It shouldn’t be a tough question, even for Republicans. Yet many of them still fail to come up with the right answer.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you know what popular vote loser Donald Trump did a few days ago. No, not that. Or that. Or even that. This is about how he gave the Russians “code word” level intelligence developed by Israel about ISIS. The term “code word” signifies intelligence that’s even more secret than Top Secret. Double Top Secret, perhaps? And Trump did it as part of a brag—“I get great intel”—that sounded eerily like the kind a 5-year-old boy would make. You can almost picture him bouncing in his chair, asking the two Sergeis if they wanna see it.
It’s not necessary to add to the chorus of righteous outrage and sincere concern for the fate of our country that has arisen in response to Trump’s incompetence, not to mention his disregard for the basic principles of checks and balances. Others have done that quite well. Let’s focus here on how Trump’s defenders have reacted. The quotation above from Bill O’Reilly protege Jesse Watters about what a “loyal person” would do encapsulates this perfectly.
Watters and others on the right appear to believe that what Trump did is far less important than the matter of who spilled the beans about it. Who knows what they actually think about the man they serve, although we recently got some idea about what one top adviser really thinks.
Of course, those who talk like Watters didn’t come up with this idea on their own. They were simply following the lead of the White House. Last week Trump sent out his national security advisor, Gen. H.R. McMaster, to spin away his leaking of intelligence to Russia: “National security is put at risk by this leak and by leaks like this.” Please note that he’s not talking about the danger created by his boss having leaked, but by those who blew the whistle. “Tattle-tales!,” he might as well have screamed.
Likewise, the Trump 2020 campaign (it’s never too soon!) sought to raise money by attacking both the whistle blowers and the media. A recent fundraising email included the following:
You already knew the media was out to get us. But sadly it’s not just the fake news…There are people within our own unelected bureaucracy that want to sabotage President Trump and our entire 'America First' movement.
His dead-end supporters can’t credibly defend what Trump did, so they are reduced to bleating about leakers and media bias. Without leakers, of course, our first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, might still have his job. Only when the media reported that Trump knew Flynn had been severely compromised and was vulnerable to blackmail did the president finally show him the door—eighteen days after he found out about it.
As for media bias, Trump goes after the messenger because the content of the message is devastating. The truth hurts. But the truth doesn’t matter to the Always Trump crowd. Jeremy W. Peters of the New York Times summarized their take on recent developments as follows:
The chief accomplice in this version of events is the media, which in the case of The Washington Post, erupted into cheers when its story on Mr. Trump’s disclosure of intelligence to the Russians broke. “WASHPOST Newsroom staff openly applauding at latest Trump hit finally clarifies how this has turned into nothing but a bloodsport!” [Matt] Drudge wrote on Twitter. (A reporter for the Post had actually written on Twitter that the newsroom applauded when the story broke an online traffic record.)
Here’s the question to ask people like Jesse Watters: Where do your loyalties lie? That’s the ultimate question for anyone who wants to participate in politics. As for Trump and "America First,” we can turn that phrase on its head. Are you more loyal to America, or to the person who sits in the White House? Do your loyalties lie more with fundamental American values like truth, democracy, equality, and the rule of law, or more with an individual—even when he or she threatens those values and/or the institutions we’ve created to ensure that we follow them?
Our country has reached the point where everyone who has supported Donald Trump must decide where they stand.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).