"Not as bad as Trump" is not good enough
We can't excuse Presidential misbehavior by comparing it to the last guy.
Lest I be accused to terminal both-sidesism, I don’t think Joe Biden’s classified-documents mess is as bad as Donald Trump’s. Saying they’re exactly the same is like saying MS-13 and the Squirtle Squad are exactly the same, because they’re both gangs.
It still shouldn’t be handwaved away, though, writes David French:
What else should we be thinking about this mess? I have a few thoughts.
First, resist the urge to compare everything to Trump. He is not the moral or legal benchmark. Here’s another way of putting it—even if the early indications are that there are substantial differences between Biden’s conduct and Trump’s (for example, Biden seems to have been far more cooperative than Trump), that does not render the Biden incident acceptable or excusable.
Handling classified information properly is not difficult. Indeed, handling classified information properly is a minimal requirement of access to our nation’s secrets. I once possessed a security clearance. I once had access to thousands upon thousands of pages of classified information. The system was set up to make it easy to handle those documents the right way.
Classified and unclassified documents were transmitted through entirely separate computer systems. Separate rooms were set up for storing and viewing classified documents. Even if there were occasions when classified information had to be moved from secure facilities (as often happened downrange in Iraq), the markings were clear, and accountability was strict.
We simply cannot consent to a culture of impunity regarding the mishandling of classified information at the highest levels of American government. If anything, accountability matters more the greater the power of the individual and the greater their level of access to secrets. After all, these are the people who have access to the most dangerous and damaging information. They should uphold the highest standards.
French also sub-tweets commentators who immediately dismissed Biden’s documents situation out of hand when it was first announced, only for it to blow up in their faces when more classified documents were found at his home:
Third, be patient. Don’t respond to the news like a partisan. As I’ve discussed before, partisans often behave like unpaid lawyers for their political team. If you feel an affinity for one party over the other—or one politician over another—any negative news triggers a powerful protective instinct. You instantly want to minimize or explain away negative facts. You’ll want to respond with whataboutism and contrasts (“Trump was worse!” or “At least Biden is cooperating!”)
Leave the partisanship to the paid professionals—the lawyers and politicos who make their living defending their team. Instead, we need more citizen-jurors, the people who at least try to separate their emotions from their analysis and do radical things like waiting for all the facts to emerge before forming a definitive conclusion.
So let’s wait. If past incidents provide any clue to future events, we’ll likely see a flurry of early news activity followed by a long wait for the final results of the investigation. That early news activity can tell us important things. For example, almost immediately it became quite clear that the DOJ had adequate legal grounds to search Mar-a-Lago. But we still don’t have the complete picture of Trump’s conduct, and we may not have a more complete picture for many months.
I do, however, have one strong desire—to change the culture of accountability so that we’re not consistently expecting less of the most powerful politicians than we expect of the ordinary service members, law-enforcement officers, and diplomats who serve this country sacrificially and often anonymously.
You know my respective feelings about Trump and Biden. They could find a video of Joe Biden handing secret documents to Chinese officials for cash while subsequently making jokes about my mother and the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Stanley Cup drought, and I still might not think he’s as awful as his predecessor.
But we’re well and truly screwed if Donald Trump’s actions while in office and immediately afterward become the new minimally acceptable benchmark for how a President should behave. You cannot say that he was an unusually awful aberration and then excuse anything future Presidents do by saying “well, it’s not nearly as bad as what Trump did.” That’s like arguing the Russian invasion of Ukraine is NBD because Stalin killed way more people than Putin.1
The good news is, at least we don’t see liberals and Democrats spreading nonsense conspiracy theories about Biden’s classified documents the way Republicans do it for Trump, and…sigh what did the babbling idiots on The View say now?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Rigid Thinking to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.