IN TRUMPWORLD, THE RULES STILL APPLY ONLY IF YOU'RE CAPABLE OF SHAME

I don't agree with this headline from James Hohmann's Daily 202 column in The Washington Post:

Monica Crowley losing White House job shows that the rules of politics still apply for Donald Trump

Here's Hohmann's argument:

Donald Trump and his team believe that the rules and norms of Washington do not apply to them. They are wrong, and yesterday brought a significant proof point.

Washington veterans marvel at how much Trump has been able to get away with because he just doesn’t seem to care what anyone else thinks....

For the past 10 days, the poster child for this phenomenon has been Monica Crowley, a TV talking head who despite a dearth of serious experience was appointed as the senior director of strategic communications on the National Security Council....

A steady stream of stories since the weekend before last has revealed pretty egregious examples of apparent plagiarism over a period of several years, from a 2012 book to her PhD dissertation and op-eds.

... Trump learned crisis management from his mentor Roy Cohn, who had been Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel during the witch hunts of the 1950s. Cohn, who represented Trump when the Justice Department sued him for housing discrimination in the 1970s, taught him to never apologize and to always counter-punch.

That’s exactly how his team initially responded to the revelations about Crowley....

[But] because a handful of reporters doggedly pursued the story, the pressure became too much. Yesterday afternoon, Crowley sent a statement to the Washington Times to say that “after much reflection” she’s decided to stay in New York.

That doesn't prove that the rules apply to Trump. It proves that the rules apply to Trump appointees who don't have the unmitigated gall to brazen out a scandal like this (and who presumably aren't Trump's special favorites).

Crowley's appointment would not have required Senate confirmation. She could have hung on if she'd been deemed a key person in the administration -- like, say, the man who would have been her boss, General Michael "Putin Poodle" Flynn. But Crowley was picked presumably because binge TV watcher Trump used to see her all the time on Fox, not because the president-elect regarded her as a critical figure in his administration. She was easy to jettison -- and she appears to lack the extraordinary self-regard of her would-be boss, or her would-be boss's boss. If you think you've cornered the market on excellence, genius, and judgment, as Flynn and Trump do, you'll probably try to outlast embarrassing revelations, because your ego won't let you withdraw. Crowley, I guess, doesn't have a head swelled to several times normal size.

We'll see if the old rules still apply if there are relentless attacks on a higher-level appointee -- Flynn, for instance. For now, though, Crowley's an exception to the Trump Rules, which still seem to hold.