American culture has a history of high regard for the “bad guy”. Bank robbers and killers like Billy the Kid or Bonnie and Clyde were glamorized, without regard for the bad nature of their behavior. Being bad was a good way to become a folk hero. That seems odd, but it was entertainment. The people who were killed or whose money was stolen weren’t entertained, but much of America was. So it seemed OK to portray bad as good.
That incongruity eventually spread to the American lexicon. Modern American English is best explained by the brilliantly insightful Finnish comedian, Ismo Leikola. To paraphrase Ismo, bad has become a synonym for good, especially when “bad…” is combined with some other choice words! Like everything else Ismo says, it’s very funny yet true. Illogical silliness has become everyday reality in American speech.
But when that reality becomes more than talk, it’s not funny anymore. In Washington, bad political leaders along with their bad choices and bad decisions are no joke. And it’s gotten worse over time.
Two bads combined
Politicians can be careless with the truth, but they used to try to appear to be trustworthy. Images of the “good guy” were created by American politicians in the 1950’s and 1960’s, with help from the media who routinely downplayed anything negative when reporting about America’s top leaders. We later learned that such sanitized portrayals weren’t accurate, but the main decision makers in America back then worked hard to appear good, even when they weren’t.
In the 1970’s, President Richard Nixon was caught for bad behavior that he couldn’t hide, so he resigned as president before he got kicked out of office. Bad was good only as long as politicians could maintain the façade of being good. In the 1990’s President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sexual activity with an intern, and his bad choice became a legacy of his entire presidency. Many don’t remember if he did any good while he was president. For him, his bad behavior had bad consequences.
Even in the 2000’s, bad intentions needed to be disguised. President George W. Bush sought an excuse to invade Iraq, so “weapons of mass destruction” were invented to gloss over the lack of any connection to the then-recent September 11th attacks on the USA. That fabrication was eventually exposed, but with no consequences. Nobody was held accountable for the multitude of deaths that resulted from that lie. The attempt to portray bad as good had failed, but it was convenient that Saddam Hussein was also bad. Two bads combined meant that bad was no longer really that bad after all.
Then came Donald Trump. He campaigned for president by crassly bragging about his ability to sexually assault women because he was famous, calling other Americans ugly names and labelling all latinos as criminals and rapists. That was truly bad, but for Trump it was good. He was elected President of the United States in spite of behaving that badly. Some think he won because of it.
Bad behavior is seen as good
Bad manners were far from the worst thing about Trump. He had a flagrant disregard for science or proven facts. He didn’t back up his dishonesty with evidence; he merely repeated the same lies often enough for them to become accepted by many as true. Major policy decisions were then made without any basis in objective reality. That was bad, but by the next election only a slim majority of Americans voters seemed to be able to discern bad from good.
Trump wasn’t re-elected, yet the daily news in America is still filled by reports of his continued lies about how he won the election. It’s gotten so bad that he recently wrote that the U.S. Constitution should be “terminated” to give him back the presidency rather than wait for him to be elected again in 2024. He single-handedly created an era where baseless falsehoods and bullying are accepted as part of American political discourse. American politicians’ increasingly bad behavior is surprisingly seen as good in the eyes of many Americans who vote.
This was proven by the recent 2022 U.S. congressional elections. As part of the earlier 2020 American presidential election process, 147 Republicans, including eight senators, voted to deny certifying Joe Biden as the President. All eight senators are still in the current U.S. Senate. Of the 139 representatives who denied the election results, 124 ran for reelection in 2022 and 118 of them won.
Some newly elected representatives are also election deniers, for a total of 145 representatives (and perhaps more, depending upon how proof of election denial is defined) who publicly deny that the United States has a validly elected president. That’s at least a third of the total current members of the U.S. House of Representatives who ignore the fact that no evidence has ever been offered in any court or anywhere else of a stolen U.S. presidential election in 2020.
They merely repeated Trump’s lies to win their own elections to the U.S. Congress. They are all Republicans who also won a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, so their bad behavior was good for them and for their party. Yet they immediately began infighting with other Republicans, which was supposedly good for the Democrats. The same group has promised more disruptive behavior in the future by how they will vote while in Congress, including threats to deny funding for assistance to Ukraine. How can that possibly be good for America or for the rest of the world?
Not bad enough
Now, in early 2023, one newly elected U.S. House of Representatives member was discovered to have chronically lied about all facts of his life to get elected. Republican George Santos wildly misrepresented his education, work, family, ancestry, employees, wealth and sources of campaign money, to name just a few of his deceptions.
Santos took American politics to a new level of unaccountability. He was elected to Congress as a complete imposter. That should be bad, but so far, it’s not been bad for Mr. Santos or for many of his fellow members of Congress.
He has said he feels bad about having lied, but he feels so good about his new job as a Congressman that he has no plans to quit. Some in Congress say that’s bad, but others say it’s not bad enough to kick him out. They figure that he has no respect (self-respect or respect from anyone else) and they want him to stay in Congress so they can manipulate him to vote however they want him to vote, as if that’s good.
The end result is that American political integrity as most of us know it has been turned upside down. Being bad beyond belief has become very good, and being totally bad has become the best. That’s not good. It should only be good as the basis for an Ismo Leikola joke. But it’s unfortunately the true state of affairs in Washington.
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Tom A. Lippo is a Finnish-speaking American lawyer. Educated at Yale, the University of Jyväskylä and Stanford Law School, he is the founder of FACT LAW, an international law firm established in 1985. FACT is the first law firm with offices in both Finland and the United States. Tom has been a lawyer in Washington, DC based on Capitol Hill for more than 40 years.
