Never Trump … Still
It may be premature, but it’s possible that conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens may be starting to choke on his recent semi-conciliatory words about Donald Trump.
After all, how can a sentient being think anything but the worst after the recent shitstorm of venality and incompetence over the debt ceiling—set against the astounding array of fools and scoundrels with which the once-and-future president has surrounded himself for his next time in the sandbox.
Stephens is a thoughtful, prize-winning journalist, a neoconservative who jousts every week in print with his more-liberal Times colleague Gail Collins. (It is one of my weekly must-reads in the Times.)
In his own column recently, Stephens had this to say about Donald Trump:
“Who, and what, is Trump? He’s a man and the symbol of a movement. The man is crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive, dishonest but authentic. The movement is patriotic—and angry …”
Stephens went on to say that Never-Trumpers (he included himself) simply missed the surging waves of discontent among all voters this year, and joined liberals and moderates (like me) in a cavalcade of cluelessness:
“We also talked a lot about democracy. That’s important: The memory of Jan. 6 and Trump’s 2020 election lies were the main reasons I voted for Kamala Harris. But if democracy means anything, it’s that ordinary people, not elites, get to decide how important an event like Jan. 6 is to them. Turns out, not so much.
“What ordinary people really cared about this year were the high cost of living and the chaos at the border. Why did Trump—so often deprecated by his critics as a fortunate fool—understand this so well while we fecklessly carried on about the soul of the nation?”
First, let me say that it’s not a bad thing to worry about the nation’s soul, just that maybe this season was not the time to make such a thing of it (the price of eggs, you know.) But I would add to Stephens’ sobriquet “fortunate fool” the Italian word “furbo.”
To be furbo is to be clever, or cunning—but not usually in a good way. Conniving might be the better English equivalent, and that certainly describes Trump, not to mention any number of his sycophants, including his buddy billionaire boy-man Elon Musk, who is effectively an unelected shadow president. (Don’t tell this to Donald, he may hurl a ketchup bottle at you.)
Trump’s furbizia was especially obvious on immigration. Like any good Fascist (I’m looking at you Adolph, Benito) Trump always needed scapegoats to blame, or to use to deflect criticism of his own policy failings. And at the southern border especially he found oh so many.
Never one to care about facts or accuracy, Trump made it seem as if every other illegal crossing the Rio Grande was a rapist, a murderer or a drug dealer. And those who were not criminals were eating your pets.
And it didn’t help that a hapless, diminished Joe Biden—his increasing frailty shielded by a wall of family and White House staff and enablers in Congress—did fuck all over years to deal with the influx effectively.
Trump saw his chance and he took it. Good on you, Orange Pustule.
The sheer mediocrity of the people Trump has chosen to be in his cabinet or serve as key advisors is staggering. You know the field is weak when Marco Rubio, his pick for secretary of state, looks like Socrates by comparison.
Can anyone with a worm-free brain see anything to commend an anti-vax, conspiracy theorizing nut job like Bobby Kennedy,Jr. as our health czar? Or not see in a rabid dog like Kash Patel the real potential to turn the FBI (once again) into a private secret police force?
The list, of course goes on and doesn’t get any better. A wrestling mogul for secretary of education, a Putin apologist for chief of National Intelligence. Even thinking of a scumbag like Matt Gaetz for AG.
Still, here was Bret Stephens a few days ago:
“Let’s enter the new year by wishing the new administration well, by giving some of Trump’s cabinet picks the benefit of the doubt, by dropping the lurid historical comparisons to past dictators, by not sounding paranoid about the ever-looming end of democracy, by hoping for the best and knowing that we need to fight the wrongs that are real and not merely what we fear, that whatever happens, this too shall pass….”
I agree with Bret on one thing: this too shall pass, one hopes as early as two years from now, when, after what I fear will be more Trump chaos, the midterm elections, God willing, flip the nearly equally divided House of Representatives back to Democratic, and possibly even help Dems pick up a seat or two in the now 53-47 Republican-led Senate.
But two years is a long time for this ship of state, especially when it’s a Ship of Fools.
