Link (Archive)
I began writing about politics because of Trump and in defense of him, which continued until late 2019 or early 2020. I vividly recall being told by an editor that my initial writings in praise of him were “overwrought.” Call it the convert’s zeal.
But that flame would flicker. In short, I went from embracing Trump’s flaws to overlooking them and finally downplaying them before admitting to myself that I couldn’t make excuses for him anymore. There was a time when you could argue the issue was, as Steve Bannon once intimated, that Trump is easily duped. But the buck stops with him in the end.
I think my first swing at Trump was published by American Greatness in February 2020, “Trump Is Betraying the Working Class,” wherein I argued that he’d turned his back on restricting immigration. I remember getting a call from someone who worked at a prominent restrictionist think tank a little while after it went to print. They thanked me for writing it. That was just the beginning.
Later in 2020, I also wrote about the nefarious influence of Jared Kushner, who effectively served as prime minister in the Trump administration—the real, dead-eyed power behind the throne. Ann Coulter shared several excerpts from it on Twitter. I had come late to the same realization she had about him.
By the end of his tenure, I was thoroughly disillusioned with the man and the myth. But I never turned my back on the idea of America First. Indeed, my anger at Trump stemmed from believing he had done just that, and it was informed by my conversations with good people behind enemy lines in the White House who waged a desperate and losing war against subversives and grifters. These people meant well and bore the brunt of Trump’s betrayals and blunders, which they largely suffered in silence. I hope they will someday find the courage to go on record with what they’ve told me off the record.
In time, however, I grew a little Pollyannaish toward Trump, believing he could grow and change after 2020. I have never hidden the fact I like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis. But there is something quixotic about Trump, a magnetism that draws people toward him and wipes their memories like magnets corrupt data on hard drives. I know very smart folks for whom Trump is like an elixir of forgetfulness and naïveté. Trump’s world is a lot like the land of the Lotus-eaters—an island of narcotic-induced waking sleep. In Homer, the fruits and flowers of the lotus tree are the dope. In Mar-a-Lago, it’s copium.
I almost joined them in indulging in that botanical, going back and forth on the former president. I hoped that he had learned something while licking his wounds. But I was, once again, disabused of all delusions not long after the launch of his latest bid for the White House.
Calling it a ‘“campaign” is an act of charity. It’s more of a demented marketing scheme run by malevolent clowns designed to sell people the political equivalent of used cars with bodies crammed in the trunks. DeSantis, of course, has been the target of Trump’s ire because he threatens to put an end to the used automobile business. But what infuriates me about the slander against DeSantis is that everything he is accused of is true of Trump and often worse in his case.
Paul Ryan said something nice about DeSantis.
Trump’s supporters didn’t get a border wall or infrastructure plan because he sidelined those promises to cater to the agenda of Ryan, who Trump supported and defended and heaped praise on when it mattered most.
Karl Rove is working with DeSantis.
There’s no evidence that’s true, and, more importantly, Rove was actually an advisor to Trump’s reelection bid.
DeSantis is working with the “deep state” against Trump.
Not only is that hilarious untrue, but Trump recently defended his decision to hire Christopher Wray to lead the FBI, although Wray has become a bête noire to Trump’s base, who view Wray as an actual deep state foot soldier. That minor detail, however, doesn’t matter. Trump hired Wray, so we can’t be too harsh on the man because it might reflect badly on the former president’s leadership, even if Wray is hostile to Trump’s supporters and, more importantly, to their political aspirations.
DeSantis didn’t handle the coronavirus pandemic well.
It was Trump who criticized leaders for reopening their states. It was Trump who awarded Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation instead of grilling him. As the late conservative intellectual Angelo Codevilla wrote: “Only President Trump’s complaisance made possible the American people’s submission to scientifically nonsensical regulations that ended up solidifying the oligarchy and transferring more wealth and power from one class to another, possibly, than ever before in mankind’s history.”
The list goes on and on.
And while I initially planned to remain balanced when dealing with the 2024 race, it seemed like overnight, people around me, including those I expected better from, received orders to join the attack on DeSantis. It was all predicated on the lies—lies like the one spread by Richard Baris, a pro-Trump pollster who claimed the governor had been secretly plotting against Trump with Kevin McCarthy. It evaporated once Trump endorsed McCarthy for House speaker and sided with him against the Republican rebels. It disappeared and was never heard from again because it was always a bullshit story, one of many designed to give Trump’s camp cover for its attacks.
Almost everyone on “this side” of things threw in behind Trump, either because they see their careers as contingent on his success or they’re paid by his camp or, saddest of all, they see it as an avenue into a future White House. Some know Trump will likely lose in 2024, but they don’t care. It’s a joke or a paycheck for them.
I decided I wasn’t going to join the circus, that I wasn’t going to lie to people for any reason, and that was that.
Now it’s obvious Trump has learned nothing from his defeat. In fact, he’s doubled down on nothing and become worse—a reality made embarrassingly evident yesterday with the Loomer debacle.
Loomer is an attention-seeking headcase and is either a pathological liar or incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction or both. She once claimed her tires had been slashed and suggested it was part of a plot by her enemies to destroy her. It took internet sleuths five minutes or less to determine Loomer had fabricated the story.
Above all, she is a sycophant, so it wasn’t surprising when Trump instructed his aides to formally make her part of his team.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, two reporters with access to Trump’s world, wrote in The New York Times yesterday that Trump had instructed his team to hire Loomer. The ensuing drama encapsulated everything about Trump that put me off the train for good. It’s why I’m convinced he cannot win or govern well even if he somehow does due, in part, to the fact that few sane or competent people are willing to be around him anymore.
If you read the report carefully, it becomes obvious that it was planted by people around Trump who are scammers but not totally braindead. Hiring Loomer would be an absolute disaster, in no small part due to the fact she has picked fights with or lied about so many people. That includes plenty of pro-Trump figures, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, reacting to the report, publicly opposed Trump’s decision, calling Loomer “mentally unstable” and a “documented liar.”
But getting people like Greene to respond was the point of going to the Times. “The level of blowback that is said to have come at Trump from allies and advisers after this story published is stronger than for any potential staff appointment I can recall,” Swan tweeted, noting that Greene’s anger, in particular, carried weight with Trump. The plan worked.
Haberman and Swan added an update to their story later in the day: “The New York Times’s report on the potential hire ignited a firestorm among some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal conservative supporters, and by late Friday, a high-ranking campaign official said Ms. Loomer was no longer going to be hired.”
There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here.
Trump is surrounded by people who are so spineless they had to crawl on their stomachs to the Times to tell the paper what they didn’t have the backbone to firmly tell Trump to his face. Haberman and Swan had to do their jobs for them. It shows that Trump is deeply influenced by the press, even as he whines about “fake news.”
It also showed that Trump reflexively makes terrible decisions without regard for anyone or anything but himself. Loomer is an awful person without any useful skills. But she has also been orbiting his world for a while. Why, then, would Trump only take special notice of her now? Because she has incessantly attacked DeSantis and his wife, Casey, in the most vicious and slanderous ways. Via the Times:
Loomer’s attacks on DeSantis and his wife are insane—but Trump has been driven mad by his hatred, and Loomer’s crazy scratched the itch. And when the backlash against her came, it also became clear that different factions vie around Trump for access and influence, like dogs fighting over scraps around the feet of the master.
Every aspect of this embarrassing debacle mirrors the problems that infected and undermined the Trump White House. The leaks. The bad reflexive bad calls. The jockeying between factions that are more concerned with who gets to lick the meat off the bones than the mandate and people they claim to represent.
All of these things have only worsened. Loomer not getting an official job—for now—is not a victory. Trump is still surrounded by people like Jason Miller, who said in court documents that he has a thing for prostitutes and “Asian themed” massage parlors that offer happy endings. Asked if his visits to those fine establishments were sexual, Miller said he’d gotten “a hand job at a massage parlor” four or five times. People like Miller are good at selling lies and running a circus. But they won’t come in handy when it comes to running a country.
That is the fundamental problem with Trump. We need leadership, not the political equivalent of a hand job parlor servicing grifters and hacks that merely masquerades as a serious campaign that wants to capture the White House to govern well. That is why I keep saying that if you want to beat the left, if you want to do more than console yourself with memes after each defeat, you’re going to deal with the Trump circus first.
Some insist that the circus is the point. After all, the whole system is a joke. Who could take the established political order seriously? But what you’ll notice about these people is that they also insist there is no alternative to Trump, a conclusion that is at odds with the proposition that none of this matters—because, if that is true, why is it so imperative the Trump show goes on? It only seems like a contradiction until you realize they are lying to you and maybe to themselves.
I have no idea what will happen in 2024. But I can promise I’m going to tell you the truth even if it’s what you don’t want to hear.
Leaving the Circus
My critical coverage of Donald Trump’s third presidential bid has raised some eyebrows. I figure now is a good time to discuss that in the wake of the Laura Loomer affair. If you hadn’t heard, Trump considered formally hiring her before a pressure campaign stopped him, for the moment, from going through with it.I began writing about politics because of Trump and in defense of him, which continued until late 2019 or early 2020. I vividly recall being told by an editor that my initial writings in praise of him were “overwrought.” Call it the convert’s zeal.
But that flame would flicker. In short, I went from embracing Trump’s flaws to overlooking them and finally downplaying them before admitting to myself that I couldn’t make excuses for him anymore. There was a time when you could argue the issue was, as Steve Bannon once intimated, that Trump is easily duped. But the buck stops with him in the end.
I think my first swing at Trump was published by American Greatness in February 2020, “Trump Is Betraying the Working Class,” wherein I argued that he’d turned his back on restricting immigration. I remember getting a call from someone who worked at a prominent restrictionist think tank a little while after it went to print. They thanked me for writing it. That was just the beginning.
Later in 2020, I also wrote about the nefarious influence of Jared Kushner, who effectively served as prime minister in the Trump administration—the real, dead-eyed power behind the throne. Ann Coulter shared several excerpts from it on Twitter. I had come late to the same realization she had about him.
By the end of his tenure, I was thoroughly disillusioned with the man and the myth. But I never turned my back on the idea of America First. Indeed, my anger at Trump stemmed from believing he had done just that, and it was informed by my conversations with good people behind enemy lines in the White House who waged a desperate and losing war against subversives and grifters. These people meant well and bore the brunt of Trump’s betrayals and blunders, which they largely suffered in silence. I hope they will someday find the courage to go on record with what they’ve told me off the record.
In time, however, I grew a little Pollyannaish toward Trump, believing he could grow and change after 2020. I have never hidden the fact I like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis. But there is something quixotic about Trump, a magnetism that draws people toward him and wipes their memories like magnets corrupt data on hard drives. I know very smart folks for whom Trump is like an elixir of forgetfulness and naïveté. Trump’s world is a lot like the land of the Lotus-eaters—an island of narcotic-induced waking sleep. In Homer, the fruits and flowers of the lotus tree are the dope. In Mar-a-Lago, it’s copium.
I almost joined them in indulging in that botanical, going back and forth on the former president. I hoped that he had learned something while licking his wounds. But I was, once again, disabused of all delusions not long after the launch of his latest bid for the White House.
Calling it a ‘“campaign” is an act of charity. It’s more of a demented marketing scheme run by malevolent clowns designed to sell people the political equivalent of used cars with bodies crammed in the trunks. DeSantis, of course, has been the target of Trump’s ire because he threatens to put an end to the used automobile business. But what infuriates me about the slander against DeSantis is that everything he is accused of is true of Trump and often worse in his case.
Paul Ryan said something nice about DeSantis.
Trump’s supporters didn’t get a border wall or infrastructure plan because he sidelined those promises to cater to the agenda of Ryan, who Trump supported and defended and heaped praise on when it mattered most.
Karl Rove is working with DeSantis.
There’s no evidence that’s true, and, more importantly, Rove was actually an advisor to Trump’s reelection bid.
DeSantis is working with the “deep state” against Trump.
Not only is that hilarious untrue, but Trump recently defended his decision to hire Christopher Wray to lead the FBI, although Wray has become a bête noire to Trump’s base, who view Wray as an actual deep state foot soldier. That minor detail, however, doesn’t matter. Trump hired Wray, so we can’t be too harsh on the man because it might reflect badly on the former president’s leadership, even if Wray is hostile to Trump’s supporters and, more importantly, to their political aspirations.
DeSantis didn’t handle the coronavirus pandemic well.
It was Trump who criticized leaders for reopening their states. It was Trump who awarded Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation instead of grilling him. As the late conservative intellectual Angelo Codevilla wrote: “Only President Trump’s complaisance made possible the American people’s submission to scientifically nonsensical regulations that ended up solidifying the oligarchy and transferring more wealth and power from one class to another, possibly, than ever before in mankind’s history.”
The list goes on and on.
And while I initially planned to remain balanced when dealing with the 2024 race, it seemed like overnight, people around me, including those I expected better from, received orders to join the attack on DeSantis. It was all predicated on the lies—lies like the one spread by Richard Baris, a pro-Trump pollster who claimed the governor had been secretly plotting against Trump with Kevin McCarthy. It evaporated once Trump endorsed McCarthy for House speaker and sided with him against the Republican rebels. It disappeared and was never heard from again because it was always a bullshit story, one of many designed to give Trump’s camp cover for its attacks.
Almost everyone on “this side” of things threw in behind Trump, either because they see their careers as contingent on his success or they’re paid by his camp or, saddest of all, they see it as an avenue into a future White House. Some know Trump will likely lose in 2024, but they don’t care. It’s a joke or a paycheck for them.
I decided I wasn’t going to join the circus, that I wasn’t going to lie to people for any reason, and that was that.
Now it’s obvious Trump has learned nothing from his defeat. In fact, he’s doubled down on nothing and become worse—a reality made embarrassingly evident yesterday with the Loomer debacle.
Loomer is an attention-seeking headcase and is either a pathological liar or incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction or both. She once claimed her tires had been slashed and suggested it was part of a plot by her enemies to destroy her. It took internet sleuths five minutes or less to determine Loomer had fabricated the story.
Above all, she is a sycophant, so it wasn’t surprising when Trump instructed his aides to formally make her part of his team.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, two reporters with access to Trump’s world, wrote in The New York Times yesterday that Trump had instructed his team to hire Loomer. The ensuing drama encapsulated everything about Trump that put me off the train for good. It’s why I’m convinced he cannot win or govern well even if he somehow does due, in part, to the fact that few sane or competent people are willing to be around him anymore.
If you read the report carefully, it becomes obvious that it was planted by people around Trump who are scammers but not totally braindead. Hiring Loomer would be an absolute disaster, in no small part due to the fact she has picked fights with or lied about so many people. That includes plenty of pro-Trump figures, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, reacting to the report, publicly opposed Trump’s decision, calling Loomer “mentally unstable” and a “documented liar.”
But getting people like Greene to respond was the point of going to the Times. “The level of blowback that is said to have come at Trump from allies and advisers after this story published is stronger than for any potential staff appointment I can recall,” Swan tweeted, noting that Greene’s anger, in particular, carried weight with Trump. The plan worked.
Haberman and Swan added an update to their story later in the day: “The New York Times’s report on the potential hire ignited a firestorm among some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal conservative supporters, and by late Friday, a high-ranking campaign official said Ms. Loomer was no longer going to be hired.”
There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here.
Trump is surrounded by people who are so spineless they had to crawl on their stomachs to the Times to tell the paper what they didn’t have the backbone to firmly tell Trump to his face. Haberman and Swan had to do their jobs for them. It shows that Trump is deeply influenced by the press, even as he whines about “fake news.”
It also showed that Trump reflexively makes terrible decisions without regard for anyone or anything but himself. Loomer is an awful person without any useful skills. But she has also been orbiting his world for a while. Why, then, would Trump only take special notice of her now? Because she has incessantly attacked DeSantis and his wife, Casey, in the most vicious and slanderous ways. Via the Times:
Trump is obsessed with the governor because, in him, he sees everything he is not and what his money can’t buy: competence, discipline, conviction, and a command of respect. Notice how there are virtually no leaks from DeSantis’ side. People will not go behind your back and leak if they respect you. Trump cannot say that is true about himself. He knows it, so he seethes with venom at DeSantis.In recent months, Ms. Loomer has caught the attention of people in Mr. Trump’s inner circle—and Mr. Trump himself—by posting videos on social media that personally attack his potential rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Ms. Loomer has accused Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, who had breast cancer, of wanting “to play the ‘cancer survivor’ card to make people think they are untouchable from criticism.”
On Twitter in February, Ms. Loomer posted: “Ron and Casey DeSantis are social climbers who will NEVER be Donald and Melania Trump,” adding, “Ron DeSantis will never have what it takes to be ICONIC like Trump.”
Ms. Loomer also organized a group of Trump supporters outside an event in Leesburg, Fla., where Mr. DeSantis was signing his new book.
“Anybody who follows me knows that I’m the person who has been independently leading the charge on opposition research, aggressively exposing damning and consequential stories about Ron DeSantis and other Trump opponents,” Ms. Loomer said on Friday.
Loomer’s attacks on DeSantis and his wife are insane—but Trump has been driven mad by his hatred, and Loomer’s crazy scratched the itch. And when the backlash against her came, it also became clear that different factions vie around Trump for access and influence, like dogs fighting over scraps around the feet of the master.
Every aspect of this embarrassing debacle mirrors the problems that infected and undermined the Trump White House. The leaks. The bad reflexive bad calls. The jockeying between factions that are more concerned with who gets to lick the meat off the bones than the mandate and people they claim to represent.
All of these things have only worsened. Loomer not getting an official job—for now—is not a victory. Trump is still surrounded by people like Jason Miller, who said in court documents that he has a thing for prostitutes and “Asian themed” massage parlors that offer happy endings. Asked if his visits to those fine establishments were sexual, Miller said he’d gotten “a hand job at a massage parlor” four or five times. People like Miller are good at selling lies and running a circus. But they won’t come in handy when it comes to running a country.
That is the fundamental problem with Trump. We need leadership, not the political equivalent of a hand job parlor servicing grifters and hacks that merely masquerades as a serious campaign that wants to capture the White House to govern well. That is why I keep saying that if you want to beat the left, if you want to do more than console yourself with memes after each defeat, you’re going to deal with the Trump circus first.
Some insist that the circus is the point. After all, the whole system is a joke. Who could take the established political order seriously? But what you’ll notice about these people is that they also insist there is no alternative to Trump, a conclusion that is at odds with the proposition that none of this matters—because, if that is true, why is it so imperative the Trump show goes on? It only seems like a contradiction until you realize they are lying to you and maybe to themselves.
I have no idea what will happen in 2024. But I can promise I’m going to tell you the truth even if it’s what you don’t want to hear.
