Before there was a President Donald Trump, America had been living with an ever-diminishing erosion of accountability in high places. Take the war in Iraq, for example, called by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, “the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history.” No one was ever held accountable for this disaster.
A similar lack of accountability can be discerned in examining the resolution of such big newsmakers as the banking crisis of 2007-8, or the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska. Or even under former President Donald Trump, the Mueller report in which so many Americans had placed their hopes for accountability, until then-Attorney General William Barr swept those hopes aside.
If America needed more indicators accountability was on the wane, Trump’s feud with Walter Shaub, director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, occurred in the summer of 2017. Named to that office by George W. Bush, Shaub was appointed its head by Obama.
He clashed several times with Trump on ethical matters, coming to a head over the President’s failure to follow the example of his predecessors in placing his business holdings in a blind trust, turning them over instead to his two sons.
In his resignation letter, Shaub wrote, he and his staff were “committed to protecting the principle that “public service is a public trust.”
Ethics and accountability have never been major obstacles for Trump throughout his career. Indeed, much of what he did in his presidency was not...
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