By Nick Catoggio
Friday, December 08, 2023
There are two Republican primaries happening, not one,
wrote Tim
Miller of The Bulwark this past summer. There’s the
fantasy primary in which right-wing donors and conservative legacy media obsess
over whether Ron DeSantis is outpolling Nikki Haley, or vice versa, and how the
latest Potemkin
debate might affect that.
And then there’s reality, in which Trump
leads by 48.3 points.
It’s embarrassing that a fantasy primary would exist in
parallel to a real one, but that fantasy serves a purpose, Miller noted. It
reassures traditional Republicans that there’s still a place for their kind in
a party now led
by capital-A Authoritarians and populated by the lowercase-A variety.
Normies may be a minority on the right in 2023, but their continued support is
crucial. The GOP can’t win without them.
One can view Kevin McCarthy’s elevation to the
speakership as a fantasy in the same vein. If you’re the sort of voter who
worries about the party becoming something qualitatively different and ominous
under Trump, all you had to do for the past five years was remind yourself that
a guy on the cover of Young
Guns was nominally a leader of the GOP.
The modern Republican coalition has always required a
healthy fantasy life to hold itself together. Those 20-plus women who’ve
accused Trump of sexual conduct? Liars, all of them. The 90-plus felony charges
that have been filed against him? Baseless, all of them.
The weirder Trump gets, the more robust the fantasies
need to be in order to soothe normies and keep them in the fold. What else are
the moronic conspiracy theories around January 6—it was a false flag by antifa
or the FBI, or by antifa and the FBI—but an attempt to sow
doubt among voters so that they won’t hold the insurrection against Trump next
fall?
The latest hard reality for right-wing media is a raft of
inconvenient reporting about Trump’s
illiberal plans for a second term. He craves
“retribution” against his enemies; his cronies are recruiting yes-men
for important
government positions to exact
that retribution; even rumblings about using the military in, shall we
say, unconventional
ways have been heard. “This is all from his own mouth and/or from his
close allies or his advisers,” the New York Times’ Maggie
Haberman recently stressed. It’s not left-wing fanfic, in case the
occasional public vows from the candidate to root out “vermin”
haven’t made that clear.
Traditional Republicans won’t be comfortable voting for a
man whose autocratic ambitions are overt. Even lowercase-A authoritarians,
nagged by a vestigial sense that such things are un-American, might pause at
the prospect. The task for right-wing media between now and next November will
be to construct a new fantasy for those voters that the talk about Trump
wanting to be a dictator is much ado about nothing.
It’s already begun.
***
The parallel reality of the presidential primary reflects
a parallel reality in right-wing media. There are “respectable” outlets aimed
at mainstream America that seek to reassure average voters that the GOP is
still a normal party, or at least more normal than the Democrats are. Fox News
and the Wall Street Journal (any Murdoch property, really) are
obvious examples.
Then there are the post-liberal populist outlets that
seek to reassure the grassroots that the GOP isn’t the normal
party that it was before Trump. Tucker, Steve Bannon’s podcast, Gateway
Pundit: That’s where you go for “war” talk and conspiratorial fantasies
that Fox refuses to provide. (Well,
usually.)
The dichotomy between the two isn’t so much “wine track”
versus “beer track” as “beer track” versus “meth track.” And as you might
imagine, the two tracks approach the topic of a potential Trump autocracy
differently.
The meth track is all-in:
“I’m down for a Trump dictatorship,” Grace Chong,
the COO of Bannon’s “War Room” outfit, recently declared. That will be the
unspoken ethos of the meth track throughout the campaign, no doubt, although as
the election nears I expect they’ll become more circumspect about admitting it
publicly. Capital-A Authoritarians understand how chatter like that risks going
viral and spooking the lowercase-A cohort. Team Trump has been keen to distance
him from the sinister plotting that New Right institutions have
undertaken in his name and Bannon lately has sounded
grumpy about Trump being asked to address the subject in interviews.
There’ll be plenty of time to talk openly about a Trump
dictatorship once he’s been reelected and returned to office; it’s easier to
ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, as the saying goes. Until then,
broadcasters and publishers in the meth track will wink at the idea and speak
in fashy euphemisms about “knowing what time it is” and “doing what must be
done” or whatever. They won’t deny their autocratic intentions—their audience
wouldn’t like that—but neither will they confirm them too visibly.
The more respectable commentators of the beer track will
happily deny having autocratic intentions of their own. More importantly,
they’ll deny that Trump has autocratic intentions—or, if he
does, that he stands any realistic chance of acting on them successfully.
Again, the point of the beer track is to soothe normie voters about the state
of the Republican Party. From now until Election Day, their task will be to
persuade the persuadables that a second Trump term would be less dangerous to
America than a second Biden term.
And they’re not waiting for him to clinch the nomination
before starting that project.
“I don’t think in a second term Trump would have much
luck even if he tried to drive the country toward dictatorship,” Brit
Hume said earlier this week on (where else?) Fox News. “He’s more
likely to drive the Republican Party into defeat at the hands of Joe Biden than
he is to drive the country toward dictatorship.”
Another Foxie, Bret
Baier, conceded in an interview with Hugh Hewitt that Trump has said
“troubling” things on the stump this year. But no worries: “We saw four years
of Donald Trump. Were there issues that crossed lines? Yes, they raised all
kinds of questions. But did people for the most part live their lives and were
there checks and balances? Yes, there were.”
On Thursday Baier repaid the favor by hosting
Hugh Hewitt as a panelist on his Fox News evening show. When the
subject of a Trump dictatorship came up, Hewitt scoffed. “Hysteria has broken
out among our friends in the Beltway media on the left,” he sneered,
referencing the reporting on what Trump is planning. “There won’t be a
dictatorship. Breaking news. It won’t be a tyranny.”
The Wall
Street Journal editorial board chipped in its own
reassurances in a piece published Thursday titled “The Real Trump Risk to
Republicans.” The “real” risk turns out not to be power grabs or invoking the
Insurrection Act or contriving an excuse to remain in office when his term runs
out in 2029, it might surprise you to learn. The real risk is that he won’t
keep his promises on cutting spending:
Mr. Christie chided his Republican
rivals for failing to take on the former President directly, which is true to
some extent. But the former New Jersey Governor’s warnings that Mr. Trump is a
threat to the republic won’t persuade GOP voters who remember Democrats saying
the same in 2016.
The more potent attacks during the
debate were on his record as President. Ms. Haley gamely noted that he added $9
trillion to the national debt in four years, “and we’re all paying the price of
that.” Mr. Trump spent like a Democrat on domestic programs, and there’s little
reason to think he would show spending restraint during a second term.
“We think American institutions are strong enough to
contain whatever designs Mr. Trump has to abuse presidential power,” the
editorial breezily concludes, blissfully oblivious to the fact that a motivated
coterie of proto-fascists have anticipated that problem and are working
very hard to solve
it in advance.
It’s not just Murdoch media that’s rushing to soothe
jittery voters as major news organizations go about exposing Trump’s plans.
At The Messenger, Joe
Concha assured readers on Thursday that hysteria about a Trump
autocracy is old wine in new bottles, little more than scare tactics from the
left to blunt the decline in Joe Biden’s pitiful polling. “We’re told democracy
is at stake. It’s the most overplayed song on the political dial,” he
confidently declared.
It can’t happen here. Ignore the fact that Trump tried to
make it happen here less than three years ago.
***
Many of the themes of the coming campaign in respectable
right-wing media to convince Americans that Trump poses no threat are apparent
in the quotes above. We’ll see them in print and on the air many times before
Election Day.
It’s all academic because he can’t win. He
can, though. If the election were held today, national polling indicates he
would.
Democrats have cried “wolf” about a Trump autocracy
before. That’s true, and it’s also true of Never Trump conservatives
like me. Guess what: The
wolf was real. If Mike Pence had capitulated to pressure from Trump on
January 6, it’s anyone’s guess what America would look like today. In
beer-track conservative media, the insurrection essentially doesn’t exist.
Insofar as it does, there’s no information to be gleaned from it about how
Trump might behave in a second term.
Our institutions will hold next time because they held
last time. Again, Trump’s lackeys have already begun preparing to
hollow out those institutions and then to co-opt them after he returns to
power. They learned a hard lesson in 2020 that coup attempts are as successful
as the willingness of apparatchiks in key positions to assist them. Somehow,
the people currently minimizing the threat he poses failed to learn the same
lesson.
He won’t be a literal dictator. This is also
true, strictly speaking. Even a pessimist as staunch as me finds it hard to
imagine Congress being dissolved and Trump promulgating new laws in the form of
dank memes on Truth Social.
But so what? There’s a solid chance that his party will
control both houses of Congress in 2025. If they do, he won’t need dictatorial
power. Cowardly Republican lawmakers will rubber-stamp his plans as needed. And
if they can’t muster the votes for him in certain situations, he’ll act on his
own and claim dubious
extant legal authority to get his way.
Our friend David
French recently pointed out that Trump could shatter the norm that
prevents presidents from using soldiers to keep order in American cities while
remaining well within the bounds of federal law. If tanks roll on Broadway, his
right-wing apologists will remind us that Congress gave him that power via the
Insurrection Act, and they’ll be right. Would it make you feel better in that
moment to know that Trump’s actions weren’t “dictatorial” in the technical
sense of the word?
The core fallacy in all of these rationalizations about
the allegedly low risk of a second Trump term is that he’s the same guy as he
was in his first term. He didn’t do anything too nutty
policy-wise back then. Why would we think he’d do something nutty policy-wise
next time?
The answer: Because he’s not precisely the same guy as he
was in his first term.
By and large, he is that same guy.
That’s how Democrats and Never Trumpers were able to see the wolf coming the
first time. Trump is Trump is Trump. You don’t need a degree in political
history to recognize his type.
But he’s worse now than he was then. He’s old, and age
takes away some self-restraint. He’s terrified about going to prison and
enraged at those trying to send him there. He’s gorged himself for years on
lavish right-wing propaganda about his own greatness and the depravity of his
enemies. He’s cocooned in a thick bubble of slavish yes-men who treat him like
a king. He’s en route to a much more decisive primary victory than he enjoyed
in his first run and presides over a party in which there’s no longer any
meaningful dissent to his leadership.
In 2016, Trump had an actual political program. In this
cycle, his program is personal revenge. Implicitly and eventually explicitly,
the highest purpose of his presidential campaign will simply be to place him
beyond the reach of the law. If he wins on those terms, he’ll interpret it as a
mandate from the people to indulge his “retribution” instincts. A country
willing to hand him a “get out of jail free” card is willing to let him do
anything, he’ll reason—not unreasonably.
And because he’ll be term-limited as president (in
theory!), he won’t care if it turns out that he misunderstood that mandate.
Take it from those of us who spotted the wolf approaching
once before: It’s rabid this time.
To which the beer-track conservative media replies,
“Wolf? What wolf?”
***
Years ago the conservative writer Rod Dreher proposed
something he called “The Law of Merited Impossibility.” It described
left-wingers’ propensity to deny any adverse consequences from their
culture-war policies—and then, if those consequences appeared, to turn on a
dime and insist that their political enemies had it coming. In Dreher’s formulation:
“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”
If Trump becomes president again, we’re destined to get
an extended demonstration of The Law of Merited Impossibility from beer-track
conservative media: A Trump dictatorship will never happen, but when it does,
the right’s enemies will deserve it.
When, not if, he lives down to the expectations I’ve set
for him in this newsletter, not one of the pollyannas mentioned earlier will
admit they were wrong to have downplayed the threat he posed. They didn’t do it
after his first term; why would they start now? None will say they’re sorry
because, truthfully, they won’t be. The core conviction of right-wing media is
that the worst Republican is preferable to the best Democrat. If Trump ends up
behaving in the way I’ve described, that’ll still seem better to them than
having an ancient generic liberal as president.
For the beer-track types like Hume and Hewitt, covering
his second term will be an exercise in rationalizing why the latest
hair-raising action taken by the White House isn’t technically dictatorial,
isn’t all that different from something some Democrat once did if you squint
hard, and/or is lamentably justified morally because it’s for the good of the
country. No matter what he does, be it deploying the military against
protesters, ignoring court rulings, or making Stephen Miller emperor of
California or whatever, the fact that he’ll be acting in the right’s interests
against the left in each case will temper their outrage. They’ll never regret
that he defeated Biden.
And the meth-track types will be thrilled with
all of it, which is no small thing in an industry like right-wing media. You
know how it goes by now: Whatever The People are adamantly for, the
propagandists who serve them must not be against. That
includes Fox, also needless to say.
You know what the most interesting thing is, though,
about mainstream conservative media types asserting that Trump won’t try to
seize power? None of them insist that it would be an unthinkable break with
character for him to do so, as they assuredly would have for any Republican
president in American history to this point.
No one claims that he’s learned his lesson from January 6
and has since reformed. How could they? He babbles about the “rigged election”
of 2020 to this day. He’s promised to pardon
a “large portion” of the insurrectionists if he returns to office.
“Respectable” right-wing media personalities are so
fanatic in their partisanship that they can’t resist defending a candidate
whom even they don’t presume to be too civic-minded to try to
end the American experiment if given the chance. Eventually all of their
reassurances to voters that “it can’t happen here” will be in the vein of “he
won’t succeed,” not that he won’t try.
Something like 80 million people, if not more, will end
up voting for that. Given the option of an underwhelming but sane Democrat,
they’ll roll the dice instead on a guy who plainly prefers to govern like a
fascist and has shown some serious intent of purpose in the recent past but
might—might—not be able to build the institutional muscle to make it
happen next time.
This is who we are now, to borrow a point from a memorable essay by Mark Leibovich. Why shouldn’t the influential figures in our media be as contemptible as we are?
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