The Hill:
Trumpunity is the right to adopt the very practices or policies you once denounced, all because you are not Trump. Even the mention of his name magically relieves any duty to follow prior positions.
As Washington prepares for a Biden administration, congressional Democrats are discovering they cannot live without Donald Trump. In controversies ranging from federal investigations to executive orders, they are invoking Trump to justify abandoning the very principles they inveighed against him for four years. There is a sense of immunity from needing to be consistent or coherent.
Call it “trumpunity.”
Trumpunity is the right to adopt the very practices or policies you once denounced, all because you are not Trump. Even the mention of his name magically relieves any duty to follow prior positions.
So, it was no problem when incoming White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon heralded the Biden administration as ushering in a new “sense of unity” while calling Republicans a “bunch of f—ers.” Although Dillon later apologized, figures like Hillary Clinton publicly supported her vulgar attack as perfectly acceptable given Trump’s past rhetoric. There is now an open license to engage in the very same behavior as he did.
This is, of course, little more than a juvenile “he did it first” defense. Washington has long floated on a deep rolling sea of hypocrisy, but now leaders do not even feel the need for pretense — they have Trump.
After complaining for years that Trump acted unilaterally through executive orders, Democrats now call on Joe Biden to do the same. Just a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) denounced Trump’s unilateral coronavirus relief orders as unconstitutional, a circumvention of Congress. Now, he wants Biden to circumvent Congress after his inauguration with such acts as wiping out up to $50,000 in debt per college student — a massive federal subsidy without any vote of Congress.
For years, Democrats and an array of legal experts denounced Trump for dismissing the Russia collusion investigation as a politically motivated hoax. They insisted on the appointment of a special counsel, and described even rhetorical criticism as criminal obstruction or witness tampering. Now, Biden has dismissed federal investigations of his son as just another form of political “foul play.” Various Democratic senators, including Schumer, have called for the Justice Department not to investigate the Hunter Biden allegations, and figures like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) called for the termination of the Durham investigation.
With the confirmation of federal investigations into Hunter Biden, the media and Democratic figures dropped their prior claims that such allegations were Russian disinformation — in Schiff’s words, “out of the Kremlin.” Now, the influence-peddling scheme is treated as true but dismissed as no worse than what the Trumps did. In other words, if the Trump kids cashed in on their father, so can Hunter Biden. It does not matter if there were tax or money-laundering crimes, or if Joe Biden lied about his knowledge or role. The same people who demanded investigations of the business dealings of Trump’s children now cite those dealings to denounce any investigation of Biden’s son.
