Baloney!

I seem to have a kind of muscle-memory of America’s fundamental decency (which at the highest levels of government probably means “veiling the necessary indecency”).

Kevin D. Williamson thinks I should get over it.

“This isn’t what Americans voted for.”

Everybody says this when Donald Trump does something stupid or awful. My friend Jonah Goldberg says it from time to time. John Bolton said it on a recent edition of the Dispatch Podcast.

With all due respect to my friends and colleagues and for their desire to take a charitable view of their fellow citizens, and with equally due contempt for Rolling Stone et al.:

Baloney.

Americans are not stupid: Americans know damned good and well that whom we’re voting for is what we’re voting for. We do not have the excuse of ignorance or stupidity.

…

Trump was elected to hurt people.

The creed of cruelty is nearly universal among Trump loyalists. Of course, they don’t put it that way, but ask them and they will tell you the truth in spite of themselves: Trump was elected by people who resent this or that group for its status, its wealth, its influence, its political power, its class condescension, etc., and electing Trump—again—was a way to get back at “them,” “the media,” “elites,” etc. Nobody voted for Trump for policy reasons, because he has no policies, only tantrums. Nobody voted for Trump for philosophical reasons, because he has no philosophy beyond, “I am your retribution.” The excitable ladies and gentlemen over at The Daily Wire sell “Leftist Tears” mugs, and there’s a reason for that. The tears—of our fellow Americans, wrongheaded though they may be in their politics—are what this is all about. Forget policy—those tears are the deliverable, the only one that really matters.

It is time—well past time—to stop making excuses for Americans: for Americans’ cruelty, for Americans’ selfishness, for Americans’ childish insistence on being led by their resentment and by their lowest instincts.

If the shoe fits, wear it (until it drives you to repentance). I haven’t given up on you yet.

And while I’m on a political tear, I’m feeling warm fuzzies for Cory Booker today.

A conservative who hates, hates, hates partisan judicial elections, I’m nevertheless gratified that the liberal overcame Musk’s millions behind a Trumpist in Wisconsin yesterday.

“Fascist” slightly misses the mark. M. Gessen hits a bulls-eye:

Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

Trump 2.0 is telling Trump 1.0 “Hold my beer”

Trump’s effort to squeeze the Ukrainians to get dirt on his likely opponent in 2020, the cause of his first impeachment, was just the best-documented instance of a form of corruption that characterized his entire foreign policy.

The Worst President in History

Can he go any lower?

Of Donald Trump:

[H]e’d have to don climbing gear and an oxygen mask to rise high enough to see a snake’s belly in a wagon rut.

Kevin D. Williamson

What Cheeto gets out of the uncertainty he creates

Uncertainty is exactly what Trump relishes about his tariff powers. Everyone is at the mercy of his announcements, which can change at any time, so business executives and foreign leaders have to hang on his every word and constantly come to him begging for relief. If he provided “clarity” by committing to a specific and unchanging tariff policy, he’d be giving up both leverage and attention, two of the things he likes most.

Josh Barro via Damon Linker

159 Canadians

When the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did something it had never done before and has not done since: It invoked Article 5, the collective-defense provision at the core of the alliance. With Manhattan burning and the Pentagon in ruins, thousands of Americans dead, and the future uncertain, our allies came to our aid.

And that included our nearest ally, Canada.

Canada did not send a bloodied and wounded United States thoughts and prayers via social media: When it came time to go after Osama bin Laden et al. in Afghanistan, more than 40,000 members of the Canadian armed forces served in what was not, narrowly speaking, a Canadian cause. And 159 Canadian soldiers died there.

That may not seem like a very large number, but it is 159 more than the Trump family has sent to fight for the American cause in the century and a half since that family’s first draft-dodging ancestor fled military service in Germany. Frederick Trump, the horse-butchering Yukon pimp who brought the Trump family to the United States, had no plans to stay in the country long term, but was expelled ignominiously from his homeland for his cowardly evasion of military service. During the Trump family’s time in the United States, Americans have fought in conflicts ranging from the Spanish-American War to the two world wars to Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Afghanistan and Iraq. None of Trump’s ancestors served in any of those conflicts, and none of his progeny has, either. The president has occasionally, however, taken the time to sneer at figures such as John McCain, whose service was—whatever you think of his politics—genuinely heroic.

…

Donald Trump has his name on the front of The Art of the Deal. John F. Kennedy’s name is on Profiles in Courage. Both men used ghostwriters, but we may take these works as testament to their priorities.

From father to son to father to son, the Trumps have been a line of small, oafish, grasping, chiseling, dishonest, dishonorable, cowardly, conniving, dim-witted, donkey-souled plotters and plodders, and no sensible country would trade the lot of them for one of the 159 Canadians who died in Afghanistan ….

Kevin D. Williamson

When your only tool is a hammer

There’s a classic episode of The Simpsons in which Homer gets a gun. He thinks his awesome gun is great for everything, home defense, opening beer bottles, whatever. When Marge says she doesn’t want a weapon in the house, Homer replies. “A gun is not a weapon, Marge, it’s a tool. Like a butcher knife or a harpoon, or … or an alligator. You just need more education on the subject.”

How Homer thinks about guns is not all that dissimilar to how Donald Trump thinks about tariffs. Or if you want an even more dated pop culture reference, the Trump administration talks about tariffs the way Chevy Chase did in the old Saturday Night Live parody commercial for “New Shimmer”: It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.

Jonah Goldberg

For my friends, anything …

[T]he Department of Justice pardon attorney was fired apparently for declining to agree that a “personal relationship with President Trump” was a “sufficient basis” on which to restore gun rights to a domestic abuser.

Bob Bauer, Corruption and the Maximalist Theory of Presidential Power

Truth Matters

… Truth matters.

Here it is: We have a sociopathic president in total command of a cult-like party; a Congress that, as long as the GOP controls it, is a rubber-stamp version of the Russian Duma under Putin; a court balanced precariously between a modest defense of the unitary executive and an Alito wing bent on empowering an American Caesar; and a Justice Department openly planning persecution of the president’s political opponents.

Andrew Sullivan

Government Censorship

Well, it’s hard to top this for sheer credulity:

The progressive left has been for open borders and closed debate. The Trump administration flips these positions. Border enforcement was a day-one priority. A January 20th Executive Order signed by Trump includes this statement: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”

R.R. Reno. Mafia Don’s boyz call it “terrorism” when they want to censor speech..

I will concede that Trump and his pathetic throne-sniffers are less likely to censor me than a progressive Democrat regime would have been, but your mileage will vary very much if you’re far to my left.

Tidbits

Seen by my wife on the web: Canada must feel like it’s living upstairs from a meth lab.

“I wish I was one of Elon Musk’s kids so I’d never have to look at him again.” (Not my coinage)

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (or so I’m told; I haven’t read it)

Trump is the chump antithesis. The chump antidote. A walking, talking, golden-lidded canister of Chump Be Gone.

To make that sale, he exaggerates wildly, lies promiscuously and elevates conspiracy theories ….

Frank Bruni, on a persistent thread in Trump’s rhetoric

Trump is clinically incapable of understanding any system of mutuality, because he cannot tolerate being anyone’s equal.

Andrew Sullivan, Requiem for the West

The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.

Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Going Back

A 2011 preview of President Old Scratch

Recommended: a modern David.

It’s pretty short. If you think comparisons of Trump to Hitler are over-the-top, how about a comparison of him — four years before he descended the Golden Escalator — to Satan?

And then there’s First Things, cravenly removing the comparison sometime after Trump ascended to the throne and Rusty Reno decided that collabortion has its advantages.

Politicized Prosecutors of the Right

The U.S. Attorney for D.C. described himself and his colleagues as “President Trump’s lawyers” Monday in a post about the Associated Press’s legal case against the Trump administration over access to White House events. The attorney, who is a federal prosecutor and not Trump’s personal attorney, said “As President Trump’s lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first.” We’re old enough to remember a time (2024) when conservatives criticized progressive prosecutors for putting politics ahead of getting violent criminals off the streets.

The Free Press

It is obvious that Musk and his disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers simply do not know what they are doing: For example, they ordered the dismissal of a bunch of federal employees who were “on probation” because they seem to have thought that this probationary condition was disciplinary rather than a formality related to those employees being new hires. Employees with stellar evaluations were fired in emails that cited their supposed performance problems. In one case a reader passed along, an administrator promoted to a manager position because of his excellent work in a subordinate role was dismissed because he was “on probation” in his new role. Many similar situations have been reported. Ignorance is the natural state of mankind, and most of us will forever be ignorant about most subjects—economists call this “rational ignorance,” which reflects the fact that there is not much reason to learn a great deal about things that do not matter much to you in the near term or foreseeable future and about which you do not have, and never will have, much control or influence. Ignorance can be rational—arrogance rarely is.

Musk and his army of angry nerds have a duty—a professional and patriotic obligation—to be less stupid than they have been. They are creating chaos and damaging worthwhile government programs while simultaneously complicating and pre-discrediting future reform efforts—the ones that will, one hopes, be led and executed by people who can bother to do a little bit of the homework before they start running amok like a bunch of psilocybin-addled maniacs while being led by an actual psilocybin-addled maniac.

Kevin D. Williamson

A friend of mine, on hearing the misunderstanding on probationary employees mused that maybe they misunderstand asylum seekers as well.