A Ruthless Few

 As Trump continues his campaign of retaliation against perceived dissidents—including members of his own former administration—it's interesting to watch the steady moral deterioration along the way in the kinds of people he can find to do his bidding. They just get worse and worse. 

Trump's first attorney general, after all—back in his first term—was Jeff Sessions—and we thought at the time that he was as bad as they could come. But even he had enough integrity to recuse himself from an investigation in which he had a conflict of interest—and Trump never forgave him for it. 

Next came Bill Barr. We thought he was perfectly awful. But even he had moral lines he would not cross. He would not lie to pretend that Trump had won an election he had actually lost; nor go out and hunt up pretexts for Trump to stay in power unlawfully. 

So he had to be out too. 

Now, we have Pam Bondi. Truly, the bottom of the barrel. Someone with no scruples whatsoever. Except that even she tried—however half-heartedly—to save the job of a respected career prosecutor who declined to file an indictment against James Comey—citing the lack of evidence to convict.

Trump wouldn't have this. He can't have any career prosecutors who actually abide by the Justice Department's ethics manual—or the oath that every attorney swears never to prosecute someone when they don't actually believe in the person's substantive guilt. 

Trump needed someone who would stop at nothing—who would scruple at nothing—who would leave no moral line uncrossed—who would "go the whole length of want of principle," to borrow a phrase from William Hazlitt. 

He found it in Lindsey Halligan—the only "prosecutor" who signed her name to the Comey indictment—after being appointed to her DOJ post just days earlier, with no prior prosecutorial experience. 

Shortly after the Comey indictment, she filed the Letitia James indictment as well; despite a similar lack of evidence or the support of career DOJ prosecutors. 

And it is by this same process of moral winnowing—the weeding out of anyone with the slightest scrap left of dignity or ethics—that we get the cast of characters that increasingly make up the federal government and judiciary—the Kash Patels, the J.D. Vances, the Marco Rubios, the Pete Hegseths, the Lindsey Halligans, the Emil Boves: people who have no conscience whatsoever; people who are complete, howling voids of integrity or any form of self-respect; people who will do anything Trump asks them—with Sardinian grins on their faces—and ask for more—

—people, in short who: 

[...] should stick at nothing to serve the turn of a party; that should be the exclusive organ of prejudice, the sordid tool of power; that should go the whole length of want of principle in palliating every dishonest measure, of want of decency in defaming every honest man; that should prejudge every question, traduce every opponent; that should give no quarter to fair inquiry or liberal sentiment; that should be 'ugly all over with hypocrisy', and present one foul blotch of servility, intolerance, falsehood, spite, and ill-manners

—as Hazlitt put it. 

That is how we end up with the members of the Trump administration. That is how we end up with Pam Bondi fiendishly berating Congress, when asked to account for her pursuit of flagrantly political prosecutions of innocent people. That is how we end ups with Kash Patel turning in the same type of performance, during his turn in the hot seat before Congress. 

That's how we get spectacles like our White House press secretary making "your mom" jokes, in order to deflect a serious question from a reporter—or the Vice President grinning in front of a rally audience as he "jokes" that his administration might very well indeed be massacring innocent fishermen in the Caribbean Sea. 

These are the people who will stop at no moral boundary—apparently, not even at murdering or persecuting the innocent. These are people who will gleefully "go the whole length of want of principle." 

They do indeed present "one foul blotch of servility, intolerance, falsehood, spite, and ill-manners."

Lindsey Halligan. Pam Bondi. J.D. Vance. Karoline Leavitt. Kash Patel. Pete Hegseth. Marco Rubio. J'accuse. Truly, they are (to borrow a stanza from Hugh MacDiarmid): 

..A ruthless few
Claiming as their rights the wrongs they do,
Ready to advance themselves
And secure high posts and powers for which
No intrinsic merits qualify them
At no matter how great a cost
In the sacrifice of all human values
—A few whose only distinction
Is cowardice, cruelty, and greed[.]