Jul 3, 2023 2 min read

Whataboutism is no defense

Whenever former President Trump’s loyalists find themselves lacking a legitimate defense for his nefarious behavior and gross prevarications, they resort to a foolhardy smokescreen called “whataboutism.”

Whataboutism badly fails to negate the facts and is an ineffectual attempt to distort the truth. It endeavors to blur the facts with false or weak innuendos that fall apart under careful analysis. Such is the stance Christine Zienkiewicz took in her June 22 letter.

Instead of offering a viable defense of Trump’s purloining of government documents, an accusing finger was pointed at Hillary Clinton. If Zienkiewicz would have followed the entire Clinton investigation, she would have known that under Trump’s Department of Justice no firm evidence was discovered that Clinton attempted to obstruct justice, nor did she refuse to give up anything the investigators demanded. After many months of probing the matter, the final opinion rendered by the Trump Administration’s investigators concluded that there were no crimes committed and therefore no indictment was warranted.

I strongly suggest that Zienkiewicz take the opportunity to read Trump’s indictment in its entirety, then honestly evaluate the extreme difference in the way Trump acted during the months in which the Justice Department attempted to retrieve what was unlawfully taken to, and concealed at, Mar-A-Lago. I am sure that a reasonable person would easily understand the vast difference in legitimacy between the two issues concerning Trump and Clinton.

However, a sensible pursuit of factual information seems to be an intellectual concept quite foreign to Trump’s legion of devotees.

Ronald J. Yamka

Canonsburg