Adam Schiff Forgets Hamilton

They say it’s unprecedented to charge a former president. You’re damn right it’s unprecedented. We never had a president who was making hush money payments to a porn star and falsifying business records to cover it up.

— Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California

When he said that, Schiff was responding to accusations that, since charging a former president with a crime is novel in the history of the country, New York’s prosecution of former president Trump can only have been politically motivated, a perversion of the legal system, unfairly singling Trump out. And if Schiff means to say that Trump is the first president who got caught conducting sleazy crimes like paying hush money and falsifying business records, he’s right, obviously.

But an implication lurks behind his remark. Or maybe it’s more like a mood, a general sense of the history of the presidency and other high office in America, involving a presumption that before Trump, such people, whatever their flaws, didn’t commit lowlife acts of the kind Trump has now been convicted of. Like paying hush money and falsifying business records.

And that’s funny, because just to begin with, Alexander Hamilton, whom Schiff and other Democrats were so fervently quoting only five years ago in opposition to Trump, is well-known for having paid hush money to the husband of a woman he’d had an affair with, a fact that came to light when Hamilton was called on to explain certain irregularities in the accounts of the U.S. Treasury. No, he wasn’t a president. But come on. What Hamilton found himself having to confess made him unusual among men of his social class only because he had to confess it.

Is it good partisan politics to pretend that such acts make Trump, in themselves, unique?

Maybe.

But in order to resist Trumpism, do we have to believe it? Do we have to think presidents and other august figures throughout our history haven’t gotten away with paying people to keep sexual and other behavior secret? Do we have to think that for such acts to rise to the level of truly Trumpian grime, they would have to involve someone Schiff would call a porn star?

Of course we don’t. Hamilton’s father-in-law Philip Schuyler, an upstanding revolutionary leader, paid a woman, whom his son had sexually assaulted, to refuse to testify, move to Canada, and never come back. President Harding was attending a rowdy event involving a group of “actresses” dancing on a table when one of the performers was killed by a thrown glass; everybody there was paid off or otherwise induced to stay silent.

JFK probably didn’t have to pay people to keep the facts of his sex life under wraps—investigative aggression wasn't what it is now—but given the car-trunks full of cash that gained him victory in the 1960 West Virginia primary, we know he was hardly above making under-the-radar payoffs. When JFK was president, one of his girlfriends was also the girlfriend of the leading gangster Sam Giancana—not a “porn star,” just somebody with whom pillowtalk crossed far more dangerous lines than Trump’s pre-presidential escapade with Stormy Daniels ever did. In 1932, FDR made deals with the New York and Chicago mobs to win his party’s nomination and handed out federal patronage without compunction to criminal operators like the Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast, Harry Truman’s patron (and Truman of course put family members in no-show jobs on his Senate office payroll).

That’s how it was.

It shouldn’t have been. But it was.

On falsifying records and other such chicanery: our first president, George Washington, like Trump, ripped off almost everybody he ever did business with. He broke British laws against real-estate speculation in western land, and when his titles were legitimized by victory in the Revolution, he used presidential power to enforce them. He subverted the antislavery laws of Pennsylvania when it was hosting the nation’s temporary capital. He ignored a federal law for creating the nation’s permanent capital, siting it to benefit his own commercial interests, then held up signing a bank bill in order to pressure Congress to revise the law to retroactively permit what he’d done.

So the point is that what Trump did is OK?

No, it’s that our standards for officials’ behavior have drastically improved over time.

Also that Trump is such a chaotic force of mayhem that he can’t help but get caught.

Being in everybody’s face with stuff that people used to move heaven and earth to cover up is key to his whole operation. He goes out of his way to leave the world no choice but to enforce the law or blow off the law. That’s his thing: being impossible to deal with, making all of our systems untenable. It’s a national nightmare.

But maybe we can learn from his grotesquely larger-than-life public performances of what used to be kept secret. Learn, say, that we need to maintain these standards for public officials’ behavior that were never applied until recently. Learn to remember to investigate commercial chicanery before its perpetrators get into a position to jeopardize the world.

That’s the challenge Trump’s been presenting us with for almost ten years now. He’s never going to stop, and I don’t think we’re likely to meet the challenge. It’s a lot more fun to follow Schiff into a fantasy world where what makes Trump historically unique is sleazebag behavior—though that actually makes him fairly common—and not a degree of derangement that challenges so many treasured preconceptions about our country.