the law or the facts that Donald Trump acted lawfully with good intentions with respect to official documents. None. That’s why both Trump and Johnson have simply brayed their innocence in general terms while denouncing their investigators as illegitimate. What else have they got? They sure don’t have the facts on their side.
And it’s deeply telling that the bulk of the charges against Johnson are about how he responded to the investigation, just as much of Smith’s case rests on what Trump did after he was told there was legal scrutiny of his official records. These two citizens start with a presumption that they are exempt from all rules, and then compound it with perjury and clumsy obstruction because they simply cannot admit guilt. (And neither was framed. A majority of the parliamentary committee were Tories; and the chief accusers of Trump are the national security apparatus and the FBI, which ten minutes ago were regarded as GOP-leaning institutions.)
Overwhelming self-entitlement is just at the core of who Trump and Johnson are. It is their character. This is how Johnson’s school principal described him when the future PM was just 17: “[He] sometimes seems affronted when criticized for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.” It could read as a summary of parliament’s report 41 years later.
And as with Trump and his bizarre behavior with “his boxes,” it’s very hard to see some profound, malign motive here in pursuit of something important. It’s just mindless egotism, married with an infinite capacity for deceit. Here’s how George M. White, Trump’s classmate at their military academy, characterized him at 17:
“The most significant incident, which I got into big trouble for, was when we were taking a picture in May of 1964, and Donald Trump refused to draw his sword. I’m the first captain and I order present arms and there are five guys behind me and they draw. But he refuses. I hear behind me, ‘Trump, draw your sword.’ Donald refuses. The picture gets taken. … He was defying a direct order, showing his defiance,” White said. “He was ‘being Trump,’ showing that his ego was more powerful than anybody’s. He later showed that picture around to show how defiant he was because he didn’t draw the sword.”
Trump himself told one biographer that “when I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.” These character flaws of Trump and Johnson also linked to their previous successes, of course. Both men felt able to buck the national elite consensus because of their preternatural self-assurance, and said things no one else dared. They both shifted the politics of their countries and parties — in ways that I think revealed an important democratic deficit in both countries.
But when the personal flaw is this structural — whether it’s pathological narcissism with Trump, or deceitful bravado from Boris — it will eventually obliterate any of the virtues associated with it. Clinton’s flaws did not erase his moderate legacy (and his impeachment was an overreach). Even Nixon accepted the system that removed him from office and had an awe toward the office he held. Trump and Johnson’s egos are, in comparison, self-annihilating — blinding them to the interests of others, denying them any chance of achieving anything substantive (Boris got Brexit done only to botch it entirely), while pushing the political culture of both countries to the edge of polarized collapse.
And there is almost nothing in the narrative of these men’s late careers that isn’t exactly replicated in every previous episode of their lives. A mature democracy will throw up these characters every now and again, and use them. But a healthy one will also test them, and cast them out if they threaten the integrity of the system as a whole. The Brits and Tories have done that, in the end, with Boris — and it speaks well of the remaining integrity of their democracy.
The GOP needs to do the same with Trump. And soon.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a lively chat with David Grann on an 18th century shipwreck and mutiny; an update on the turning tide against transqueer ideology; reader dissents over my take on Trump’s indictment and wokeness in Hollywood; seven notable quotes from the week in news; 20 great pieces on Substack covering a variety of topics; my latest appearance on the Triggernometry pod; a Cool Ad Watch for an anti-woke company; a stirring Mental Health Break with incredible dance moves; a gorgeous window in San Diego; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new, especially tough challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
Some props from a subscriber:
Shit son, I really like your substack. I’ve been reading you since your great piece about England in New York Magazine forever ago. Every week the Dish delivers a winning piece. Bravo.
New On The Dishcast: David Grann
David is an extraordinary investigative reporter, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, and an old acquaintance. Several of his stories and books have been adapted into major motion pictures, including The Lost City of Z, Old Man and the Gun, and Killers of the Flower Moon. His new book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder — and the film rights have already been acquired by Scorsese and DiCaprio.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the hell of sailing around Cape Horn, and the horrors of scurvy. That link also takes you to listener commentary on last week’s episode with Patrick Deneen and a post-liberal future, as well as a variety of reader emails.
Browse the Dishcast archive for another conversation you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Tabia Lee on her firing as a DEI director and Matt Lewis on ruling-class elites. Please send your guest recs and pod dissent to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Some pod love from this listener:
I love Friday when the Dishcast drops! Your podcast is the best one out there, I think — thank you!
It’s remarkable, in retrospect, how tenacious gender ideology has been. A theory that denies a core fact of human existence — the irreducible biological differences between men and women — requires enormous establishment support to survive: censorship, propaganda, blackmail, intimidation, even criminalization of dissent. And the good news is that, when exposed to sunlight, it withers. It’s possible to provide transgender people with the legal and formal status of the opposite sex — and we absolutely should — without tearing up everything we know about the reality of the sex binary.
And, sure enough, despite enormous propaganda, the polling after a few years of open debate shows the numbers going south for the transqueers.
(Read the rest of the piece here, for paid subscribers)
A reader responds to my initial reaction to the federal indictment:
Yes, Trump is horrible. But putting him in jail is not how we do it. You just have to beat him at the ballot box. He gave money to his lawyer to hush Stormy Daniels. She consented to it. Tell voters that. He shared presidential secrets with ... PACs? What’s the worst thing he did with this classified info, exactly? Be specific.
And it better be egregiously awful, Andrew. No, raise your standard. Presidents are different. It’s literally written into the Constitution for how to deal with crimes done by presidents: impeachment. There are sections of the Constitution devoted to it because the wise founders knew presidents were different and necessitated a different system of justice. It’s appropriate, because presidents have to take all manner of presidential actions that can’t and shouldn’t be judged in the same system of adjudicating regular acts by citizens. By definition, all presidential decisions and actions are irregular.
Just beat him in a fucking election. That’s democracy.
Read my response to that dissent, along with two others, here. Follow more Dish discussion on the Notes site here (or the “Notes” tab in the Substack app).
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Trump’s indictment, the growing case against Hunter Biden, and the death of Cormac McCarthy. A few examples:
Don’t miss Taibbi on an “explosive coronavirus story” — that patient zero was perhaps a gain-of-function scientist at the Wuhan lab.
David Aaronovitch takes aim at Ozempic-shamers and the “virtue-signalling” of thin people.
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s an entry from last week’s contest, titled “Off With His Hand!”:
In 1778, while Kentucky was still considered part of Virginia, George Rogers Clark, leader of the Virginia militia during the Revolutionary War, founded Louisville. He chose the city’s name to honor France’s King Louis XVI because of the king’s support of the American colonies. Louis, husband to Marie Antoinette, was convicted of treason and beheaded by guillotine in 1793, partially because of the enormous debts he racked up helping America.
In France, Louis XVI is considered a crappy king, so there are very few statues honoring him, but one enormous 17-foot-tall, 15-ton marble and limestone statue of Louis ended up in Louisville, and the story of how it got there is absurd.
In 1827, Louis and Marie Antoinette’s eldest daughter decided it would be a great idea to commission a grandiose statue of her father and gift it to the city of Montpellier (the French one, not Vermont). This was her own “Let them eat cake” moment. The statue stood in Montpellier’s town square for less than a year before the outraged townspeople tore it down. City officials put the statue in a coffin-like box and hauled it to a military dungeon where it remained until it was discovered 70 years later, in 1899. At that point the military, the Montpellier mayor, and the city’s university played hot potato with the statue. No one wanted him. He ended up in the basement of a municipal archives building, where he remained for another 70 years until the 1960s.
In 1966, someone in Montpellier found him and got the great idea to gift the statue to Louisville, Montpellier’s sister city in the U.S. One problem: they forgot to tell anyone in Louisville that Louis was coming. He arrived in Norfolk, where he was dumped on Pier 2 with no one there to claim him. After a few weeks he caught a ride on a train and arrived in Louisville on Christmas Day. The statue was so enormous he was difficult to move, so the city covered him in a red tarp until officials could decide where to put him. He stayed under the tarp for six months.
Upon his installation in front of the Jefferson County Courthouse in 1967, the Louisville Courier-Journal dubbed Louis a “first-class, pompous nincompoop” and called the statue the “worst white elephant gift” ever.
Louis stood in front of the courthouse for over 50 years until the BLM demonstrations in 2020. Louis lost a hand and was vandalized. The city removed him and put him in yet another basement storage facility, where he’ll probably remain for another 70 years.
