If our charming little era has any governing principle, it's that Nothing Matters. Hypocrisy is dead. As a social force to be wielded against behavior that is unacceptable but not illegal, shame is in inexorable decline. There is no longer any expectation of honesty, consistency, or principle from political leaders, because right-wing types in particular have an entire information ecosystem supporting them that they can retreat into in order to avoid accountability. While there are lefty outlets, there is no equivalent closed system. If your supporters only get their information from a few sources that are unflinchingly sympathetic to you—or indeed, basically erase any mistakes and misbehavior—there are no real consequences for anything.

No one has thrived in this environment more than Donald Trump, American president. He helped make it. He does not subscribe to the idea of observable reality. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. It doesn't matter whether what you're saying reflects the world around you. It only matters whether you're crushing the various Enemies.

So it was no surprise to see Trump trot out an entirely disingenuous and manufactured take on the 1994 crime bill—not for any principled reason, but because he thought it a useful cudgel against Joe Biden. The bill is now widely viewed as having wrought destruction on African-American communities, ushering in the era of mandatory minimums and mass incarceration. Even Bill Clinton, the Democratic president who once championed the bill, has begun to back away from it. Biden helped usher it through the Senate, and is struggling to defend that work as he courts black voters in the Democratic primary. So Trump went there.

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Anyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected. In particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you. I, on the other hand, was responsible for Criminal Justice Reform, which had tremendous support, & helped fix the bad 1994 Bill! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2019

According to Gallup, Donald Trump's approval rating with black voters is 18 percent. It's clearly absurd for him to speak on their behalf, but he isn't really angling for their support. Like his campaign—and the Russian meddlers!—did in 2016, he is trying to depress enthusiasm and turnout among a section of the Democratic base. One indication this is a principle-free bit is that his TV lawyer and soon-to-be frontline campaign surrogate, Rudy Giuliani, was talking up the exact opposite side of the issue earlier this month.

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The 1994 Crime Bill passed by Pres. Clinton and Speaker Gingrich,with Biden & Schumer as the leaders in Senate and House,helped me and the NYPD reduce murder from @ 1,900 a year to @ 500 and then under Mayor Bloomberg to @ 350. That’s over 20,000 lives saved. Joe don’t cave. https://t.co/iacpJ3lYQw — Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) May 15, 2019

But the hypocrisy of this particular Trumpian shtick is mind-blowing. Trump does not just have an extensive record of overt racism, he's got one that specifically includes peddling propaganda about black-on-white crime. And more to the point, around the time of the crime bill, he spent $82,000 to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times advocating the death penalty for a group of black and brown teenagers, known as the Central Park Five, who were accused of raping a jogger. He refused to back away from this even after they were completely exonerated of the crime and awarded a $41 million settlement for their wrongful imprisonment.

In fact, Trump's was one of the loudest voices in the room—along with, to be fair, the Clintons—calling for hardline crime policies that would go on to disproportionately affect people of color while having a complicated impact on crime rates. (Much of the crime bill's benefits are likely traced to increased funding to hire 100,000 new police officers nationwide.) In a new Netflix mini-series exploring the Central Park Five case, it looks like director Ava DuVernay will examine this part of Trump's legacy.

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The story people know is the lie that you told them. Your violent rhetoric fed tensions that led to the bill you pretend to distant yourself from. But you can’t hide from what you did to The Central Park Five. They were innocent. And they will have the last word. #WhenTheySeeUs https://t.co/M0hkcnpt0Y pic.twitter.com/gbOIvSW1ou — Ava DuVernay (@ava) May 28, 2019

It is startling to continually rediscover that racism and delusions of white persecution are one of the few consistent features of Trump's worldview. Some of his first newspaper clips came when the Justice Department sued him and his father in 1973 alleging racial discrimination at their rental properties, after all, even if it was ultimately settled without any admission of wrongdoing. He has characterized Hispanic immigrants almost exclusively as rapists, gang members, and criminals, suggested a federal judge from Indiana could not adjudicate the Trump University case fairly because his parents are Mexican, and led the campaign to suggest the first black president was not American and thus illegitimate. And he still has the unmitigated gall to tell a scrum of reporters he is "the least racist person you will ever interview."

Shame doesn't work anymore, folks. Hypocrisy is dead. And the result is you can say anything if you have the intergalactic gumption and enough support from Fox—and, increasingly, One America—News. Simply put, the mechanisms to hold political leaders accountable, the very cornerstones of democracy, are crumbling. A whole lot needs to change about this country, but you wonder whether anything can before that does.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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