Corruption's Enablers
I’m disappointed.
Actually, that word doesn’t cut it anymore.
I’m disgusted.
Not simply that Donald Trump has managed to turn the presidency into something resembling a family business with nuclear weapons. I’m disgusted that he’s getting away with it.
Ezra Klein of the New York Times put it beautifully in July, if “beautifully” is the appropriate adverb for governmental rot. Republicans he talks to privately, Klein said, acknowledge we’re dealing with corruption “majestic in its grandeur.”
Majestic. We’ve apparently reached the point where ordinary corruption needs a balcony.
Peggy Noonan, hardly a card-carrying member of the resistance, devoted an August Wall Street Journal column, “The Art of the Self-Deal,” to Trump-era corruption, citing polls showing nearly 70 percent of Americans believe Trump’s business interests influence his presidential decisions. Her larger point is the one that sticks with me. Corruption tolerated today becomes precedent tomorrow. Bad policy can be repealed. Corruption changes what we’re willing to accept.
The most troubling part isn’t even Trump. It’s everybody standing around pretending not to notice.
Which brings me home to the Kansas of yesterday and today.
Bob Dole was fiercely partisan, and to be fair, supported Trump in 2016 and 2020. But near the end of his life, when Trump insisted the 2020 election had been stolen, Dole said plainly that Trump’s fraud claims were hooey. Bob Dole lost the White House and went on Letterman to make fun of himself. Trump lost and went looking for someone to tell him he hadn’t.
Nancy Kassebaum didn’t require nearly that much evolution. She became an outspoken Trump critic and ultimately endorsed his Democratic opponent in 2024.
I cannot imagine either of the U.S. Senators of my young adult life looking at a president whose family businesses overlap with industries his administration regulates, whose White House power routinely bumps up against personal interests and concluding: Keep moving. Nothing to see here.
Enter the U.S. Senators of my later adult life. Jerry Moran is the more disappointing of the two because we’ve seen another Jerry Moran. In 2019, opposing Trump’s emergency declaration at the Mexican border, designed to build a wall after Congress declined to pony up.
“The ends don’t justify the means,” Moran said at the time. What does that Jerry Moran think of the means and ends of Trump’s pocket lining?
Moran has raised legitimate objections to pending crypto legislation, but publicly his concerns have centered largely on banking and policy questions, not the elephant in the room wearing the navy suit and red necktie (too long, btw).
Roger Marshall is less mysterious. When Democrats tried to force a Senate vote blocking the Pentagon from accepting Qatar’s luxury 747 for Trump to jet about, Marshall personally objected and stopped it.
I can’t crawl inside either man’s head or heart, but the political calculation seems obvious. Trump owns the Kansas GOP electorate and crossing him invites a Primary challenger, MAGA fury, and the possibility of spending retirement explaining how somebody named Biff Q. Patriot from Chautauqua County beat you by 19 points.
Marshall has made his bed and appears comfortable snoozing away. Moran troubles me more because he knows better. And that’s the corrosive genius of all this. Trump doesn’t need every Republican Senator to approve of what he does. He just needs them to decide that objecting costs more than acquiescing.
So they talk about agriculture. Veterans. Shoveling the federal grants to K-State. Anything except the cha-ching emanating from the Oval Office.
Bob Dole understood institutions matter. Nancy Kassebaum understood that character matters. Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall must decide whether political survival matters more.
And Kansans should not allow silence to masquerade as an answer.
Mike Matson covered politics as a reporter and later managed the message for a two-term Kansas Republican governor. Today, he writes an every other weekend column for The Manhattan Mercury and goes in search of the second thought as host of Within Reason, three days a week on News Radio KMAN.
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