(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



There Shall Be No Scandals [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-10

There’s a story on the front page about how the DHS, the Trump White House, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem really bungled the response to the Texas floods. By now you know the deal- a new policy requiring the Secretary to sign off on costs greater than $100k meant that response teams were held up for 72 hours because that’s how long it took for her to do so.

Now, let’s at least acknowledge the purposeful idiocy at work here.

- Policies like having the head of something sign off on anything that costs more than $X are usually put into place if you’re somewhere that has had a lot of corruption, which does not apply to FEMA. Or where there is distrust between the top brass and the rest of the organization.

- One place you would never put this into place is an organization dedicated to disaster relief, which has to move quickly. Disasters don’t generally give you a couple of weeks notice.

This is old news at this point. The entire point of the Trump administration is to not have government work for the general welfare. The point is to get people to distrust and not want government involved, and to have the federal government run like a crime family.

But that’s another diary. This is about another part of it all.

Normally this would be a giant scandal. I mean, it is a giant scandal, but it would be treated as such by the media. But we know it won’t. Or rather, it won’t be treated the same as if this was happening with Democrats in charge.

We should all know how the political media treats scandals, which they seem to live for: first, have the opposition party screaming about it. Get the White House response, all the while pushing back on what they say. See how members are the same party are: the entire thrust of any scandal is not the scandal itself. It’s a litmus test for “power” in DC. Who is standing with whom? Who is changing their mind? Who is in “trouble?” And whose head, if any, rolls.

That’s the appeal of scandals to the media. It’s because of the media that they, supposedly, have any consequences...because the media keeps talking about them. It’s a way to keep score in what the political media really cares about- the high school lunch room dynamics of who’s up and who’s down. And a scandal really stops when someone is fired/sacrificed.

That’s it. That’s the game.

The problem is….none of that is happening with one of our two major parties.

When a political party becomes a cult of personality, then all of this stops. Elected Republicans have decided they are just rubber stamps to MAGA. They make noise and vote against some things in the process, but in the end they pretty much all cave in. Because when you are a cult, you don’t question the leader. This is the dynamic between the leader and his pathetic base (the MAGA cult members).

In other words, there is no accountability. And if there is no accountability, there are no consequences. And if there are no consequences, there are no “scandals.”

The current dynamic is that there is only one thing that gets people in any sort of “trouble”- upsetting Trump. Cue Elon Musk. Nothing Musk did was a “scandal” to the Trump White House. But it was “splitting up” with Trump and attacking him that put Musk on the outs. That’s it.

This is authoritarianism at work. Not in our entire system- the Democrats are not on board, and neither are a bunch of real judges, not to mention the majority of the public. This is within the Republican party and whatever they are running (sadly, right now the federal government)

But this is the same old crap from those guys that we’ve seen for years. My beef is with the media.

The media seems to think that if no one is going to be fired, then it’s not really a scandal. They were happy to spend forever on the nothingburger of Clinton’s emails. Jumping on every bump in the road for Biden was simply normal press behavior.

But….if the media is going to drop coverage of far larger scandals with the Trump White House because no one is ever going to face consequences, and therefore their role in the whole dynamic becomes “unnecessary” with one side of the political arena...then we have a problem.

Scandals are only for Democrats because they’re the only ones that will ever face the consequences?

That’s the real scandal.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/10/2332710/-There-Shall-Be-No-Scandals?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/