It's witch hunting season

Readers, I tried. I swear—I was going to give Donald Trump the week off and write about something else. . . I had it all planned out. . . and then, lo and behold, last Tuesday within a few minutes of each other, his longtime lawyer, fixer and right-hand man, Michael Cohen, pled guilty to eight felony counts, including paying off a porn star “at the direction of” Trump for the specific purpose of “influencing the election”—and then Trump’s longtime friend and campaign manager Paul Manafort (the two have known each other since the 1980s) was found by a jury to be guilty of eight felony counts. Essentially, Manafort was found to have hidden millions of dollars in foreign accounts to skip out on taxes and lied repeatedly to banks in order to get $20 million in loans. (He still faces a retrial on 10 felony counts that the jury was deadlocked on—in addition to another entirely separate trail to begin next month in Washington, D.C. centering around money laundering, lying to the FBI, and illegal foreign lobbying.)

How bad is this news? Bad enough that Fox News went into full-on ostrich mode, as they always do when Republican scandals erupt. The rest of the media went wall-to-wall with the news that the President of the United States was elected by deceiving Americans about his payoffs of hundreds of thousands of dollars to two women—one a Playboy Playmate and the other a porn star, both of whom he had affairs with shortly after the birth of his son Baron—just a few weeks before an election. The New York Times ran an immense banner headline reading COHEN PLEADS GUILTY, IMPLICATING PRESIDENT.

What did Fox News run as their big story at this same time, both on TV and online? MURDER SUSPECT CAUGHT: Mollie Tibbett’s suspected killer identified as 24-year-old illegal immigrant—a local news story about a missing Iowa college student. Later on Tuesday, when they could ignore the story no longer, here’s how they spun it: The big news in months—the lawyer for the President of the United States testifies under oath, under penalty of perjury, that the same President directed him to commit a federal crime—was “not a surprise” and “kind of what everyone expected,” a Fox commentator told Tucker Carlson. Trump—who was holding another one of his pep rallies, yet again in West Virginia—was “unflappable,” the commentator said. Trump himself, sounding like a broken record, said that the convictions “had nothing to do with Russian collusion.” Technically, he’s right, but not for long: He’ll likely be facing a mountain of evidence regarding that in the coming months, once Robert Mueller finishes his investigation.

There’s another fallback excuse for this kind of news that I’ve been hearing a lot lately—mostly from Republicans, or people who voted for Trump. “They’re all corrupt,” these people say. “Democrats, Republicans—they’re all on the take.” So I decided to look up some statistics on the subject. Here’s what I found: Since 1965, in 25 years of power, Democrats in presidential administrations have faced three indictments, one conviction, and one prison sentence. How do Republicans fare? In the same time frame, they’ve been in power for 28 years—three years longer than Democrats, that is—but they’ve been slapped with 120 indictments and 89 convictions, and 34 prison sentences. (These numbers don’t include the Trump administration.) Tell this to the next person who starts muttering about how both parties are the same and all politicians are corrupt.

A brief scorecard of where we’re at: Trump’s campaign chair: Found guilty. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer: Pleaded guilty. His National Security Advisor: Pleaded guilty. His deputy campaign chair: Pleaded guilty. His campaign advisor: Pleaded guilty. His friend and consultant going back decades, Roger Stone, is about to be indicted. His son Donald Jr. is under at least one major investigation, as is his son-in-law and perhaps his daughter. Trump himself is under at least two major, serious, and long-term investigations. (Meanwhile, both of the first two Republican members of Congress who endorsed Trump during his candidacy—New York’s Chris Collins and California’s Duncan Hunter—are under indictment: Collins for insider trading, and Hunter and his wife for using $250,000 in campaign money for vacations in Italy and Hawaii, among other things.)

In the meantime, we’re paying Trump’s salary to start work at 11 a.m.—after daily morning lie-downs in a tanning machine—knock off at 4 p.m., take Fridays and weekends off to golf in Florida or New Jersey at his own properties (137 times, at last count) on our taxpayer dime. What time he does spend in the White House is mostly spent ranting and raving on Twitter (often more than 20 times a day). His presidency has failed, even by his own terms: There’s no wall. Hillary isn’t getting locked up any time soon—his own people are—and Obamacare isn’t being repealed. His big-boy military parade was cancelled, after the head of the American Legion spoke out about its $92 million pricetag (that’s $80 million more than he originally told us it would cost). Our national debt—yeah, the one that Trump vowed to pay off in eight years—has reached $1 trillion for the first time. Each day, the Special Counsel’s investigation seems to have backed him into a corner a bit further. With each day, he seems more desperate and makes less sense.

The Republican eunuchs in Congress, of course, could stop all this in a heartbeat, simply by holding real hearings and real investigations and asking real questions. Instead of doing that, they’re providing cover for Trump, refusing to answer any questions about Dear Leader and hoping voters won’t notice.

“So we continue the witch hunt,” Trump continued on Tuesday, after his “no collusion” schtick.

Is it still a witch hunt if all the witches are turning out to be guilty?

Corey Seymour is a proud NRHS graduate who went on to study political science, economics, and literature at UND and Georgetown University. A former writer and editor on the National Affairs Desk at Rolling Stone and at many other magazines, he now works as a senior editor at Vogue in New York. Write him at [email protected].