Doubling Down On The Team: Moving The Ethical Line
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In the events regarding Donald Trump’s impeachment investigation, Republicans seem to be purchasing the truth, trying to move the ethical line, in efforts to protect Trump’s integrity. Quid pro quo or bribery, the real question is, how far do we bend the truth and blur the lines of political ethics? Listen to this episode as hosts Bill Stierle and Tom review Trump’s and the Republicans’ identity in the impeachment hearings.
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Bill, we touched a little bit last episode about the team and the dynamics of the team sports, but in our politics as well. It is behaving more like a team sport than anything else. It’s where especially Republicans are dispensing with truth for the sake of the team. There are lots of unhealthy things going on there. We also talked about the line of where ethics and a criminal act. Those lines are getting mowed so much closer together, aren’t they?
Yeah, they are. One of the biggest challenges with identity politics and how a team of mindset works is you forget that you’re not rooting for the game. You’re not doing what’s best for America. You’re only doing what’s best for your team. I remember one time Paul Ryan was talking in this way, “I’ll do anything I can to keep Hillary Clinton from getting elected.” If it’s not right for America. Isn’t that identity? It’s like, “No.” It was his version of America he was advocating for. It’s his mindset around that. You’ve got to wonder when that guy is going to pop back up again. When is it going to be safe for him to come back? He’s coming back.
I’m sure he’s coming back. He’s too young not to come back. He is now a much older politician. Mitch McConnell, who’s at the end of his career has been guilty of the same thing standing in front of the microphone on Capitol Hill saying, “Our entire purpose as Republicans is to deny Barack Obama a second term,” back in 2010, 2011. I’m like, “Really? That’s what you were sent to Washington to do?” I don’t know about that.
The challenge with that mindset is that it does win for them a certain ideology, a certain mindset that says this is the way the country is going to go, but it’s not necessarily the way the world is going. It’s one thing to be conservative. I want to conserve anything. It’s almost the rollback of EPA. We’re not going to conserve the environment. We’re looking out for what 1, 2 or 5 special interests are. Those are more valuable than the environment. The value called the conservativism is not even being used. Let’s talk about how purchasing truth works or has an impact on once the identity is purchased, you’ve got to stay with it. You’ve got to double down. It’s the sunken cost fallacy. It’s I am going to double down on the bet. I am going to triple down to the bet. I’m going to deny the truth.
I wasn’t trying to get a foreign leader to investigate something for me personally in exchange for the foreign aid that Congress appropriated. The call was perfect.
I’m going to double down on me because what I’ve done is right up to this point and I did another right thing here and this right thing I did and the way I did it was the right thing to do because I’m on your team. It’s like playing twelve guys on the field and the ref not catching it or the ref pointing it out. The person who runs off the field says, “Why was it on the field?” It’s unsettling because the obstruction that takes place is the obstruction of what the ethic is. Not necessarily whether or not the thing was fit into the criminal category, but it clearly broke the law the way it was handled, the way it was set up, the way it was executed is not in alignment with what an ethical government would do. It’s closer to, “It’s not written in the law and there’s no punishment written for this crime.”
When there’s no punishment for us when you caught me, since there’s no punishment, then there’s no crime. There’s no written punishment. If a president or people that he asked to do things, there’s no punishment written for Rudy Giuliani. Therefore, how do we convict him and how do we try him? There’s fully no crime.
There are crimes that Rudy Giuliani will end up facing, not all that different from all facing crimes in the 1980s. It happens before Congress, not the FBI, the CIA or your local law enforcement eventually.
Most of the public doesn’t see that Congress is a law-enforcing body, even though they’re a law-writing body. They don’t see that there’s some power there because the mindset is not inclusive like that. They see that a policeman can arrest you. They’re used to that because that’s what policemen do. They see how that works. Regrettably they know what a judge is. The most of the public is, but they don’t think the Congress can do something about something that’s legal or not, and they never see that happen because they don’t see it happen, they don’t think it’s real.
It’s rarely needed. To me somewhat ironic is that you have many people in business and in entertainment being held accountable for things that breach an ethical standard. All the time we see this. The CEO of McDonald’s had to step down because he wanted the leader of a public company. A different standard you have shareholders to answer to and public perception to deal with that he has to step down because of an inappropriate relationship with somebody else, a worker at McDonald’s corporate level. You see this thing all the time.
Let’s go back to Billy Bush Access Hollywood, NBC reporter who was the casualty of Trump’s off-camera mention of how he could treat women to put it nicely. Billy Bush loses his job and has all consequences and we elect the guy who said it president. It does seem like if you’re at a lower level below the President of the United States and government or you’re somebody who is in business, there have been any way more real consequences than there are for the President of the United States. It seems the only mechanism that exists to try to hold him accountable is impeachment or waiting until 2020 if the American people decide to vote him out. It’s only one of those two things.
What’s unsettling is that, “Don’t you have any shame of that?” The answer is, “No, I don’t.” I get to do what I want because this is what I’ve been brought upon. This is what I’ve taught on is I am strength in denial of this. It’s getting worse. It’s getting more challenging to watch the spin. I did that. It’s like, “You did what?” It’s hard for us to watch and to have compassion and empathy for a person that’s struggling with this. One of the hardest parts about this show, Tom, is that you and I can rant on what’s happening to this individual and the impact on the country. At some point, we’ve got to get to a place of healing. We’ve got to get a place to having empathy and compassion for this person. They got elected. Compassionate for the person that’s voting for them. The person who is voting for them has invested their vote in this person. The messaging has been this other team is wrong and bad and you are not on this other team.
They’re wrong and bad because there’s a story crafted around them. You don’t like those people. You don’t like Bill Clinton. You don’t like Hillary Clinton. You don’t like them because they’re bad people. Why are they bad people? She let her husband cheat on her. It’s not the same standard for Melania, but she let him do that. It’s their team, it’s because of these Democrats. Why are they bad? They allow women to choose how and make a difficult decision with their doctor regarding abortion. Now that abortion is wrong. There are bad people because of that. It doesn’t say it in the Bible, but this is what life is, my preacher says it. That team is wrong and bad because it’s having compassion for a person that has a value that is not in alignment with our value or another value of freedom of choice. That’s where the identity is swallowing up the truth.
That’s for the people. I agree that the team identity that’s what’s happening for the people of the United States. You see these politicians completely abandoning their own core values from what they’ve done in the past. What they’ve said in the past all to try to make excuses for and to preserve this president remaining in office. Nobody’s challenging him that his views are far different from any of theirs. They’re abandoning their own and being demonstrated as hypocrites in what they say on a daily basis. All to identify with this guy who they’re also afraid of because he’ll turn on you in a moment and torch you if you don’t abandon your beliefs and lineup with him. I’ve thrown a lot in there.
Once the identity is purchased, you got to stay with it. You've got to 'double down.' It's the sunken cost fallacy.
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It’s okay because the team identity and team loyalty, it goes a little more like this. “The opposing team, a quarterback throws a ball out and your team’s guy causes pass interference, but it’s close.” It’s pass interference. The guy clearly hit the guy. The mind makes up a belief that it’s okay if the ref doesn’t call it. It’s too bad. That’s part of the game. It happened to New Orleans. It’s with the Rams where they play pass interference. The ref clearly did not call it and the Rams still went and the other team says, “That’s the game.” This is what’s happening. They keep doing pass interference. There’s no ref to call him on it and the team is going, “There’s no ref. It was not called.”
It’s not that. Meanwhile, you’re going like, “Yes, it is that.” They go like, “No, it’s not that. It’s pass interference. There’s no call. We’re going to move on.” They keep moving on to go to the election. All of a sudden, we’ve got to wait for the Super Bowl to call the right play. Finally, it’s blatant and clear and then even though Nancy Pelosi says, “This is too blatant and clear.” The public does not understand the Mueller Report. They don’t understand the nuance between ethics and values. The public is not with us on this. They don’t believe ethics. Their team is giving this guy a pass, not calling them audit and it’s still not working. We’re calling them audit. We’re showing that they broke this rule and it is across the line.
That line keeps moving or that’s a truth that’s being purchased. The Republicans are purchasing that truth and trying to move the line. A great example is a Latin phrase, “Quid pro quo.” In the history of American politics or modern history, I’ll say the twentieth century to now. A quid pro quo has been equated with being bad. I do have to say, Bill, there are examples of legitimate and for real quid pro quos in politics and in life it’s like, “We’re going to negotiate, we’ll do this. You do that, fine.” In American politics it’s been seen as you cannot do that for personal gain.
There are things that are out of bounds. The Republicans are cleverly at the beginning, “I don’t think there’s any quid pro quo. I don’t see evidence of that.” They’ve moved now from there’s no evidence of that to, “Some quid pro quos are okay.” All the way to the point of, “There’s nothing wrong with quid pro quo and it may not be a deal, but I don’t think it rises to the level of impeachment.” They’re trying to make quid pro quo acceptable to the point where the vast majority of the American public does not understand what quid pro quo means. The definition is becoming less toxic, less bad and more meh.
People are in jail for obstruction. They are in jail for making these deals, this quid pro quo deal. The ethic is here’s what fairness is. That’s the ethic. I am fair and you’re not doing this because it’s a deal. You’re doing this because it’s in your interest. That’s why you’re doing it is because it’s the right thing to do not because you’re making a deal and I’m holding something back for you to do it. That is an adult mindset. Fairness mindset for a ten-year-old is if you do this, you get that. I am making a binary choice and that’s what fairness looks like. I’m not doing anything for you unless you do something for me instead of doing what’s best. What’s best is there’s a country, there were some rules to set up around this country and this other country invaded this country because it wanted to.
It was able to show strength by invading this country and created some good reasons for their public not to do anything to fight this other country coming into this. Meanwhile, American ethics said, “You’re invading this country. This country wants weapons. A country that is asking for our support, we are fighting for their values.” No, we’re not fighting for the values of Syrians. We’re not fighting for the values of Kurds. We’re not fighting for the value of Ukrainians. No, it’s not our business to fight for values anymore. It’s not our business to advocate democracy. We’re going to keep democracy for ourselves. We’re not going to promote it worldwide. We’re not going to be advocates for freedom of speech or standing up for what an ethic or a value is.
We’re not doing that anymore. It’s like, “What? Are we not doing that? We’d been doing this for 200 years. What do you mean we’re not doing anymore?” That’s one of the troubles with identity and why we’re struggling so much as the team identity is that my team gets to break the rules. I get to as a part of my team get to agree that’s okay to do because my team says it is. I get to go to the Super Bowl and you don’t because my team is changing the rules, ignoring the rules, not paying attention to the rules. No one is calling us on it. If somebody does it, the ref in this case is the whistleblower. The ref called the thing. The whistleblower called this.
That’s an interesting analogy. I like that.
The whistleblower was the ref and threw the flag out and says, “This is not right.” All of a sudden, we’re arguing with the ref’s call. How do you do that?
It’s not only that, another interesting purchasing of truth that’s happening relative to the whistleblower is the Republicans are saying the impeachment inquiry. It’s the sanction and voted one now that’s about to start taking place live and on the house floor. It is going to be invalid unless the whistleblower testifies. I’m like, “What?” The whole point of the whistleblower law is to protect the identity, the safety and the job of the whistleblower. The whistleblower does not get outed or needs to come to testify in public. You shined a light on a problem that then got investigated. This is another moving of that. I don’t know if it’s an ethical line, but it’s certainly illegal.
It’s like the ref for the rest of his life is going to get yelled at for that bad call and he did. He was reffing a basketball game a week or two later somewhere. He showed up the court and they ripped him. They let him have it. Are we going to yell at the whistleblower? Their team is going to look at first, what’s his politics? Second, what dog food does he feed his dog and make that wrong? The team will find any reason. It’s because you look like this, you are this, you are that and that’s the reason why you are that. You are wrong.
You’re a bad person for pointing out our guy did the thing that’s illegal. There’s no accountability in team identity, because how could you? You have to admit, “Your team sky grabbed them as a face mask. Your team roughed the passer.” Many years ago, that was not a roughing. They didn’t call that because it was a rough sport back then. They’ll call that, but they call it now and we are changing the rules so that our best players are injured earlier in their career than they need to be. It’s rough enough already.
Here’s another good example of where the team identity is appropriate. You see this happen all the time in Major League Baseball. It’s when a player is arguing with the home plate umpire about balls and strikes. “That was six inches outside and you called me out, you’re a terrible ref.” What does the manager of the club do? He always runs out and tries to protect his player. He literally stands in between the player and the umpire trying to prevent him from saying that magic word that’s going to get him thrown out of the game. He’s trying to help diffuse the situation. Regardless of what his player does, no matter how bad the action is, the manager is always going to stand behind his player, support his player, try to protect this player. That’s the best example of team dynamics.
Even if the call was wrong, the coach comes out and as a strategy and a reality of getting his players fired up. He gets thrown out of the game because your leader took one. He took it so you could play the game. Who’s going to be the fall guy for this? Truman would say, “The buck stops here,” but Donald Trump never says, “The buck stops here.” The Trump says, “The buck stops at Manafort. The buck stops at Flynn. The buck stops here.”
Did you see the latest person being set up as a fall guy? That the buck may stop with Michael Pence. Did you see this? Trying to start to throw Michael Pence under the bus or while I sent him to Ukraine to negotiate. You can see that he’s trying to preserve himself and setting up the potential that Michael Pence might be a fall guy. This team dynamic, it makes sense in sports, I don’t think anybody who watches a sports game and sees that the player was wrong is going to argue that the coach is doing his job to try to protect them. The fact that he’s wrong doesn’t matter. He may still be wrong, but that’s not happening in politics here.
Here’s what’s happening but this is more of the overview. The way to think about this is more of an overview. Tom, if you came and you went every week, you watched a football game where the rules weren’t followed. Every game, there was some blatant, the home team was always allowed to win more than the visiting team. The refs were ignoring calls or making bad calls to tilt the scale. Wouldn’t you stop believing in the game?
Absolutely, I would stop believing the game.
We stop believing. What’s happening with this team dynamic is causing people to stop believing in America, the concept of America where there’s a fairness piece that’s going on here. I’m going to put it in the field of time over the last many years, it’s been we’re going to gerrymander this and we’re going to allow this person to get away with it. We are going to give this person a pardon. They made a mistake. They sat in court. We’re not commuting their sentences. That person was convicted. If you think about somebody that was a fall guy, let’s pick Scooter Libby with that. He went to jail.
He went to jail for outing Valerie Plame in the newspaper.
Donald Trump pardons him because that’s what happened.
Did Donald Trump pardon him?
He commuted his sentence.
I thought George W. Bush ended up doing that. Maybe I’m thinking of another one.
Valerie Plame is running for Senator.
She’s running for Congress in New Mexico, I believe.
She’s going like, “I’m an ethics and integrity gal. You people are not ethics and integrity people. I’m running because this is what America means to me and this is what I’ve done for America. Trump, I’m coming for you.” Basically it’s like, “No, I’m not standing for this.”
It’s disconcerting that the President has found a way to purchase truth and so has his team to the point where he’s trying to escape accountability for his actions. The whistleblower, I liked your analogy that he’s like the ref. Now the difference is in the NFC championship game in 2018 with the Rams and the Saints, they didn’t have the rule that they could review pass interference in the replay. To stretch this analogy a little further, it seems Congress does have the ability to review this, replay it so to speak, and decide if there was an offense committed here worthy of removing the President. It’s called Congress and impeachment. This is our review of that whistleblower complaint and the calling him out on, “This is not okay to withhold $400 million in aid that Congress voted on until you get a political favor.”
When politics goes this way, when we leave ethics and values behind, what winds up happening is you’re allowed to individualize, demonize, and pick somebody that is against your team. You make that person a wrong person instead of the mistake that was made, the crime, the ethics or line that was broken and you get to make that a problem. Dick Cheney and none of them did any jail time because they were playing for their team and they made their calls based on what they thought their team/America/private interests would like. How about that? It’s like, “We’re are these big entities that you can’t touch.” Donald Trump is pushing that to the next level of, “You can’t touch me over here. No one’s going to jail for this.” They were playing by the rules and they’re like, “What rules? Those rules don’t apply to me.”
We’ve had a couple of interesting things happen on this issue that it seems, one of them, I want to give an example that it illuminates what you’re saying here, Bill, is that the ethics line keeps moving. That first one is Rand Paul who was interviewed on one of the weekend news programs. He was trying to say that, “Trump needs to be treated fairly the same way we’ve treated other people.” I don’t see any difference between Donald Trump withholding that aid for an investigation into corruption and what Joe Biden did as Vice President in negotiating with the government of Ukraine to get rid of this prosecutor who was thought to be corrupt and equating those two as the same thing. They got news for everybody out there. Joe Biden was executing US foreign policy through the State Department, sanctioned everything above board and nobody knew. Donald Trump is trying to make a secret deal and use language that the Democrats could help re-label quid pro quo to bribery. That would start to change the messaging a little bit.
When it starts shifting to a criminal term like bribery away from the Latin phrase quid pro quo, what winds up happening is this is what a mob boss does. Everybody’s been hesitating to call him a mob boss and a deal maker like that. They weren’t wrong and from his mindset, this is a perfect call. I’ve been bribing people my entire life. I’ve been using this strategy for forever. There’s something we’d like for you to do and he’s been white-knuckling and arm twisting and almost breaking arms by stealing from others. By doing this tactic, the deal always gets worse for the receiver when you’re in a relationship with this type of person. They keep moving the line greater and greater in their deal until you say, “Finally, I’m not dealing with this person,” but they’ve already taken you for X, Y and Z.
Bill, you and I know this happens in business all the time. It certainly does, but that’s in business. Like other business owners, other companies have the choice not to do business with people like that if we don’t want to. If their actions are not in alignment with our values and ethics, you can stop doing business with them. In the government situation, this is a different environment with a different set of rules and the President has not figured that out.
There’s nothing to figure out when your habit brain is already wired in a way that this is habit brain. He still thinks he can use his tactics, his strategies and his mindset in government and there’s nothing stopping him from doing that. For a few years, it’s been true. Nobody or there’s nobody even there because we had to wait for a ref in private. That whistleblower, if worse, it’s like, “I’m getting to it.” If you bring out the whistleblower, the same thing will happen to what happened with Judge Brett Kavanaugh. It’s the same thing with that woman coming forward.
With Christine Blasey Ford, they’ll make him the whistleblower, the villain, the enemy.
The process is like the Democrats you’ve hijacked this and it’s another thing that Hillary Clinton has done. It’s like, “How did Hillary Clinton get in the middle of this? There’s this woman who testified and you’re going to make it about Hillary Clinton?” At that moment, the entire group of Democrats needed to walk out of that room and to say, “This is a job interview. You do not think and we are not going to listen to another word you say.” They need to get up and walk out of that room and it’s like, “You guys vote for him. You vote for him without us here. You vote for him because we’re not even voting. We’re not even going to honor this person that did that in this room. This is not the temperament of a judge.” All they had to do was stay out of the room, “Don’t vote. Everybody, you have the votes. You have nine votes. We cannot stop you from voting in, but we’re not voting this guy, this character in.”
The message would’ve risen to the standard of what it’s like to cross an ethical line. It’s like, “This is what an ethical line looks like. We are not even listening to you. We are not coming back into the chamber. Find someone new, not him. Find someone new and we know you’re going to pick somebody conservative because what he did is a path that we cannot do.” It’s really challenging. It’s like good parenting when a parent says to a kid, “You do not like this because your version of fairness is not taking place. This is more of a lesson that you don’t get your version of fairness at the expense of myself or at the expense of another person.” Good parents have to suffer through that and go like, “No, I’m not taking that. You have to learn this ethical line because this is what it looks like.”
I wonder, are we going to see enough? This remains to be seen. We’ll be talking about it in future episodes. I’m sure it remains to be seen if enough of the witnesses are being called to testify in front of the impeachment inquiry is going to not only tell the truth. I certainly hope they do tell the truth regardless of the outcome. It makes it harder for them to be on the team and to support the team when they’re testifying under oath in front of Congress. Let’s take Ambassador Gordon Sondland for example, he testified initially, “I didn’t remember any mention of a quid pro quo. I don’t remember that there was a condition on the leader of Ukraine making a statement about investigating the Biden’s or about getting a meeting with the President.” After his private deposition testimony, he walked it back. He came back and submitted a deposition, some sworn document to Congress saying, “I’ve had further recollection and I heard some of the other’s testimony. I do seem to recall there was some discussion of this at some point.” He’s changing his story under the potential weight and the gravity of this whole process. Would you agree?
He’s changing his story. He’s saying, “I’m watching these other guys go to jail and I don’t want to go to jail for this. I’m going to make a deal this way because not only am I not going to get anywhere here, this guy is not worth fighting for. This situation is not worth fighting for and it’s not going away. I’m in the middle of this. I need to get some cover because if I stay right in this same spot and I’m getting called back to testify again, I better not do that.” As soon as he did, the rollback and the walk back in the resubmitting of the new testimony, they started doing the same thing they did with Blasey Ford with them. You’d go like, “It’s because of this. The Democrats might’ve got to him.” No Democrat is getting to them. It’s the law that’s getting to them. It’s the prospect of going to jail that might be getting to them.
That’s the thing I think it is too. Here is a private citizen, who’s never been in government and politics before, donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s campaign and got rewarded with a foreign post for it. That thing happens all the time. I’m not saying that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. He may not be the best person to choose for the job, but that stuff happens. This guy is like, “I’m not going to risk going to jail.” He’s seeing the weight of history and looking back at Watergate. How many of those people that testified and were not truthful ended up going to jail? He doesn’t want to be another one of them.
The long arm of the law doesn’t work if you start breaking it early. With the Brett Kavanaugh experience, the long arm of the law and the same with Clarence Thomas. It never got to those guys by getting to those guys because they are the law. There’s no recourse for somebody that was a teenage boy that did something to a teenage girl at this party and he also was a college boy that did that. We’ll give him a pass for that. He did another thing because he was that. It was that character that then says, “No, he’s this kind of character. He’s not this kind of character.” The problem with team identity and purchasing truth is he’s never been like that. That’s not the person that he is. Instead of him going, “Yeah, I was the person, I liked beer.” He said, “I like beer.” He didn’t say, “I did crappy things when I drank too much beer. Like most college students, I did some things I’ve grown past and I’m not that same guy. My record shows that I’m not that same guy. I was once that guy but I’m not that guy now. This could have happened but I’m not that guy.” He didn’t say any of that.
No, but that would have taken a whole lot of wind out of the sails of the opposition. He would have purchased truth right back for himself.
Instead of denying the truth about it and it’s not an alignment with respect for the honor of being a judge to do crap like that, to stand in that space, not in that spot. It’s hard to talk about the purchasing truth part of this when that the line between ethics and criminality keeps getting collapsed like that because the team identity is going like, “It’s okay because our team did it.” It’s like, “No, it’s not. It’s not okay if your team did it.”
It bothers me that personally, and I don’t know why this matters, but there are double standards when it comes to ethics in our political discourse. That is an example of purchasing the truth that’s frustrating. It’s so much more to come on this with lots of testimony yet to happen in the House.
The next thing that we could take a look at, Tom, because there is an impact on team identity is going to be seen and reverberate for a while. The vision of America has been lost of what America is standing for. Returning to what the vision is going to look like is that we can do that. We can start doing it this way but we’re going to look like a different country. If we go down this path, do we want to go down this path? That’ll prevent us from taking the high road with other countries who do things like this. Do we want to go down this path and still stay in this mindset? Team identity and us versus them. That’s great when you’re cheering for somebody.
Are you going to follow the rules? “We’re not following the rules.” Why are we watching the game then? The mental degradation of what America stands for is in jeopardy now.
Bill, thank you for that. That’s helpful. You’re right, we’re going to be arguing over a lot of details. There are going to be lots of truths trying to be purchased and then trying to purchase it back. It may accomplish some things that are good. It may accomplish some things that are a little scary honesty for America, but the reality is we are going to have to get to the point of self-reflection. Who are we as a country? How do we want to be going forward?
That’s where we’re up to next. It can’t be whose team is in charge and have the most votes. You can’t keep doing it that way. There are more to come.
Thanks so much, Bill.
Thanks, Tom.
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