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Dr. StrangeTrump: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Character Questions (As Much)
If you had access to my Facebook account and went back far enough in my history, you would find out that I neither voted for Trump nor supported him at any point before his election. As time has gone by, I find myself spending more and more time defending him from critics; more accurately, I have spent time attacking his critics, not because I love Trump but because I have come to be confounded by some of them. Would I defend a similarly situated Democrat? No, in part because I wouldn’t like their policies (I also don’t agree with Trump on trade and immigration, but leave that aside). Does this mean I have gone over to a completely transactional view of politics or that I have given in to my cynicism about the federal government and the people that people it? Probably, but a fuller explanation is interesting (at least to me).
The Problem of Corruption and Lack of Character
Aside from the moral problems (I’ll come to that later), it’s helpful to consider why a lack of character in leadership and the attendant corruption is a problem from a practical perspective. Our system is based on certain ideals; when corruption creeps in, people become cynical and start to look for alternatives. If a system purports to idealize the free market but really delivers crony capitalism more often than not, people will start to experiment with alternatives that seem (from a certain point of view at least) fairer even though time and again they produce worse outcomes. Some people will always be looking for a “better” way regardless of how good things are, but corruption exacerbates the problem and makes people more receptive to alternatives.
Interestingly, corruption works the same way in bad ideological systems (such as totalitarian systems like Fascism, Nazism, and Socialism), with occasionally good results. Upon viewing of Schindler’s List, I noticed how integral petty corruption was to the salvation of his workers. If any of the soldiers, SS men, or guards decide to put their Nazi “ideals” above their desire for black-market cigarettes, watches, or liquor, everyone dies.
So, corruption damages systems, whether that system is good or bad. Is our present system worth protecting from corruption? I find myself increasingly horrified to learn that the answer is something on the order of “not really” or more accurately “not completely.” This isn’t a call to a “burn it all down” revolution, but it is a call to rethink what we should and shouldn’t preserve if we find ourselves with an opportunity to renegotiate our present norms and assumptions. In this, Trump’s presidency has been clarifying in that everyone is revealing what their real beliefs and goals are.
What is exasperating about Never Trump conservatives is that they seem to be willing to abandon what I thought were fairly orthodox conservative viewpoints in order get Trump. Max Boot is the most cartoonish, self-defeating example, but the problem is more general than that. We used to talk about public choice theory and the problem of agencies taking on a life of their own with their own agenda; now we lionize career bureaucrats and demand everyone assume that they are just doing their job in good faith. (Side Note: I’ve never bought into the “Obama corrupted this agency or that agency” argument. The FBI is what it always was: J. Edgar Hoover’s political intelligence and intimidation outfit) We used to worry about the scope of the administrative state; now we get upset when Trump exercises his pardon power (which the Constitution vests in him alone) without running it by someone in a basement office at DOJ. I’d rather see Sheriff Joe in jail, but it was revealing that people seemed to think the pardon power effectively belongs to someone else.
If we had the system of government laid down in the Constitution, Trump’s character would be more problematic. Alas, we haven’t had that system here since 1929 (or earlier). As it stands, it’s number 103 on the list things that concern me.
Good Government as Anti-Constitutional Government or Threats: Existential and Otherwise
“So what does concern you?” asked no one at all. Primarily that so many have taken such an anti-Constitutional pose, either because they hate or fear Trump so much or because they really were ok with rule by the administrative state all along. In part, it comes down to which threats you believe are existential and which are not.
Trump is problematic, but our system has remedies for that, the most prominent being impeachment and defunding. Congress has conceded plenty of its prerogatives over the last hundred years to the executive, but in a system like ours that does not assume that good people will always be in charge and depends on checking ambition with ambition, it is hard to fault the executive (any of them really) for taking advantage of what has been freely given by another branch. Absent dropping a nuclear bomb (which seems less and less likely as time goes by), what Trump does can be checked if only Congress was willing.
But Congress doesn’t want to do that because its hard; instead, we are treated to the anti-Constitution spectacle of the executive branch investigating itself, with some wanting to make it so that Trump can’t fire is own subordinate. Let’s be clear why: so that when the inherently political act of impeachment is discussed, Congress can avoid responsibility by pretending to defer to the supposedly apolitical experts. Some see this as necessary because of the unique threat Trump represents, but I see them as modern-day Ropers, willing to cut down all of the laws in order to get at the Devil. Morrison v. Olsen provides no cover here, as that case dealt with a lapsed statute that created an officer controlled by the judicial branch rather than the executive.
We could discuss here that much of what we think of as good, honest government is really an invention of early nineteenth century progressive activists (an ethos most conservatives have bought into, wittingly or not), but that is a topic of another day. What matters here is that the Constitution is not some guarantor of good government; it merely dictates with whom the final word on certain matters is vested. When the question is whether or not to have a criminal investigation, or fire an executive officer, or the like comes up, the only person who gets to have the final word on such matters is Trump, for good or ill. People got upset when Eric Holder said he was Obama’s wingman, but that is actually closer to the original understanding of what the Attorney General’s role was than the current view of the DOJ as some kind of independent agency. People want to purge politics from government, but I’m sorry, politics is how we make decisions in this country. If you want to live somewhere where decisions are made by people unaccountable to public pressure, then go live in a dictatorship. That isn’t to say that I would vote for a president who said he would only prosecute Democrats during his term or something similar, but if people elect someone who makes that promise then that’s what we will have. Again, there are ways of handling that scenario if it ever happens (resignations and refusals to serve, defunding, impeachment, etc.). But to have unelected officials put themselves, their opinions, and their agendas above those of the elected president represents a rejection of the Constitutional order. The Rule of Law, whatever it means, has to at least begin with the word long written down: “[t]he executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Trump abusing the pardon power, for example, may be a violation of the Rule of Law in the abstract, but there are concrete, set in stone ways of dealing with him: impeachment, electoral defeat, etc. If we don’t have the collective political will to do either, then we deserve what we get. It would be the final abandonment of what is left of our Constitutional order (and itself a violation of the Rule of Law) to invent new ways of dispensing with Trump or curtailing his power.
A Christian Perspective
I mentioned we would discuss morality later and here it is: If you were to say that it was important to have men of strong character lead this nation, I would have agreed with you in the past and I still have a preference for such men; now, as I grow in my faith I have become less and less interested in politics. Conservativism has a strain of “American as God’s Chosen Instrument/New Israel” that I have increasingly come to reject, to the extent that I prefer to skip church on the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July so I can miss the calls to rededicate myself to America (and maybe also God). I mean, is the Church universal or its is something that history books 500 years from now will describe as part of an American civic culture that failed? In any event, the need to associate American government with Christian leadership has led many Christians into one of two methods of dealing with politics:
- Effective Disenfranchisement: Refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils. (the David French Method)
- Witness Gambling: Willingness to gamble your otherwise effective witness by either (1.) pretending your candidate is a Christian even if you don’t believe they are, or (2.) hoping that they really are a Christian now and that past performance won’t predict future results. (the Franklin Graham shuffle)
I chose the first method last election, but I am not convinced that it is necessary anymore. If I am right that American is not God’s chosen instrument (at least in the way some think of it), my choice of president has much less gravity. Conceptually, I should be able to vote for someone whose policies are best for the Church in America (for example, by not requiring religious agencies to place children with homosexuals for adoption) even if they personally are not some Christian exemplar. I may be wrong in this and am open to arguments in the comments.
Well, there is my Magnum Opus on why Trump doesn’t both me as much as he otherwise would. There was a discussion in another post about how writers like Mona Charen and Jonah Goldberg don’t necessarily reveal a preference for the established order over Trump simply because they constantly challenge him; that is fair enough as far as it goes, but what you choose to rehash reveals what your priorities actually are. This is related to why I feel that otherwise effective charges of “Whataboutism” ring hollow: the fact that Obama or someone else might have done the same thing is not a complete defense of Trump, but it does make clear that a lot of what he does isn’t new and serves as a call to focus on the fresh or more important outrages of the day (which may very well be caused by Trump but are more often than not the work of his opponents) before doubling back to take care of things that, while wrong, have been accepted in the past.
Published in General
Yes, well, that sounds reasonable, unfortunately Mona doesn’t engage in the conversation — freewheeling or otherwise. I know, I know, people said mean things to her. I’d probably disappear, too, if I got the response she gets.
However, it seems to me the purpose of “freewheeling conversation” is to learn something from each other and maybe, just maybe, change our opinions based on what we’ve learned. But, Mona’s syndicated
embarrassing twaddlecolumn gets deposited here with no possibility of even a civilized response convincing her of anything. It seems to defeat the purpose of Ricochet to keep her on the roster.We don’t need to purge commentators for saying things we don’t want to hear, but Ricochet and other sites hopefully select for people who are good at presenting their points, whatever it is. Trump has made certain commentators lose the handle such that their work has become objectively worse than it once was. Similar things can happen in various contexts.
In The Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy,” we are introduced to the one episode character Frank Grimes. Over the course of the episode, Grimes develops a hatred of Homer; this hatred is somewhat justified by the effect Homer’s actions have on Grimes, even though Homer doesn’t intend for them to be taken in a negative way. Grimes is also infuriated at Homer’s ability to avoid problems through dumb luck compared to the hardscrabble life he has had. At the end of the episode, Grimes does a series of objectively stupid things, including grabbing a live high voltage wire; he does this because grabbing a high voltage wire seems like something Homer would do yet somehow survive; unlike his hypothetical Homer, Grimes dies.
Being a successful professional poker player requires a lot of math. Television makes it seem like it is a bunch of guys staring at each other trying to read each other’s minds (it is partly that), but it is actually mostly doing a lot of statistics in your head to figure out the likelihood of the various hands you can end up with as compared to the value of the pot and the cost you have to pay to stay in to see the next card. If you cannot do this kind of math in your head, you will not succeed as a professional player. Sometimes, no matter how calculated your play is, you will take a “bad beat.” This can happen because a player ends up winning the hand holding cards that no one in their right mind would have played given the circumstances that occurred earlier in the hand. Sometimes, bad beats cause players to go “on tilt,” which means they start playing more aggressively than is warranted in an attempt to, in a sense, avenge the loss. This leads to unforced errors that only compound the problem.
continued below …
Trump has caused some commentators to become Frank Grimes playing poker on tilt. I mentioned Max Boot by name in the original post. If he wrote for Ricochet, I would not want that to continue; this isn’t because he doesn’t like Trump but because he has descended into self-parody. I don’t read Mona Charen a lot so I won’t comment on her writing more generally; however, I found her most recent post to be poorly conceived in an objective sense for three reasons:
Now, Ms. Charen isn’t responsible for the commentary of others that came before her, but I would expect a professional to understand that her post would come off as a desperate attempt to find something, anything wrong with the visit unless she brought her A game. As the comments on the post developed, it became clear that she had not.
I’m not trying to be particularly harsh here. This is something that happens to everyone. It has happened to me on Ricochet and elsewhere, but commentating isn’t my job.
I nominate this for best comment of 2019 (so far).
I admire the candor of anyone who just comes out and says, why yes, why shouldn’t we get the Mona-Charen types kicked out of our movement? That said, about those Birchers…
Earlier I mentioned that here on Ricochet,
To assert, as the Birchers did, that
is to veer pretty hard toward lizard-people-Illuminati-FEMA-camps territory. New World Order, for heaven’s sake! Might as well be a Taco Bell commercial!
Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove is a spoof on the Birchers, which fits neatly in with the title of the OP.
I hear you. How much does Ricochet select for people who are good at presenting their points? That’s an interesting question in its own right. As often happens on social media, well-presented but somewhat offbeat points may languish while more poorly-presented but red-meat content gets the attention. Ricochet ought to do less of this than other social media, but less ain’t none, and I don’t suppose there’s reason to suspect it ever would be.
That said, I suspect that having content like Mona’s serves more as a peg or an anchor than it does novel content in its own right. It’s no secret that shifting the Overton Window in one’s favor is a common political goal. Trump supporters, for example, have an interest in shifting the Overton Window Trumpwards. This can be done by widening the Overton Window to include more pro-Trump content, something the Ricochet forum has already done (members complain the podcasts haven’t been as successful in this, but the forum and the podcasts are fairly distinct). It can also be done by narrowing the Overton Window to exclude content insufficiently supportive of Trump. Simply having content like Mona’s here sets an anchor point against this exclusion.
I spend little time thinking of Trump himself, either good thoughts or bad. He’ll do what he’ll do as President, and life will go on. I do spend more time thinking about what happens if people decide the most expedient way to shift the Overton Window in their favor is by drastically narrowing it. My suspicion is that Overton Windows can either be low and broad, or piled high and deep, and of those two, I’d rather have low and broad.
Would it be nice to have better pegs? Sure. But in the choice between the pegs they have and no pegs at all, why people would stick with the pegs they have is at least somewhat understandable.
I think that the fourth paragraph of Mitt’s Column for the Washington Post hits the name on the head about character. Mitt writes,
“To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow ‘our better angels.’ A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”
I would like to see the math that was used to arrive at this conclusion. And I would like to see whether Mitt’s research study separated presidential policy from presidential personal behavior.
Whether or not the Illuminati is made up of lizard people is unknowable absent a more robust program of post-mortem dissection and examination.
Yeah, Mitt produced some first rate twaddle there. You’d think we were anointing a president — not down and dirty democratically electing one.
I’m equally mystified by:
I was referring to the notion that a presidency shapes the public character of a nation* (to a degree), not the whole of Mitt’s complaints, which I’m reasonably confident even most of the President’s supporters have conceded are truly Trump’s flaws.
But, we’ve done this dance a million times on the internet. Trump supporters admit he is flawed but is doing good, conservative things for the country. Trump critics defend one of their own, because “character is destiny” or something.
It seems one side is willing to concede to the reality of the man, but the other refuses to concede that the perpetual repetition of what we already know to be true (and have conceded) isn’t helpful to the conservative cause (and, indeed, may be giving aid and comfort to the Left’s efforts to overturn the election). Criticizing the critics isn’t allowed. Yet Trump supporters are the sycophants. Got it.
*I disagree — vigorously. The education establishment, the news and entertainment media, the opinion shapers — these shape the public character of the nation. Ours has been shaped by the Left lo these many decades (with either obliviousness or fecklessness from the Right) and Donald Trump is a thumb in the Left’s eye (some of its own medicine), not the cause of its coarsening. Not only is Mitt placing way too much importance in the person of the presidency with this notion — it’s just twaddle. IMHO.
I often think the same.
So we’re all tired of it. Let’s call the whole thing off.
Or it’s possible to believe that a habit of bullying the insufficiently loyal into silence because they’re “too repetitive” (or whatever other excuse might be used if they were less repetitive) is also bad — even worse, perhaps, than a few people repeating information we already know to be true.
It’s not that criticizing the critics isn’t allowed. But how much of the criticism they’re getting is real criticism, and how much of it is simply pressure to shut them and theirs up?
Charen’s threads here have become an overused example at this point, but do you realize how little of the reaction she gets is substantive criticism rather than rude emoting of the “boo, why are you still here?” variety? Charen is successful enough in her own right that Ricochet no longer carrying her column would be little skin off her nose. But it sure would send a message to Ricochet members capable of writing Trump-skeptical content that there’s no point to doing it here anymore — no matter how interesting, respectful, or gentle the content. After all, it’s not like the “boo, why are you still here?” emoting has been all that great at discerning Trump criticism that’s in poor form from Trump criticism that’s in good form. It tends to all get treated alike, sadly.
Why not just turn comments off under her posts. Less “trouble” but the clicks generated would quickly drop to two. (Wanna guess which two?)
Thank goodness only one side of the TrumpWars has people capable of writing posts that make everyone else go “Oh, no. Not this [expletive] again.”
Just to reiterate, @jasonobermeyer‘s post was a welcome exception to the pattern.
There you go again. “Insufficiently loyal.”
/thump, thump… Testing, testing…Is this thing on??
I don’t know, is it?
If you don’t see why a gal who was never a NeverTrumper would perceive that there is a faction of pro-Trumpers attacking others for being insufficiently loyal, perhaps it would help to re-read your own words?
If you’re not complaining about insufficient loyalty with these (and similar) words, then what are you doing?
Simple. I’m not asking for sycophantic loyalty. I’m asking the Trump critics to consider silence as an alternative to repeating things we already know and have admitted about the man because 1) there’s already an abundance of criticism directed at him every stinking day, and 2) there are people within and without the government doing everything they can to undo the 2016 results, while 3) he’s actually getting more conservative things done than either of the two previous Republican presidents.
As I’ve said before, if you can’t say anything nice…. but, especially, if your criticism gives aid and comfort to conservatives’ enemies — try not saying anything at all — for a change.
Sounds like “shut up you traitors” to me.
Well, at least that’s clear.
I didn’t use the word “traitors,” (“sycophants” and “cult of personality” gets used regularly for Trump supporters) nor do I think that’s the case. I’m more inclined to see the Jonahs and Mitts as foolish and self-important — as if we all need to know how awful they think Trump’s character is. We know already. Ad nauseam.
But, yes, I admit to an element of “shut up” — I just prefer to finesse it a little in my amended “if you have nothing nice to say…” phraseology.
Questions for Trump critics:
What about criticizing his policies? Is that fair game? I’ve been personally up to my eyeballs with added paperwork and costs due to the tariffs alone. The way the tariff costs are back-billed, sometimes charged up to 60 days after the original parts invoice, I have no idea what my parts costs are in real time. And the on-again / off-again nature of the tariff threats means that a massive part of the manufacturing economy in the US has pulled its horns in over the last 6 months – people don’t know how to plan for what may or may not be coming, and are back to hedging. We saw a collapse in our sales over the 3rd and 4th quarters, and part of that was due to tariff confusion and uncertainty.
And while some credit may be due to Trump over various regulatory freezes, especially of the Obama Hail Mary shots of the end of his term, Trump has done almost nothing to actually restructure or repeal many other regulations – mostly what’s been happening has been of the low-hanging fruit and fiddling at the margins, and the rest has been either rhetorical or ineffectual. And then the NAFTA crud has made everyone involved with imports or exports have to crash re-learn their entire catalogs of incoming and outgoing products and declarations.
Personally, I’d like to see torpedoed any further discussion of Trump’s “character”, let’s get into the meat of what he has and has not done, because a lot of what he did in 2017 was undone by different actions over 2018.
Yet you use the very same phrase that the Constitution uses to define treason:
These word choices do an excellent job implying you think those who won’t shut up about Trump’s flaws are traitors to the right.
As for your questions:
1. There is no such thing as an overabundance of criticism, so long as it is based on facts. I will gladly concede that large amounts of Trump criticism do not meet this criterion.
2. Yes.
3. Yes.
4. I don’t have an aim, which is why I don’t bother contributing to most Trump discussions. Complaining about or complementing the president has as much impact as commenting on the weather: it will be what it will be.
That being said, I think discussing an apparent gap in what conservatives say ought to be valued and what they actually do value can be interesting. Unfortunately, the discussion always seems to turn into “but Hillary!” “But Hillary!” does not transform Trump’s degenerate character into something praiseworthy; it merely offers a justification for preferring his degeneracy to hers.
Hard to answer. Much of it — particularly, from the left — is wrong and counterproductive. Same goes for the Max Boots and Jenn Rubins of the world whose only way of evaluating an action is whether or not Trump supports it.
I am, generally, glad to see cogent criticism of the president, especially from those whom he might listen to.