The reactions by Alaska’s top elected leaders to former President Donald Trump’s indictment last week say a lot about what they think of the public.
Two out of the three — our governor and junior U.S. senator — must think the public is politically motivated above all else, unable to consider the facts and unwilling to believe that the former president could ever do anything wrong. I’ll add “gullible” to the list because, sadly, the two apparently think the public is gullible enough to believe their accusations, which sound like they were mindlessly copied from one of Trump’s own social media posts.
A federal grand jury in Florida indicted Trump on 37 counts for his dishonest and allegedly illegal handling of highly sensitive, national security-level secret documents. Essentially, the former president and staff packed up a lot of top-secret documents when voters booted him out of the White House, carted the papers off to his private residence in Florida, hid them from the National Archives, and lied about it the entire time.
Trump must think stealing classified documents is the same as stealing nice towels when he checks out of a hotel. The difference being that he owns the hotel, so he’s only stealing from himself, though I suppose it’s possible that his hotel submitted a fraudulent insurance claim for the stolen towels.
These were not mundane secret documents, such as the wine price list for a state dinner. The indictment reports that the purloined paperwork included information about defense and weapons capabilities of the United States and foreign countries, U.S. nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies to military attack, and plans for a possible retaliation attack.
No one knows what Trump planned to do with the documents. Odds are, even he didn’t know. The former president is an opportunist, not a planner.
Alaska’s senior U.S. senator, Lisa Murkowski, was the only one of the state’s three top leaders who provided a thoughtful, reasoned response to the indictment. “When you look at a series of 37 charges here, it would appear to me that they are serious,” she told reporters in Juneau last Friday. “It ought not matter who you are — whether you are a former president, whether you are an intelligence analyst that kept classified documents — these are serious matters and no one can pretend that they have the ability to look the other way on the law. So, we’ll see where these steps in this process go next.”
Alaska’s other U.S. senator, Dan Sullivan, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy saw the same indictment through partisan-colored glasses. President Joe Biden is the villain, not Trump, they said.
In a prepred statement, Sullivan suggested the indictment would “do lasting damage to our polarized nation.” Note that he didn’t say Trump had done any damage. In Sullivan’s politics-dominates-everything world, the indictment is the problem.
“The Biden administration is shoving our country into dangerous territory that is eroding trust in critical institutions of our government,” Sullivan said on social media. There he goes again, blaming the messenger, not the criminally liable.
It was more of the same from Dunleavy.
“There is no denying President Trump is the most persecuted president in our country’s history,” Dunleavy said on Twitter before the indictment was made public. “I am afraid the American people will continue to lose trust in our governmental institutions.” Maybe the governor confused “persecuted” with “prosecuted,” but what’s the right word matter when making a political point.
And the worst of it? Both Dunleavy and Sullivan issued their defense of Trump, their attacks on Biden, their dismissal of the grand jury’s work without having read the indictment. They used social media to comment on what they heard about on social media.
“You’ve got my statement and that’s what I’m sticking with,” Sullivan told reporters.
No reason to keep an open mind when politics rule the day.
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