Apr 15, 2025
No time to give it its due, what with the constitutional crisis, but we can’t fully pass over Trump’s wild assertion yesterday that Ukraine started the war with Russia: “You don’t start a war against someone twenty times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
Okay, now on to the worst stuff. Happy Tuesday.
A Degrading Spectacle
by William Kristol
For some godforsaken reason, I made myself watch some clips yesterday of President Donald Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador (“the world’s coolest dictator,” as he calls himself) yukking it up in the Oval Office.
After all these years in and around politics, I’d like to think I have a pretty strong stomach, but yesterday was sickening. Trump and Bukele were having a great time. They were relishing the fact that innocent men had been snatched from their homes in the United States and sent by our government, lawlessly and with neither evidence nor due process, to an open-ended sentence in a ghastly prison in El Salvador. They were enjoying the prospect that even more people would be sent there, including some “homegrowns” who, Trump assured Bukele, would be the next to go.
This was not newsreel footage of two dictators meeting somewhere far away and long ago. This was yesterday. Here in Washington, D.C. In the Oval Office.
Almost a decade after Trump’s entry onto the political center stage, almost three months into his second term, the spectacle wasn’t surprising. Still, it was a new low.
And it reminded me of the young Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, where he spoke on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
I’ve studied Lincoln’s speech a bit. But I must acknowledge that I didn’t really take this seriously as a concrete possibility. I was well aware that democracies can fail, and that others have. But I hadn’t really envisioned the prospect of the suicide of freemen here.
Now one has to.
How does that suicide happen? Trump would certainly be its primary author. But looking at the video from the Oval Office, one is reminded of how many enablers he has, starting with the senior officials sitting on the couch in the Oval Office and standing behind it. There are other associates who weren’t there, such as Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who recently met with President Putin and said of the murderer and war criminal, “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.”
But of course, there are also so many others working for Trump, arranging all the events and drafting all the documents, to say nothing of those who are in fact seizing innocent people and sending them into captivity.
There are many, many enablers.
And of course, one should not neglect Trump’s supporters among the people. They too make all this possible.
I’d add that one of the things we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better is that Trump’s supporters fall into only two camps: There are the Trumpist elites, dedicated authoritarians out for money and power. And there are ignorant followers, true believers, brainwashed by social media.
Both camps exist. But there is a third class that for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about yesterday: His sophisticated apologists. Those who, we are told, really know better. Those who often express some qualms in private, but in public accelerate the degradation of American democracy.
These apologists presumably were among the college graduates who voted for Trump in 2024. Some Trump opponents like to tell themselves that Trump does better among the less educated. That’s true: 56 percent of non-college graduates voted for Trump. But 42 percent of college graduates did as well. And 42 percent isn’t that much smaller a figure than 56 percent.
And one should add that those tens of millions of educated Trump supporters are disproportionately important. Trump and Trumpism couldn’t be sustained by only authoritarian elites and brainwashed masses. Trumpism depends on these educated apologists.
And I will say that I have no confidence that these educated Trump enablers will break from Trump any more quickly than his less educated supporters. Indeed, these sophisticated rationalizers have spent a good deal of time rationalizing and are proud of their ability to rationalize. They could be harder to dislodge than some true believers who might simply lose their faith or some low-information voters who may simply wake up to what’s happening around them.
Lincoln was familiar with this phenomenon too. As he said in his first debate with Stephen Douglas, there is “a class of men,” many of them of “vast influence,” who should be held particularly responsible for being willing to “blow out the moral lights around us” and “eradicate the love of liberty” in the broader political community.
The modern counterparts of these men have played their part in laying the groundwork for the degrading spectacle we saw yesterday in the Oval Office. But let’s not end on a hopeless note. Today is the 160th anniversary of Lincoln’s death. Perhaps the inspiration one can find in his example can outweigh the demoralization one feels from yesterday’s spectacle of Trump and his sidekick Bukele in the Oval Office.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
by Andrew Egger
Yesterday JVL and I took to YouTube after Trump’s and Bukele’s Oval Office meeting to break down the whole disaster. Trump was all but openly defying the Supreme Court’s order that he work to give a wrongfully deported man due process. How was the Court likely to respond?
JVL raised the speculative possibility that Chief Justice John Roberts might be the one to blink in this showdown—not necessarily out of sheer cowardice, but as a way of postponing the ultimate standoff between his Court and a lawless administration until he’s confident he’s fighting on the stablest possible ground. He expanded on this possibility in his newsletter a bit later:
If he is forced to fight a series of tactical retreats, then [Roberts] is willing to do so, trading ground for time. Along the way, he hopes that he can use the path of his retreat to bring Kavanaugh and Gorsuch around and convince them of the seriousness of the moment. Perhaps he can use the legal structure of his retreats to isolate Thomas and Alito. . . .
He also understands that this struggle will ultimately be decided by the People. Either they will tolerate authoritarianism or they will not. And so he hopes to preserve the position of the Court in the public eye so that, when the forces of liberalism have some ground on which to stand, he can maximize the Court’s leverage with the People on behalf of the liberal order.
Building out this sort of theoretical scaffolding in advance is much more JVL’s bag than mine. But if Roberts is thinking this way, it seems to me that he is making a grave mistake.
What does it mean to lurch into authoritarianism at a moment when we who would resist it are so stripped of real political power? It means we are both imaginatively blinkered and strategically limited. Our possible courses are few: Fight now, fight later, or fight never. Possibly we will be fucked no matter what. Meanwhile, the chaos surrounds us; we are off our own map. We should have the humility to acknowledge that we simply don’t know the likely outcomes of any course we might take.
What this means is that everybody from Roberts on down who hasn’t totally beaten their consciences into submission on the question of Trump is wasting their time if they’re trying to triangulate the best possible outcomes of actions. Even if these things were knowable, how could you possibly trust your own analysis in assessing it? We’re not playing with Monopoly money here; everyone knows Trump is going to drop the hammer sooner or later on those who cross him. You’re going to put a subconscious thumb on the scale in favor of your own safety if you give yourself a chance. At a moment like this, convincing yourself that prudence demands you fight later is tantamount to giving yourself permission to fight never.
What the moment demands from Roberts and from the rest of us is an option that, blessedly, never fully leaves the table: To speak the truth, to act with courage, and to let the chips fall where they may. That’s hard enough for anyone to do without indulging the part of the brain that whispers that temporary submission is wisdom. Here’s hoping the chief justice—the only man equipped right now, it seems, to deal justice—feels the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment