When Dealing with Trump, Republicans Should Remember Employee 4

In addition to the criminal charges previously filed against emperor-in-exile Donald Trump for his alleged pack-ratting of classified documents in various locations at his Florida Xanadu, special counsel Jack Smith supplied a few bonus ones on Thursday evening. In it, Smith accuses Trump and one of his aides — who was also newly indicted — of planning in June 2022 to delete security camera recordings of people moving document-laden boxes the day after Trump’s lawyers learned that the footage would be subpoenaed.

This latest wrinkle in the alleged classified document caper can be read in several ways. By Ruth Marcus’ account in the Washington Post, it looks like a Watergate-style cover-up. “Drip by drip, count by count, obstructive act by obstructive act, the seriousness of this situation comes into focus,” Marcus writes. If you’re a fan of the Godfather movies, the story resembles the machinations of a criminal syndicate chief attempting to destroy evidence in a quest to outwit the local D.A. According to the filing, several days after Trump spoke by phone to Carlos De Oliveira, a loyal soldier in his organization, De Oliveira tried to swear another Trump soldier to omerta and repeatedly told him that “the boss” wanted the server with footage of the moving boxes deleted.

But if viewed with the mind of a miniaturist, the superseding indictment illustrates how Trump has worked his way to control and direct the entire Republican Party.

Despite Trump having lost the 2018 midterms, the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, despite having unleashed his violent army on Congress on Jan. 6, and despite having spread an encyclopedia worth of lies since launching his campaign in 2015, the GOP follows his lead. Trump considers himself The Boss. The Boss does what he wants to do. The Boss tells his underlings — whether they work at Mar-a-Lago or labor in the Republican Party — what to do. He’s the authoritarian who flexes authority. And in the name of loyalty, he demands obedience from his order-takers to shield him from legal exposure. It’s almost hard to begrudge him for it because most of the time, it seems to work.

Trump attracts and grooms zealots and fanatics and then sends them off into battle in his service without a thought to the consequences for other lives. And in the case of the game of musical chairs he allegedly played in Florida with some of the government’s prized national security secrets, he’s created accomplices to his alleged crimes.

Politics wouldn’t be politics without an element of coercion. Operators like Boss Tweed and Lyndon Johnson didn’t move legislation by the force of their personalities alone. The stick must always be used in conjunction with the carrot. But Trump has erected his political career on a foundation of absolute loyalty to Trump. There can be no loyal opposition within his party without him blowing a gasket and there can be no staffer at his Florida home who can think they should not obstruct justice if that’s what The Boss wants.

We hear the demanding voice of The Boss in the famous 30-minute July 25, 2019, phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he seems to suggest Zelenskyy should launch an investigation of Joe Biden’s son (a call that took place just days before Trump ordered a hold on aid to Ukraine). We heard it most recently in his denunciation of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds for not endorsing him for president in the current campaign. Because The Boss once endorsed Reynolds, he thinks he owns her. He urges candidates to primary Republicans who defy him. He makes his wrath so transparent that most other Republicans — including most of the candidates currently running against him — fear saying anything negative about him, even though he no longer wields presidential power.

In a brilliant multi-part series for the Bulwark, William Saletan recently laid out how Trump used his powers of bossdom to turn one of the most independent and clear-thinking Republicans, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, into his frightened, caged rabbit. At the beginning of the 2016 campaign, Graham saw Trump for what he was. “Hateful.” A “demagogue.” A “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who “represents the worst in America.” But as the ring of power slid onto one of Trump’s short fingers, Graham became the Trumpiest of Trumpies. You could have some sympathy for Graham if he had become Trump’s mini-me out of fear, like some other Republicans. But as Saletan establishes, Graham’s transformation was so complete there wasn’t any Trump indiscretion or authoritarian power grab for which Graham wouldn’t formulate an excuse. If sucking up were a crime, Graham would be a repeat felon.

It has become the stuff of legend and song how Trump goes beyond the usual political boundaries to bend — or attempt to bend — everybody in his path to his will. The good news out of yesterday’s superseding indictment is that some of Trump’s employees might have better moral judgment and a finer sense of who and what deserves their loyalty than a lot of Republicans. The scheme to delete the security footage, allegedly ordered by Trump, was not completed.

When De Oliveira asked another Trump employee, identified as Employee 4 in the indictment, to erase the footage, he was rebuffed. Employee 4 said he didn’t have the right to do that. It’s a reminder that there are still two ways of being in the Republican Party: loyal and potentially criminal, or skeptical, moral and resistant to Trump.

Trump on Trial is going to have as many sequels as The Godfather. Send Trump criminal notes to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. I’m bored with my Twitter account as well as my Mastodon, Post, Bluesky, Notes, and Threads accounts but not so much that I wish somebody would delete them. Meanwhile, my RSS feed is my Boss.