Why politicians have never been more brazenly awful

Nobody resigns, or even admits guilt

Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.

It’s been quite the week here in New York City, where world leaders gathered at the UN and our mayor pleaded not guilty to taking bribes from at least one foreign government. Eric Adams has been a clown for decades and a catastrophe at City Hall, so for all the chaos the city is now experiencing, the arrest was very welcome news.

Right now I’m busy covering the ongoing strike at Boeing in the Pacific Northwest. There are 33,000 workers in their third week on the picket lines, and there seems to be enough resolve to keep this work stoppage running through Christmas and the New Year. Boeing did itself no favors by going around union leaders and submitting an offer in a letter leaked to the media, a rookie move that outraged negotiators and rank and filers alike. I’ll have more on it next week.

I’m also working on a follow-up to a piece I wrote last month about the growing gender gap in our politics and the rightward drift of young male voters. Expect that out later this weekend. It’s a good one.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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New York City Mayor Eric Adams was finally indicted today on corruption charges that include acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of Turkey. Far from shocking, the charges felt in many ways overdue, as Adams’s shady relationship with the autocratic Turkish government has been an open secret for years.

As the indictment indicates, the mayor was almost cartoonishly unconcerned with being caught when he committed the alleged crimes, and even after the indictment was released to the public, Adams insisted to reporters that he was actually the victim of a vengeful Department of Justice seeking to punish him for being critical about the president’s handling of the migrant crisis.

Even before news of the indictment broke, I was hearing that disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was furiously calling his remaining allies across New York City, attempting to whip up support and donation pledges for a run at City Hall. It was well-timed for Cuomo, who was booked up earlier this month with a Congressional hearing about all the nursing home residents whose deaths he caused and then tried to cover up.

That scandal, which shattered the image he’d cultivated as the ultra-competent crisis leader during early Covid, was followed by a 168-page report detailing his rampant sexual misconduct in office. The scandals ultimately forced Cuomo to resign as governor, but unfortunately, they weren’t able to shame him out of public life or prompt any meaningful reflection.

Vengeful and antsy, Cuomo has been ramping up his public appearances over the past year, trashing the progressive politicians without criminal records who ousted him, and courting conservative voters in the city in preparation for a possible run for mayor.

Cuomo obviously views becoming mayor as a way to quench his thirst for power and claim (entirely undeserved) personal vindication. But why does he think that he can be so transparently dishonest and be dogged by a long history of corruption and personal disgrace, yet still win an election against plenty of qualified opponents?

It’s likely for the same reason Adams has no qualms about sticking with the comically half-assed claim that he’s being framed by Joe Biden: Barring criminal conviction, there are no longer any real, longterm consequences for politicians who lie, cheat, incite violence, say racial slurs, or commit any other political faux pas.

If nothing else, Cuomo and Adams at least facing fierce opposition from many of their fellow Democrats, something that no longer happens among prominent Republicans. Those Republicans who condemned former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6th insurrection are now either back on board the Trump train or dissidents who were ousted by the party’s base.

You can see the difference in how GOP leaders have responded to the recent revelations about self-proclaimed Black Nazi and porn addict Mark Robinson, which has mostly consisted of shrugging and trying to change the topic. They nominated a Holocaust denier who thinks some people should just be killed, and nobody really seemed to care. He was deemed “controversial” by the press and struggled in the polls, which was deemed punishment enough, as if election results are the only arbiter of morality and relevance.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson waved off questions about a viciously racist tweet by Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, who posted threats to Haitian immigrants that perpetuated the heinous lies that fellow Republicans, including Donald Trump and JD Vance, have been spreading for the past few months.

“He's a very frank and outspoken person, but he's also a very principled man,” Johnson said of Higgins, who back in 2020 tweeted that he’d murder Black Lives Matter protestors if they came near him. The Congressional Black Caucus has sought to censure Higgins, who eventually deleted the tweet, but that can’t happen until after the election.

Trump and Vance continue to spread the lies about Haitian immigrants, which have resulted in a series of bomb threats against schools and public buildings in Springfield, OH, though they’ve also moved on to amplifying and conjuring up truly bonkers allegations against Nicaraguan immigrants in the city of Aurora, Colorado. Trump has promised to visit the city, a prospect that its mayor says he would welcome, if only to prove to Trump that his rants against the immigrant community there have been grievously misinformed.

And last night, sniggering Texas podcast gremlin Ted Cruz released one of the most exploitative and hateful political ads produced since the infamous Willie Horton spot. But because it attacks trans people, and that’s been deemed an acceptable political tactic, it has avoided scrutiny, much less condemnation.

One more thing: Rep. Anthony Esposito, a Republican from Long Island, was exposed this week for giving staff jobs to his fiancee’s daughter and his mistress. A decade ago, that would have been enough to force somebody’s resignation; today, it barely makes a ripple.

Over-correction, gatekeeping, and self-righteousness

Politicians have never been renowned for telling the truth, but over the past decade, their capacity for telling brazen lies, committing egregious crimes, and uttering violent slurs has reached new heights. This has happened in tandem with a plummeting in public consequences and personal shame, and while exactly what has fueled the dramatic shift is something of a chicken or the egg situation, I do think much of it comes down to the choices made by political media outlets and the corporations that own them.

Trump’s victory in 2016 was so shocking to political reporters and editors (and the rest of us) that there has since been a conscious effort to check their supposed biases and calibrate stories to compensate for the existence of Trump supporters. Trump can now say Jewish people would be to blame if he loses the election and never even get asked about it, in part due to the fact that the press doesn’t believe that it will upset his followers or move the needle with the electorate.

The same goes for the slurs about Haitians; the press has made a concerted effort to debunk the lies, but Trump’s claim that they were eating dogs during a national debate watched by 67 million people have not stuck to him, either.

As I’ve always said, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, which is how you wind up with an entire media ecosystem that refuses publish relevant information from a cache of Trump staffer emails. The refusal to engage is a gift to far-right media, which has a clear path to dictate the news cycle and fills the void with their manufactured scandals. That further obscures what should be real scandals, allowing the worst people in the country to constantly get away with unfathomable behavior.

Building up the progressive media ecosystem is a vital step to counteracting the far right’s ability to set the national agenda and change the national political culture. It will also put pressure on the mainstream media to keep up with issues and scandals that actually matter, not out of a sense of moral duty but simply because they have to do so.

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