Two key Trump campaign aides, Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, have been indicted for serious crimes which fall under the header: “conspiracy against the United States.” Another Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopolous, has pleaded guilty to a charge related to collusion with Russia.
Under our system of justice, Manafort and Gates must be presumed innocent. Indeed, at this juncture, they are as innocent as those who have not been charged with anything at all, like, say, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus or Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie.
But all four men share something in common as disturbing as blatant criminality. So too do quite a few other members of the Trump entourage and Trump himself.
The indictment of Manafort and Gates reveals an intricate scheme to evade taxes, launder money and violate laws requiring them to register as agents of a foreign power. At the end of the day, they sought to enrich themselves. According to the indictment, Manafort “used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States,” to “spen(d) millions of dollars on luxury goods and services for himself and his extended family.” Gates used the ill-begotten funds to “pay for his personal expenses, including his mortgage, children’s tuition, and interior decorating of his Virginia residence.”
In short, though Manafort and Gates were heavily engaged in politics — serving as unregistered foreign agents for various Ukrainian politicians and entities, and then as key players in the Trump campaign — their primary objective had nothing to do with political ideas or political objectives. For them, politics — including also a long history of representing foreign despots in the Ukraine, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Kenya, Equatorial Guiana, Somalia and Angola — was merely a convenient vehicle to enrich themselves and their families.
This bald fact bears heavily on figures like Priebus and Gillespie, both former chairmen of the Republican National Committee. Neither man has been accused of breaking any laws. But for them, as is plain from their recent track records, politics has nothing to do with promoting the public weal and quite a bit with something else.
In his capacity as RNC chief following Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, Priebus oversaw the production of the party’s so-called autopsy. It outlined a broad range of policy ideas the party would need to embrace if it was to succeed in future presidential elections.
“(M)any minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country,” it read. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too.” To that end, it called for an end to the restrictionist immigration rhetoric of the past. “If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”
Not long after signing off on these words, Priebus found himself avidly campaigning for — and then running the White House for — a man who turned almost every aspect of his professed beliefs on their head. Instead of inclusivity, Priebus turned himself into an unswerving defender of a nasty nativist, a man who began his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers and proceeded downhill from there.
Like Priebus, Gillespie also positioned himself as a champion of a humane wing of the Republican Party, a devotee of “compassionate conservatism,” someone described in a recent Forbes profile as “a genuinely nice guy,” “thoughtful” and “civic-minded.”
But this same thoughtful and civic-minded gentleman, now running for governor of Virginia, has turned on a dime. Winking and dog-whistling to white supremacists and the Trump base, Gillespie has made opposition to the removal of Confederate monuments a signature issue. The man he selected as a key campaign aide, Jack Morgan, argues that the campaign to take down the statues is part of a communist plot to subvert the nation.
Of course, political success in American politics always hinges to some degree on flexibility and compromise. But these reversals are hardly instances of that. They are instead a demonstration of unadulterated opportunism in the service of self-advancement.
When it comes to political morality, it is worth inquiring what separates a Manafort and Gates from a Priebus and Gillespie? Manafort and Gates are plainly more brazen and more driven by cupidity. On the other hand, Priebus and Gillespie are by far the bigger hypocrites.
Manafort and Gates never bothered to drape themselves in any high-minded principles. Priebus and Gillespie, on the other hand, like quite a few Republican politicians in and around the Trump orbit, have revealed that their political platforms were just a readily disposed of prop in a self-aggrandizing scam.
Schoenfeld is the author of “Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media and the Rule of Law,” and a former senior adviser to the 2012 Romney for President campaign.
