The Other Guy Broke the Rules

bubble politics

Things are spinning out of control because Trump broke the rules. That’s what liberal journalist Eli Lake — veteran of The Daily Beast and Newsweek — believes. What with Trump breaking the rules on January 6, the other side is breaking the rules too and so is trying to assassinate Donald Trump.

In America, we remain a republic unbroken, but this episode of history offers salutary lessons. We have endured Trump’s most serious norm violation: his efforts to steal back an election he claimed was stolen from him by the forces that smeared and defamed him during his presidency.

It’s just like the good old days of the Roman Republic, Lake says, and Tiberius Gracchus breaking ranks with the top tier to advocate for the common people.

Only, of course, Tiberius Gracchus was a top-tier Roman aristocrat going back generations. And Trump’s father was just an ordinary businessman and apartment developer and owner.

How about Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the aristocrat that broke the rules and started throwing goodies — bread and circuses — at the lower class?

His parents, who were sixth cousins… came from wealthy, established New York families—the Roosevelts, the Aspinwalls and the Delanos, respectively—and resided at Springwood, a large estate south of Hyde Park's historic center.

And I’d say that chaps like Eli Lake have always regarded Donald Trump as the equivalent of the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack.

And if we want to talk about breaking the rules, well.

FDR started out with the National Industrial Recovery Act .

It sought to end cutthroat competition by forcing industries to establish rules such as minimum prices, agreements not to compete, and production restrictions. Industry leaders negotiated the rules with NIRA officials, who suspended antitrust laws in return for better wages.

You see, the problem is that tippy-top people like Eli Lake don’t think of that as “breaking the rules.”

Then there was FDR’s plan to pack the Supreme Court.

Roosevelt's "court packing" plan ran into intense political opposition from his own party, led by Vice President Garner since it upset the separation of powers.

Sounds just like today’s Democrats that don’t like the recent Supreme Court decisions and want to change the rules to get their way by increasing the size of the Court and abolishing the filibuster so they can do it with 51 votes in the Senate.

But let’s talk more about rule-breaking in our own day.

• There’s the racial quotas / affirmative action / diversity policy: 60 years of flagrant breaking of the rules of the Civil Rights Act.

• There’s the Supreme Court discovering penumbras and emanations in the Constitution to allow it to legislate abortion and gay marriage.

• There’s the FBI No. 2 guy working with a former naval intelligence officer at the Washington Post to entrap President Nixon and force his resignation.

• There’s the use of the intelligence community to censor political speech as “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

• Whistlblower: “Confidential Human Sources (CHS) were used by the FBI during the J6 events, and FBI Director Chris Wray lied about it.”

There’s a fundamental human behavior that we always think we are the good guys and the other guys are breaking the rules and bringing the house down.

Anyone that doesn’t get that — and doesn’t understand that the people on the other side of the aisle have a different experience particularly if they are on the receiving end of government action — is living in a political bubble and just should not be taken seriously.