President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to inhabit his own private, convenient reality is a firmly established part of his style right now. And one of the many insidious things about his coming presidency is his attempt to force the rest of us to live in this chaotic, unmoored realm along with him. His team’s latest attempt to disorient the public came in response to a CNN investigation that found more than 50 plagiarized passages in a 2012 book by Trump’s choice to be deputy national security adviser, Monica Crowley. The Trump transition team’s response? “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.”
The statement is a wonderful example of how Trump’s private universe works: If it’s beneficial to him, or flattering to people in his circle, then it’s true. If it’s unflattering, then it’s not merely false, it’s the result of malicious political motivations. And this particular attempt to push back against criticism suggests just how little is stable, unchanging and unerringly true in Trumpland.
Whether or not Crowley plagiarized large sections of her book is a factual question, not a partisan one. There is no sensible world in which copying someone else’s words is literary theft if you’re a Democrat, but an act of original creation if you’re a Republican. Your party affiliation does not change the answer to the question: Did Crowley write an original book on her own, or did she steal other people’s work and pass it off as her own for reasons only she can clarify?
Accomplishments are tangible, measurable things. You have them or you don’t. You achieved them or you didn’t. There is an actual, meaningful difference between doing something for real and faking it. To say otherwise is to imply that hard work has no value, that there’s no such thing as genuine attainment and meaningful differences in performance. Printing yourself a diploma that says “Harvard” on it does not mean you graduated from that institution, and using the copy-and-paste function and duping HarperCollins into publishing it is not the same thing as sitting down and writing 100,000 original words. And qualitatively, messing around on Twitter is not the same thing as developing a terse and effective prose style to rival Ernest Hemingway’s.
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This isn’t even taking a map and insisting that it’s the same thing as the territory it portrays. It’s taking a stuffed toy dog and declaring that it’s a live cobra. If any conservatives want to defend a postmodern way of thinking about the world that negates the values they profess to stand for, I suppose that’s their choice, but it is baffling to me that anyone would take up this particular standard. Attempting to degrade basic standards of achievement is a sign of profound weakness and fear about measuring up.
Now, interpretations of what the facts ought to be taken to mean, or the punishment that ought to be meted out for certain offenses, can certainly show evidence of political bias. It would be inconsistent and silly to maintain that Crowley ought to be thrown out of public service forever while also saying that it is a good thing that Joe Biden, who had some trouble with proper citations and the details of his own life while on the campaign trail in 1988, got to redeem himself and continue to serve his country. Just as the basic facts of reality shouldn’t depend on party registration, our rules for redemption would be better if they were focused squarely on the magnitude of the damage done and the work it takes to make it right and restore a person’s credibility, rather than on the party identity of the sinner.
Any invocation of “the real issues,” in any context, should automatically be taken as a sign of the dodge that it inevitably is. And in the case of Crowley, it’s a particularly dumb attempt at a feint. Right now, one of the most critical issues facing the United States is whether or not we can agree on facts.