True Believers and The Tragically Cynical
Full-blown, MAGA-support for Donald Trump has never been difficult to observe. There is a certain performative nature to it and an aesthetic that accompanies it. During the recent election, the reports of “Shy Trump Voters” were somewhat comical, as shyness has never seemed a particularly common trait in the Trumpenproletariat. These are the True Believers.
Cynical, career-driven support for Donald Trump was also not terribly difficult to discern, having its own performative nature to it but more importantly, being somewhat less authentic in practice than that of the the true believers. Into this category one must surely place the show ponies from Capitol Hill (Cruz, Hawley, Rubio, Cotton and half the House), much of the Fox News opinion staff, and the RNC. These people didn’t feel the Trumpism deep in their bones, but they did feel it in other places, like their wallets, and their egos.
In a just world, the True Believers would return to their diners and their previous apolitical lives and leave the rest of America alone, or they would look into their dark hearts and have some sort of epiphany about how they had allowed the lesser angels of their nature to dominate themselves. They would henceforth dedicate themselves to active citizenship and a relentless search for the Truth, rather than lapping up the pabulum served by their corrupt media outlet of choice, the corrupt President at whose pleasure those media outlets served, or the corrupt water-carriers the President surrounded himself with. Neither of these out comes is entirely likely.
The Cynics—well, there is a place in Dante’s Seventh Circle for them. They knew better. They all thought Trump a fool and a danger, and then they embraced him. Say what you want about the True-Believers, but at least they believed. These clowns didn’t, they just wanted whatever career boost they could get out of pretending. I have little time for these people and even less attention.
The Enablers
The people I find myself really thinking a lot about these days are The Enablers. I like most of these people. I admire some of them. I continue to enjoy their work, subscribe to their magazines, listen to their podcasts. For the most part, they are conservatives (the kind that you know, have conservative principles and support conservative policies). Some have moved ever closer to the NatPop Right, attempting to create some kind of intellectual framework to support obvious tensions between their previous conservatism and their newfound acceptance of a man devoted to little but his own needs.
Most claim to be “calling balls and strikes”, ready and able to grant Trump and his team praise when they warrant it, and to criticize when required. This (to their estimation) grants a detached status to their commentary, and they have decided to concentrate their statements on actual policy positions of the government rather than concerning themselves with awful, debased, uncivil, unhinged, confrontational, and demeaning behavior and statements of the President and his Greek chorus of advisers.
Were this all they did, their position would elicit respect. But this isn’t all they did.
For some reason, they believed that their future viability demanded that they mock and diminish those for whom the President and his team’s statements and behavior were important. This has come to be known as the “anti-anti-Trump” posse, where one tries to have it both ways by retaining the right to criticize Trump, while at the same time framing character and behavior objections to him as childish, immature, unimportant, or worse. By worse, I mean a tendency within this group to lump NeverTrump objectors in with the professional left, as if a central place for character, poise, and judgment had somehow been stricken from the conservative mien.
This group has spent much of the last week taking to whatever rooftops they can find to burnish their credentials as newly and decidedly anti-Trump. There have been calls for his resignation, impeachment, and 25th Amendment removal. Apparently, utter failure to respond to the COVID pandemic was not enough to elicit this rejection. Nor apparently was Trump’s shakedown of a foreign leader in order to gain domestic political advantage. Nor apparently was Trump’s abuse of the pardon power enough. No—it took the President’s active fomenting of an insurrection to dislodge them from their Olympian heights of detached analysis.
Naming Names
Again, the Enablers were not obvious and vocal Trump supporters, although some occasionally veered into Trump-curious. Some valiantly tried the balls and strikes routine, and some tried to appear enthusiastically pro-GOP while remaining detached from the party’s titular leader. Who am I talking about?
From what was once a paragon of old school conservatism, National Review sailed into Nationalist/Populist waters under the command of Rich Lowry its editor. Lowry was the Dean of the School of pointing out Trump’s excessive personal behavior while diminishing any impact that it had on his governing and mocking those who believed that it made him unsuitable to continue in his job. Lowry even caught the zeitgeist by putting out his own book extolling the virtues of nationalism, virtues we saw exemplified in the actions of the mob attacking the Capitol last week. Another National Review writer who routinely tried to detach himself from Trump while reserving great disdain for NeverTrump was Dan McLaughlin. Both have come around swimmingly to the notion of Trump’s behavior and recklessness as having reached the point where he should be removed from office. Oh, and add David Harsanyi to this list. And Michael Brendan Dougherty.
Next there is the crew of the Commentary Magazine Podcast, John Podhoretz, Abe Greenwald, Noah Rothman, and Christine Rosen. In a recent episode, Rosen raised the possibility that they had gotten things wrong on Trump, that maybe they had provided him and his circus with more comfort than they deserved. This brought the other three out in righteous indignation, as it was clear that they had been confronted with this charge by others. Podhoretz led the defense, pointing to the balls and strikes approach. Truth be told, he did a good job. All four of the hosts obviously believe that Trump is a mess as a human being and that his behavior was a distraction. They have consistently given him credit when he deserved it and criticized him when he deserved it. Again—if they had stopped at this, they wouldn’t have been enablers, they would just have been analysts. But they didn’t stop at this. For four years of this Presidency, they have demonstrated AT LEAST as much animosity toward the NeverTrump movement as they did toward the President’s corruption, taking every opportunity that they could to impugn the motives of NeverTrump leaders, and mocking what they lampooned as the emotionality of a group of people clinging to the quaint notion that character and behavior mattered, not just whether you like or dislike particular policies.
I’m displeased with both National Review and Commentary, but I also recognize that they can be seriously influential repositories of and laboratories for conservative thought and policy development. I welcome them to the anti-Trump team.
How about Brit Hume? Brit is an active presence on Twitter (@brithume) , perhaps the highest credentialed member of the “balls and strikes” crowd. Every now and then, Brit would come out of nowhere with a withering criticism of the President, but he just as often raised “whataboutism” to a high art. He’s another one who turned his biggest guns on the anti-Trump movement.
I could go on, but I won’t. Some of these people were in government and resigned this week, seemingly in “protest”. Again, why it took a failed coup to bring you to this point eludes me. But there are scores of these people, and while I don’t disdain them to the extent that I do the Truly Trumpy or the Cynically Trumpy, I think these people have some ‘splainin’ to do. I want to know why character ceased to matter to them. I want to know why—in the cases where they were decidedly anti-anti-Trump, people who continued to believe in baseline, old-school conservatism, came in for such criticism?
More than anything though, I want to hear one of them, just one, say something like “I was wrong. I made a bad decisions out of selfishness. I put my own career and ego before the country. I was aware of everything about him, found him repellant, and not deserving of our trust, but chose to ignore those things because I thought I could gain some personal advantage appearing to be both detached and by criticizing those who remained loyal to conservative preferences for poise and civil discourse.
I won’t hold my breath.
UPDATE: Well, look at this!