A pattern of allegation-first politics has taken hold in Washington, veteran editor Terry H. Schwadron argues in a column for Alternet: time and again, whether out of frustration, intention or distraction, one side makes up public charges in hopes that the facts will catch up. The latest example, he writes, is the claimed financial “collapse” of the Kennedy Center under President Donald Trump.

Public attention, Schwadron notes, keeps flowing to the shiny new allegation rather than to the work of building a case toward finding blame. Claims of vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned out to be bad contracting work, and criminal cases alleging wide-ranging anti-Donald Trump electoral conspiracies have repeatedly fallen apart for lack of evidence.

Trump, trained under Roy Cohn, has made a political career of the tactic, he writes — through public campaigns premised on the pre-judicial guilt of the Central Park Five and on Barack Obama's birth certificate, and continuing this week with the resignation of yet another would-be prosecutor who cannot find evidence to match Trump's insistence on a “Grand Conspiracy” behind the investigation of Russian attempts to influence his 2016 election campaign.

Trump's pursuit of criminal fault among “enemies” includes a case alleging that former FBI Director James B. Comey Jr. wanted to assassinate him by photographing seashells arranged as “86 47” on a beach, as well as unending efforts to seek perjury charges against former chief government virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Special Counsel Jack Smith.

In Schwadron's view, each step downward blame-first politics makes the next one more slippery and easier.

A 'Laughable' Jack Smith Hearing

Whatever the intended purpose of bringing Smith before riled Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the effort was, in Schwadron's telling, a laughable failure. Republicans angrily pursued Smith for obtaining congressional phone toll records — not their content — a standard investigative tactic to verify testimony about calls made before and on Jan. 6, 2021. They never came close to challenging the substance of Smith's probe of Trump's leading role in the insurrection attempt.

Charges were dropped after a Justice Department order that followed a Supreme Court decision effectively granting Trump preemptive immunity for official acts. The underlying facts have never changed, the column argues, despite Trump's attempts to rewrite history — whether about Jan. 6, 2021, or about classified information held in bathrooms and ballrooms at Mar-a-Lago.

The hearing was so short on evidence that Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri embarrassed himself and his colleagues, in the column's telling, when he accused Smith of perjury over attending a basketball game in Georgia as a pretext for some conspiratorial link-up with state prosecutors there also pursuing Trump. Schmitt cited emails and smirked — until questions from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., made clear the game was wrong. Smith had not been at an Atlanta Hawks game, but in Maryland, at a game involving the University of Iowa Hawkeyes. Even if it had been true, Schwadron writes, Schmitt looked foolish proving a point that went nowhere.

On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche attacked federal judges in Minnesota, accusing them of bias after they spoke out in news interviews against evidence-free immigration cases they had been forced to hear. It is Blanche who has called his own fight with the courts a “war.” He wants an investigation of those judges and for them to recuse themselves in immigration cases, while seeing no hypocrisy in having been Trump's personal defense lawyer. As deputy attorney general, Blanche told a Federalist Society event in 2025 that the administration was at “war” with judges he called activists, Bloomberg Law reported.

Meanwhile, there are no federal charges in the fatal deaths of citizen protesters at the hands of Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. It is Blanche who has oversight of the Florida case in which two prosecutors have now walked away, claiming there is no evidence of the conspiracy Trump wants to find.

'Pretending' at the Institutions, Too

Reporting by The Washington Post shows that the Kennedy Center was solvent when Trump took over. Trump removed the professional staff, insisted on choosing the entertainment offered, and was surprised to see revenue, donations and bookings plummet.

Now Trump is demanding action because the law will not allow him to put his name on the building, suggesting he may simply raze the institution, which he claims is hopelessly in debt and failing.

The Post examined 15 years of the institution's confidential board documents and tax filings. They show that since Trump took over the center, the institution has borrowed everything its bank would lend it, dipped into money donors had given on the condition it never be spent, and written off pledges from supporters who stopped paying. Trump said the center was “losing hundreds of millions of dollars” when he took over, and his board has warned of “bankruptcy.”

There are kernels of financial dispute here, but Trump's version does not account for his own role in cutting development staff or spending the endowment money of the National Opera, among many other things The Post lays out. In Schwadron's words, it is a lot easier to make up the financial problems than it is to document them.

Fed Watchdog Clears Powell

In similar fashion, a Federal Reserve watchdog found no criminal wrongdoing by former Chair Jerome Powell in its investigation of the central bank's expensive headquarters renovation, according to a report released Wednesday. The findings effectively clear Powell after the Justice Department opened an unprecedented criminal investigation into the then-Fed chair, which became public in January, as Axios reported. The report did find a need for better supervision, but no criminal violation — the outcome Trump had pressured officials to determine amid his repeated public clashes with the Fed.

There is, Schwadron observes, no apology — not to Powell, not to those fired from the Kennedy Center, not to the former Olympian who faced criminal vandalism charges for examining peeling paint, nor to Fauci or Smith.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times and as Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times, and held leadership roles at The Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team was part of several Pulitzers in New York.