There is no pretense to the man.
Indiana’s scandal magnet of a secretary of state does not hide who he is. No, the first-term Republican is clearly, undisguisedly, blatantly not a public servant in any sense of the word.
In fact, it seems clear that the public’s interest only figures into Morales’ machinations and calculations by accident.
For him, the citizenry exists to be gulled and milked. The taxpayers are important to him only in that they provide the wherewithal for his office to buy him a new luxury sport utility vehicle in which to tool around, pay for the next high-end junket to a foreign country he wants to visit and provide paychecks and bonuses for him and his family members.
And laws are to be skirted when they cannot be outright ignored.
He is the perfect distillation of the contempt a certain twisted branch of American conservatism always has had for the processes of self-government.
The members of that branch never have seen America’s grand experiment in empowering the people to choose their own leaders as something noble. They always have thought that Abraham Lincoln’s famous and soaring tribute to a “government of the people, by the people and for the people” was just another shuck and jive, a bit of razzle dazzle designed to make the rubes even easier to fleece.
That someone like Morales, a hustler ever on the lookout for the next mark, is a member of the party built by the Great Emancipator, a president who died in service to the belief that all should stand equal before the law, is proof that history has a savage sense of irony.
Others have noted that a career such as Morales’ could only have flourished in an era dominated by Donald Trump.
Both Trump and Morales are affronts to values Republicans once truly held dear and now merely—deceitfully—claim to honor.
His followers tell us that Trump, who has declared bankruptcy at least six times, is a masterful businessman and, despite his three marriages and lord knows how many extramarital affairs, the ultimate champion of traditional values. He is their rebel king, the embodiment of everything they say they hold sacred.
Point out the ways facts contradict their fanciful image of the man—note, for example, that if he had been anywhere near as successful in business as he claimed to be, he wouldn’t have had to turn first to television and then politics to rebrand himself—and they lash out at reality so they can cling even more tightly to the myth of Trumpian omnipotence.
Diego Morales is a microcosm of Trump-style mythmaking and malfeasance.
He now leads an office from which he was fired twice for incompetence and dereliction. That the two secretaries of state who canned him—current Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Charlie White—were themselves both Republicans who possessed all the ethical sensitivities of swamp rats only makes the irony even more suffocating.
Since taking office, Morales has managed to live down to expectations. He has been accused, credibly, of one transgression after another. He doesn’t bother to disguise the fact that he is first a man on the make and second a partisan more rabid than a deranged dog.
That he’s the official charged with making sure that Indiana elections are fair and run efficiently is yet another sick cosmic joke.
There are Republicans who will say, sotto voce, that they are embarrassed by Morales’ presence among them, that they know his office is as toxic as an EPA site and that they know he will bring the GOP to ruin at some point.
And yet they do nothing about it.
That’s because in Donald Trump’s Republican Party, failure is success, disaster is triumph and falsehood is truth.
Eventually, though, gravity will reassert itself and the GOP will pay a price for nurturing and embracing a character such as Morales for so long.
At that point, Republicans will try to distance themselves from him and claim they didn’t know who he was or what he was doing.
Their distancing and denials won’t work.
Because Diego Morales never hid who he was or what he wanted.
