What it takes to tick off David Brooks
Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”
This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.
In fact, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance used his precious time to make a point similar to Deneen’s. Vance said, “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.
But that’s not what really made me angry. It was that these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.
Mild-mannered David Brooks, popping a vein (shared link, bold added).
The rest of the column was quite good, but the idea that a primitive, atavistic President would deploy his “throne-sniffing sycophants” (H/T Kevin D. Williamson, below) to reduce the nation to primitive atavism struck me as (a) too sophisticated conceptually, but perfect temperamentally, for Trump (a “stupid, lazy and angry” man — Kevin D. Williamson again); (b) exactly what his smart and unprincipled intimates would realize is necessary for their success; and (c) the kind of radical moral rot that Brooks sniffs out and exposes to us all.
And for his ability to distill evils to their essence, I am grateful.
Stupid, lazy and angry
We’ve been here before, of course. Donald Trump and his team have been three weeks away from announcing a groundbreaking new health care plan for … what, just about a decade now? Donald Trump’s confidence in addressing a complex subject has a linear relationship to his ignorance regarding that subject, and so we have got gems like this presidential declaration of ineptitude: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” It isn’t the case that nobody knew—lots of people knew. Some of those people had good ideas, some had terrible ideas, but they knew it was complicated. The guy who didn’t know? The one who spent most of his life as a Manhattan gadfly, a game-show host with side hustles in pro wrestling and porn. That guy didn’t know.
…
There are no conspiracies. There are no secrets. Everything is more or less what it seems. … [T]he obvious explanation for Trump’s eccentricity (or most anything else) is almost always the correct explanation. Which is why I have been writing for all these years that the key to understanding the Trump administration is that its central figure, Donald Trump, is stupid, lazy, and angry …
There are people around Trump, such as Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, who are not stupid or lazy (though both are distinctly angry men) but are functionally indistinguishable from the stupid and the lazy because they are throne-sniffing sycophants who dread a return to the private sector more than almost anything else in this life.
…
It’s all right there to see: Trump, the supposed master negotiator, is as a matter of practical fact able to effectively negotiate exclusively in situations in which no substantial negotiation is required: with people he can fire, for example, or with utterly dependent parties. He calls this “negotiating from a position of strength” instead of “bossing around your cowering flunkies.”
It didn’t take long for the courts to figure this out
The Abrego Garcia ruling and the Alien Enemies Act litigation have left legal scholars warning of a constitutional crisis. But a more tangible effect, attorneys told me, has been the erosion of the “presumption of regularity”—the benefit of the doubt given to the government in court proceedings. It’s based on the idea that federal officers and attorneys are operating in good faith, and not trying to achieve political goals through acts of subterfuge.
As judges see the administration saying one thing in public and another in court, they have started to treat the government’s claims with more skepticism and, sometimes, with outright suspicion of criminal contempt. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that the Trump administration has been losing the majority of its immigration-related motions and claims, regardless of whether the judges overseeing their cases were appointed by Democrats or Republicans.
Nick Miroff, In Trump Immigration Cases, It’s One Thing in Public, Another in Court
I’m not by any means certain that it will all be alright, i.e., that the courts can protect us from Trump’s lawlessness. But denying his administration the presumption of regularity is an important and needed step.
Note well that when a government lawyer tried to address the court honestly, the Attorney General fired and defamed him:
When a senior ICE official said in sworn testimony in March that Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador because of an “administrative error,” the Justice Department attorney who initially represented the Trump administration, Erez Reuveni, relayed that characterization to the court. When asked why the administration hadn’t taken steps to correct the error and bring Abrego Garcia back, Reuveni said his client—the Trump administration—hadn’t provided him with answers.
The top Trump aide Stephen Miller soon began insisting publicly that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was not, in fact, an error—the opposite of what the government admitted in court. Vice President J. D. Vance claimed that Abrego Garcia is a “convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here,” even though he has no criminal convictions in the United States or El Salvador. Attorney General Pam Bondi cast the error as missing “an extra step in paperwork” and said that Abrego Garcia should not be returned.
Reuveni was fired. Bondi said he had failed to “zealously advocate” for the government. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences,” she told reporters.
It’s a good time to be a retired attorney or, failing that, to practice outside a Department of Justice that requires you to lie (the normal term for Bondi’s “zealously advocate”) in court.
Marks of dystopia
Speaking of lying to court and losing in court:
I offer you the most dystopian thing I’ve read about the state of the federal government this year—so far:
Amid rising tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, some federal judges are beginning to discuss the idea of managing their own armed security force.
…
The Supreme Court has its own dedicated police force, but other federal judges are protected by the U.S. Marshals Service, which reports to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Security committee members worried that Trump could order the marshals to stand down in retaliation for a decision that didn’t go his way.
A country where judges need their own bodyguards because they no longer trust the president to guarantee their safety if they rule against him (and understandably so) is a country waaaaay too far down the slope of banana republicanism to chastise anyone else about failing to live up to Western “virtue ethics.”
…
[Trump named Ed Martin acting U.S. attorney in Washington] earlier this year despite the fact that he hadn’t worked a day in his life as a prosecutor. The president later nominated him to fill the position permanently, but that required Senate confirmation. And although Senate Republicans have set the bar for confirming Trump cronies on the floor, somehow Martin still failed to clear it. You need to be awfully sketchy—like, Matt Gaetz levels of sketchy—for John Thune’s conference to bork you.
…
From time to time I think back to what Sen. Susan Collins said when she was asked during Trump’s first impeachment trial whether she’d vote to convict him for demanding a quid pro quo of Ukraine. No, she answered, there’s no need. “I believe that the president has learned from this case,” she told CBS News. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”
He did learn a lesson. What he learned was that Senate Republicans would never hold him accountable for blatantly abusing his power.
Whole-of-Government Gaslighting
[W]hy is the Justice Department not only settling the lawsuit that [Ashli] Babbitt’s relatives filed but also mulling an apology in the millions? Because Trump’s alternate reality demands it. Because that is how you turn truth entirely on its head.
You don’t simply challenge what really happened at the Capitol, which is that lawless hooligans in thrall to Trump’s delusions attempted a kind of coup. You chip-chip-chip away at it in so many ways over so much time and with such unflagging frequency that many people who thought they understood what they were seeing aren’t wholly sure anymore — or give up trying to make sense of it.
Trump recast a day of shame as a “day of love.” The rioters became “patriots” and Babbitt a martyr. As soon as Trump returned to the Oval Office, he pardoned nearly all of the roughly 1,600 people criminally charged in connection with the rioting. He even floated the idea of a compensation fund for them. Everybody gets a prize!
To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.
Frank Bruni (shared link) This is so good I probably would have shared one of my ten monthly links even if it weren’t the end of the month.
86ing the important stuff
He didn’t say that in so many words, but his meaning was clear:
FBI Director Kash Patel took a break from his busy schedule of hanging out in Las Vegas instead of actually running the FBI, to go on Fox News last night to rant a bit about James Comey. After Comey posted his beachside “8647” insta, Patel quickly took to social media — where all professional law enforcement vents about its investigation priorities — to pretend that “86,” a century old term for bouncing unruly customers or canceling food orders, actually amounted to an assassination threat directed at Donald Trump.
This was, to use the technical term, f ****** stupid. Though against all odds, it was not nearly as stupid as Patel’s next move. Per the Daily Beast:
“Do you know how many copycats we’ve had to investigate as a result of that beachside venture from a former director?” he asked Baier. “Do you know how many agents I’ve had to take offline from chasing down child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, terrorists?”
Hopefully some career law enforcement professional within the FBI intervened to make sure the answer to both questions is close to zero.
First of all, since threats to the president are the jurisdiction of the Secret Service — something Patel publicly acknowledged at the time — why the hell is he pulling agents off ANYTHING to run down a soccer mom who took a picture of her bottomless mimosa brunch bill having tipped to make sure the total was 8647?
So our President’s ego is more important protecting us from child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, and terrorists. Keep that in mind. It’s barely 19 months to Retribution Day 2026.
That’s assuming the Democrats can serve up something palatable. But they’re convened in luxury hotels to do some
soul-searching after November’s defeat. “Democratic donors and strategists,” Goldmacher writes, “have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.”
One of those proposals is a $20 million effort “to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online.” The goal is to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”
This is a reprise of this era’s Democrat delusion: “We just aren’t communicating our message right.” Au contraire, mon frere: your message is your problem.
86 both major parties.
Woke Right
Richard Hanania is a longtime critic of DEI, but has a few bones to pick with Trump 2.0 fake demolition of it:
Unfortunately, it is now clear that, rather than sticking to the principles of colour blindness, merit and individual liberty that I believe in, the Trump administration seeks to implement its own version of thought control and federal-government overreach.
This can be seen most clearly in the letter of demands the administration sent to Harvard on April 11th and its announcement that it was cutting off research funds to the university. The letter stated that Harvard must cease all DEI and affirmative-action policies in hiring, promotions and admissions.
So far, so good …
… [T]here is a direct contradiction between the goal of viewpoint diversity and the principle of merit, which the administration is claiming to defend. We all have an interest in our top institutions selecting students and faculty based on intelligence, competence and their fit within a programme. Having ideological litmus tests for professors and scientists would do more damage to the principle of merit than race and sex preferences ever have, given how few individuals with advanced degrees identify as conservatives …
… Harvard may never be an institution where MAGA has a large constituency. Accepting that is necessary for being at peace with the idea of America as a pluralistic society.
An influential voice from the right laments Trump’s attack on universities
When the rhetoric comes home to roost
“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”
She paused. “This is Carol.”
A Missouri Town Was Solidly Behind Trump. Then Carol Was Detained. – The New York Times (shared link)
Prelude to a pissing contest
Elon Musk said he would step down as a “special government employee” with the Trump administration. The billionaire has led a radical effort to overhaul the American state through the Department of Government Efficiency. He has been critical of Mr Trump’s budget bill, which would add trillions to debt. He recently said he wanted to spend more time on his businesses—which have themselves suffered a backlash.
The Economist
Neither Trump nor Musk can keep his mouth shut. The Bromance is over. The divorce oughta be good — “good television” as Trump likes to say.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my rusty credentials without thinking it through.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium. I am now exploring Radiopaper.com as well.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 