Deny, Deny, Deny
And Get Away With It?
One great conundrum of this era has to be what level of depredation is disqualifying for public recognition or approval.
Would contemporary social order have been better served if Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez had not been the effective advocates of profound social change that they certainly were?
No.
Yet both men, from confirmed accounts, were womanizers whose courage and leadership went along with behavior that was reprehensible but never so widely rumored or public that they had to deny what was actually true.
I had this thought driving past MLK and Cesar Chavez Boulevards in the Northwest recently, knowing that across the country Chavez’s name has been coming down from pillars and posts this year.
More than a half century ago King was the object of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s vengeful surveillance and has nonetheless endured as a symbol of civil rights and justice in the United States. While not absolved, King is very much an icon.
Chavez’s stature has been irreparably damaged by recent revelations in the New York Times that he abused women and girls in the 1960s while winning acclaim for leading the United Farm Workers’ campaign for reforms. I was surprised to see his name still adorning a major thoroughfare in Oregon.
In rendering judgment on politicians and male public figures, in particular, standards can be confounding. These days, private and unofficial misbehavior seems to have more impact when exposed after the fact, rather than when encountered and even visible firsthand.
Despite what we have learned since, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez were heroic in most other respects. By contrast, the current president of the United States is demonstrably compromised. He is a convicted felon for falsifying business records, has been found liable for sexual abuse, and was twice impeached by the House of Representatives.
Will history eventually provide a retrospective verdict on Donald Trump, as it has with King and Chavez and so many other notables whose sins were tolerated in their eras of renown?
When Trump finally descends into ignominy, what will happen to his triumphal arch and the other celebrations of his life that he is demanding to have built and displayed?
Ironies abound. Bill Clinton’s legacy was diminished by his affair with the twenty-two-year-old Monica Lewinsky while he was president. In his 1992 campaign Clinton was mocked for saying he did not “inhale” marijuana in his younger days. Partly as a result of this deflection, he earned a reputation for being undisciplined and devious after he falsely denied a relationship with Lewinsky.
Clinton eventually acknowledged his mistakes, paid the fines, and accepted the punishments he received. His reputation has never really recovered, and I suspect he knows that this will be a permanent historic stain.
The paradox of Trump’s character is how disciplined he has proved to be in certain respects. Should Trump ever have to say he does not “inhale” cannabis or tobacco, there is actually no evidence that he ever has smoked anything.
And having watched his brother die of alcoholism, he has never, to anyone’s knowledge, had a drink.
Donald Trump defiantly trashes norms of propriety and talks to and about women in ways that are astonishingly vulgar. Somehow his refusal to acknowledge any flaw in his behavior or to apologize for any verified failure of judgment has, perversely, been a form of self-discipline and apparently a source of his lasting strengths.
Putting the noble aspirations of King and Chavez and the political values of Bill Clinton in the same sentences with the egregious public presence of Trump raises this so far unanswerable question: How does he get away with it?
Are insistent denials and outright lies the way to avoid retribution? Will Trump ever — in our times or in the conclusions of history — be fully held to account?
Denial was Richard Nixon’s strategy as the Watergate scandal unfolded (memorably asserting, “I am not a crook”), but denial became impossible after he was heard on his own White House tapes authorizing criminal activity.
The irony of Trump’s inviolability so far is especially striking because of our fascination with revelation and exposure. Trump is openly ignoring the law and accepted practice; maybe by being so blatant he can actually get away with more than what he is doing in secret.
There have always been explorations of famous lives in which invariably human flaws are present. What is different now is that scrutiny is so intense and that the punishments are so variable.
When rationalizations and fumbling explanations are offered in response to allegations, they do not generally prevail. Trump doesn’t even bother to make them.
In recent decades, revelations about prominent men’s mistreatment of women have undone reputations and livelihoods, most famously the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and the financier Jeffrey Epstein. Yet even though credible allegations of sexual abuse by Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh were, briefly, sensations, both men were confirmed to the Supreme Court after insisting angrily that these allegations were false.
Donald Trump was elected president a second time in 2024, by a wider margin than his first victory in 2016, after juries in criminal and civil cases while he was out of office determined that he was guilty of or liable for the charges against him. Now, as president, the Supreme Court has given him almost complete immunity from prosecution for his actions in office.
Trump has convinced voters to support him with emphatic denials and has managed to turn the viciousness and violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — one of the most examined episodes in history — into an anomaly in which rioters are, in his terms, “beautiful” people.
The outrageous daring of these rejections of reality has proved to be a superpower for Trump.
********************
Coming in September is Kai Bird’s brilliant biographical dissection (written with Susan Goldmark) of the lawyer Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. The book shows how Cohn also used an extraordinary ability to deny, deny, deny until he could no longer do so and died in disgrace.
