The Good Tsar

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, April 28, 2025

 

The genuflecting yellowbellies of the Cowards’ Caucus in Congress—which is to say, Republicans as a whole—have groveled mightily in seeking to curry favor with Donald Trump and have, subsequently and ironically, done Trump no favors.

 

John Thune, the Republican leader in the Senate, seems determined to follow the worst examples set by his predecessor, Mitch McConnell. McConnell is and has been a good and effective public servant, striking a careful balance between the honorable and the ruthless, and all of that will, in the historical account of his career, amount to approximately squat—after January 6, when McConnell could have led a handful of Republican senators in an effort to permanently bar Trump’s reentry into the White House, the gentleman from Kentucky flinched, fearful of irritating … the very people who had just sacked the Capitol. McConnell demurred in the interest of party unity—which is to say, in the interest of keeping the Republican Party in a bear hug with the sort of people Sen. McConnell rightly holds in contempt and that no self-respecting political party would want.

 

A modestly successful U.S. president gets to do one big thing (Barack Obama and health care), while a very successful one gets to do two (Ronald Reagan and the revivification of the U.S. economy and victory in the Cold War). Unless they go on to be president (as Lyndon Johnson did), Senate majority leaders, even those of durable tenure, get stuck with one-line obituaries. I like Mitch McConnell and wish that his obituary would read otherwise, but what it’s going to say is: “He choked.”

 

Sen. Thune hasn’t yet died from the political chicken bone that seems to be lodged in his throat, but he is looking a lot like the next choking victim. His fellow senators and his colleagues in the House have also been making a brand new round of gagging sounds since Trump secured the GOP nomination in 2024.

 

It is difficult to imagine what it would take for a Republican in our time to say, “Too much.” How about headlines reading, “Matt Gaetz ethics report says his drug use and sex with a minor violated state laws,” notable for the absence of the word “alleged.” Everybody knows—and knew—what Matt Gaetz is. But Donald Trump tried to make him attorney general, and right-wing rube-milkers such as Dan Bongino (the deputy director of the FBI, who once aspired to become an FBI agent but failed to realize that ambition) were buddy-buddy with Gaetz and defended his nomination in the usual Q-Anon-derived terms (“There’s a plan, trust it”) until the word came down to change their tunes. The Trump-bro universe was all in for Gaetz, but Senate Republicans balked.

 

It wasn’t exactly a profile in courage, but it was something.

 

(Speaking of such profiles, the 2025 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award went to Mike Pence, the former vice president and self-abasing Trump enabler whose last-minute rodential backstroke away from the foundering USS Trump in January 2021 suggests to me that he ought to have been given a prize named instead for Sen. Edward Kennedy, who knew something about swimming away from sinking vessels to save a political career from drowning.)

 

There is a kind of cursus dishonorum for Trump sycophants named to high-level positions: The president celebrates them as the best and the smartest and most successful men and women in their respective fields and then decides, after he fires them or they leave in disgust—that they were actually stupid and weak, or that they were minor figures far removed from his encompassing gaze. (Remember Trump’s take on Steve Bannon’s exit? “I didn’t know Steve” until relatively late in the game.) The problem for Trump and his circle is that the president, a profoundly insecure and hilariously vain buffoon, prefers to hire incompetent people—because competent people are a threat. Matt Gaetz can be … whatever it is he is … all day, and Trump can live with it. But Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO who served as secretary of state in the first Trump administration and wasn’t shy about presenting Trump with unpleasant facts of difficult cases? Unbearable.

 

(It runs both ways, of course: Tillerson’s eventual estimate of Trump was that he is a “moron,” which is in harmony with the views of other Trump-administration veterans such as H.R. McMaster, who reportedly described Trump as an “idiot,” a “dope,” and a “kindergartner”; Steven Mnuchin, who concurred on “idiot”; Gary Cohn, who called the president “dumb as s—t”; etc. Of course, the difference is that these Trump Show veterans are, by and large, correct. But it cannot have been news to these men of the world what sort of man they were going to work for.)

 

The amusing fact is that the sort of people Trump courts are either too addled or too vain to really appreciate that when Donald Trump asks you to go to work for him, he isn’t paying you a compliment. He is indicating that you seem like you’d make a good lackey and that you do not have enough brains or guts to be a threat to his delicate little ego, which is always balanced precipitously on the brink of disaster like the scoop atop a wobbly toddler’s ice-cream cone in July.

 

What Trump requires in a nominee is some combination of stupidity, weakness, low character, personal corruption, and, most importantly, lack of essential qualifications for the post in question. And so his administration is running aground under the combined incompetence of Pete Hegseth, who is not stupid but is a weak man of low character and entirely unqualified to serve as secretary of defense; Hegseth’s fellow Fox News figure and résumé-inflator Janette Nesheiwat; conspiracy kook Kash Patel and his conspiracy kook deputy, the aforementioned Dan Bongino; conspiracy kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; conspiracy kook Tulsi Gabbard; weirdo mall ninja Kristi Noem; addled crackpot Peter Navarro; television quack Mehmet Oz; Kelly Loeffler, who is married to the CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange and has the world’s luckiest timing; Florida goofus Pam Bondi, who might as well get an honorary degree from Trump University; madcap billionaire dope Howard Lutnick, whose family is apparently cashing in on the Trump-inflated crypto craze; Trump’s fellow pro-wrestling figure Linda McMahon; Real World veteran Sean Duffy (“Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” the White House literature boasts); feckless Putin enthusiast Steve Witkoff, etc.

 

What is important to understand is that Trump does not elevate these people in spite of the fact that they are out of their depth, stupid, corrupt, and unqualified, but because they are out of their depth, stupid, corrupt, and unqualified.

 

Here’s Trump in his own words:

 

You’ll find that when you become very successful, the people that you will like best are the people that are less successful than you, because when you go to a table you can tell them all of these wonderful stories, and they’ll sit back and listen. Does that make sense to you? OK? Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you. Do you understand that?

 

Sen. Thune and his Republican colleagues had an opportunity to prevent many of these people from being appointed to high office, but they chose not to—and one can’t help but wonder why. Simple cowardice explains 97 percent of it, of course—no need to overcomplicate things. There was a belling-the-cat problem (nobody wanted to be the first to oppose a Trump nominee and to risk standing alone—no such heroes in that caucus) on top of the general disinclination to oppose the president and the Fox News-ensorcelled mob, and there is the longstanding Republican problem of utterly imperturbable moral sloth fortified by self-satisfaction, smugness, and subservience to wealth: “corrupt and contented,” as Lincoln Steffens put it in his eternally relevant phrase.

 

There is also the problem of the “good tsar,” the wise and pious ruler who is forever being failed but who cannot himself fail. If you believe—as countless generations of bark-at-the-moon primitives and many modern Republicans do—that political leaders are raised by God and whose will is therefore the will of God, at least at some viceregal level, then it is very difficult to face the incompetence, stupidity, corruption, laziness, or madness of the king square-on. And so you have to tell yourself a different story: that the tsar is good and kind and holy, but his ministers are self-serving and ineffectual and corrupt.

 

A generation of political analysts and historians once appreciated how seamlessly the “good tsar” school of rhetoric was altered from the imperial era of Russian history to the socialist period and into the Putinist years: “Ivan isn’t so terrible—it’s those terrible ministers giving him bad advice or acting against his wishes.” This is such a deeply rooted facet of Russian political life that there is a name for it: Tsar khoroshiy, boyarie plokhiye (“good tsar, bad bureaucrats”). In Nazi Germany, it was Wenn das der Führer wüsste (“If only the Führer knew!” about this or that problem, then surely he would address it, so it must be the case that his advisers are keeping the worst from him). In political science literature, this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “naïve monarchism.”

 

There’s a wonderful irony in that: Republicans—from leaders in Congress to the rank and file—are so in thrall to naïve monarchism, so convinced that all they need to do is to trust the leader, that they ensure that their tsar is, in fact, surrounded with just the kind of boobs and criminals and n’er-do-wells you can count on to fail the tsar, to keep things from him, to freelance their own crimes and imbecilities and acts of incompetence. Of course, acting with Trump’s knowledge and on Trump’s orders might very well make things worse for even such a feeble miscreant as our secretary of defense, but that is a thought that will never penetrate the thick Republican skull to reach the undersized ball of low-grade mush found therein.

 

As Jonah Goldberg has explained, any effort to make an ideological or philosophical case for Trump is bound to come to sorrow, because Trump not only has no ideology or philosophy but actively holds these things in contempt. As such, the only safe intellectual posture for a sycophant to maintain toward Trump is one that simply says, “I trust Trump.” If Trump is pro-tariff, if Trump is anti-tariff, if Trump supports gun rights and the right to life or is hostile or indifferent toward these, if Trump favors Moscow or … favors Moscow to an almost undetectably reduced degree—whatever it is, the tsar must be good and holy and right. And if he wants some game-show guys and Fox News morning-show hosts running the high affairs of state, then who are we to object?

 

Which is fine and dandy, except that the “we” that matters here most directly is the Senate, which has the power to object and to stop the worst of these idiotic appointments. But Sen. Thune and his Republican buddies cower behind a wall of unfalsifiable nonsense about Trump’s “mandate” and his “instincts” and all the rest of that horsepucky. “Let’s give President Trump a chance to see what he can get done,” Thune told Sean Hannity (who else?) right before the tsar set fire to the economy and the credibility of the U.S. government.

 

Yes, yes—Trump won his election. So did John Thune. We are at a moment when the country urgently requires intelligent and patriotic political leadership, and John Thune refuses to provide it.

 

It is impossible to say what events and challenges the future will bring. But if we cut off the timeline today, what would history have to say about John Thune? Only that, when his country was faced with dire threats to its prosperity, security, and stability, he did nothing. Maybe Thune is a good and decent and patriotic man in his private life, but none of that matters—he refuses to act or even to open his mouth for any purpose other than to swallow another serving of whatever it is Trump happens to be serving today. Qui tacet consentire videtur.

 

I’ll end by addressing the Republican leader directly: Why wait, Sen. Thune? At some point, Trump is going to do something you cannot defend, minimize, or explain away—even such a man as Mike Pence eventually got to that point. They’re going to denounce you and oppose you and call you a traitor, anyway—why not let them do it while you can still do something that matters? If you can’t act like a man and a patriot in the Senate—where you lead the majority party—then what the hell is the use of you?

 

Economics for English Majors

 

So, what was the deal with the gold standard?

 

I’m glad I asked.

 

What is a dollar?

 

There is a silver mine in what is today the Czech Republic in the Valley of Joachim, or Joachimsthal in German. Coins made from that silver were called Joachimsthaler, later abbreviated in German as thaler and then in Flemish as daler. The term was later repurposed for coins used in the Spanish Empire in the Americas, giving rise to our familiar dollar.

 

Under the gold standard, what a dollar was was, at the end, 1/35^th of an ounce of gold. The value of the dollar was fixed to the price of gold at $35 an ounce. There were serious downsides to the gold standard and one big upside, and the downsides and the upside were basically the same thing: Governments cannot create gold reserves by simply declaring them to exist.

 

Unlike a “fiat” dollar—meaning a dollar the value of which is not linked to any physical standard—you cannot simply exnihilate a mountain of gold into existence. What that means is that there isn’t a really good way to do monetary policy, and monetary policy can, in theory, do some useful things. If, for example, you are suffering from a serious recession, you might want to devalue your currency a little bit in order to goose spending and to make your exports more attractive in overseas markets. The cranky old libertarian in me very much wants you to know that another way of saying that is: Governments can change consumer behavior by artificially lowering the standard of living of citizens and devaluing their incomes and their savings. You can also, in theory, use monetary policy in the opposite direction, reducing the money supply to fight rising prices when you are experiencing what is generally known (but not entirely accurately) as “inflation.”

 

One of the nice things about a gold standard is that, while the government can still devalue the currency, it kind of has to tell the truth about it. That $35/ounce gold we had in 1971 was up from $20/ounce when Franklin Roosevelt came into office and devalued the dollar to try to combat the Great Depression. (Which did not work.) A gold standard may not protect you from inflation, but it does protect you, in theory, from sneaky inflation.

 

In gold terms, the dollar has lost approximately 99 percent of its value since 1971, with gold’s price rising from $35 an ounce to about $3,330 an ounce as of this writing. Of course, there’s no existentially necessary reason to choose gold as your standard of value. That is one of those things that has evolved organically over the course of human history. Gold has some intrinsic value (beyond jewelry and decoration, it has industrial uses), it doesn’t rot, it isn’t difficult to store, and, while the supply is not fixed, it is relatively stable.

 

The gold standard did not prevent all sorts of economic problems, from financial panics to depressions. But the real problem with a gold standard is that you only have a gold standard for as long as the politicians say you have a gold standard, and, as U.S. history (and other countries’ histories) has shown, the gold “standard” wasn’t always a standard—it was subject to political pressure and revision.

 

But, still—doesn’t that evaporation of almost the entire value of a dollar over the course of a few decades ($1 worth of gold in 1971 would cost about $100 to buy today) seem like a bad sign? I’m not a gold-standard guy—I’m a fiscal-continence-low-debt-and-good-governance guy—but I can see the appeal. Everybody wants a one-step policy solution—a silver bullet, or, in this case, a golden one.

 

Words About Words

 

As you might guess, I was always a great admirer of William Safire’s “On Language” column. It is funny how things stick in the memory: I have a vivid memory of sitting on a particular sofa reading a version of one of his columns in Readers’ Digest in 1985 (you couldn’t get the New York Times in Amarillo), and I can still see the room, how the furniture was arranged, that the woman who owned the house had a kind of mania for brass furnishings and doo-dads, etc.

 

But mostly what I remember about that column is that I didn’t believe a word of it.

 

Still don’t:

 

THE KREMLIN MAY be expert at encrypting missile telemetry, but it is helpless to decipher the latest American college slang. Our own Defense Intelligence Agency, monitoring all calls home for money, is wondering if some pernicious wax has clogged up its all-hearing “Big Ear.” Post-teen lingo is changing too fast for this generation of computers, and the harried snoopspooks cannot hack it.

 

I have broken the code. Thanks to submissions to the Nonce Word Institute from moles on a dozen college campuses, some of the communications between yesterday’s wimps and today’s squids can now be analyzed. A new generation’s attempt to keep its data from prying older eyes is thus thwarted.

 

Consider the locution that has stumped code breakers from Langley to Dzerzhinsky Square: “The rents will pay for the shwench’s za.”

 

The key, or pony, supplied to the N.W.I. by Jon Pelson of Dartmouth College, is the elimination of first syllables in post-teen speech, which I refer to as ’guage. As we learned last year, ’rents are “parents,” with only the vestigial last syllable pronounced. This technique is used on verbal phrases as well as single words, as in the clipping of parental units to units. (To further clip this phrase to ’nits would be the work of a louse.) Let us use the same key to unlock the meaning of ’za. What is the food most consumed by college students that ends with the syllable ’za? Pizza, of course, with the ’za pronounced as “tsuh,” somewhat similar to the first sound in “Dzerzhinsky,” though bereft of its chicken fricative.

 

Wonderful writing. Preposterous nonsense.

 

If any young person in 1985 ever spoke the sentence “The rents will pay for the shwench’s za” in the wild—organically, unironically, and prior to the publication of Safire’s column—I will eat my favorite J.W. Brooks hat. Didn’t happen. Safire was being had by his supposed informant, and probably didn’t mind that too much. People like to tell stories—I was surprised to learn that a great many of the sordid tales that appear in places such as Slate’s pornographic advice columns or the old Penthouse Forum are not, as I had long assumed, simply made up by the editors and columnists. They are made up, of course, but many of them are made up by people who send them in as though they were the genuine article. We really are a storytelling species.

 

One of our favorite stories is “These Damned Kids Today.” I like that story, too: These damned kids today are the worst. And not to summon Jonah Goldberg by throwing a bunch of his favorite chum into the water, but, while there is a pronounced tendency to exaggerate the differences between generations, including when it comes to language and slang, there are real differences, too, which tend to be associated more with technological change than with shared experiences of historical events. The kids who grew up with the internet really are different from those of us who grew up without it, and the poor bastards who grew up with smartphones from infancy are just … you know, this is a family publication.

 

The closer you are to a dividing line, the sharper it looks. The median Saturday Night Live cast member isn’t a youngster, but is significantly younger than your favorite correspondent. It is notable how irritated those cast members get with youth culture that is only a few years behind them on the cultural timeline. I have Evangelical friends who are exquisitely attuned to small sectarian differences in the Protestant world (many of them now reject the adjective “Protestant,” too), real Judean People’s Front vs. People’s Front of Judea stuff. Whereas my own Catholic sensibility wants to sigh and conclude, uncharitably, that one kind of heretic is very much like another. I am just old enough to have experienced a world in which Baptist vs. Methodist was a pretty big deal in my part of Texas. (“Catholic” was pretty much a synonym for “Mexican,” and non-Hispanic Catholics were treated as a real curiosity.) You say, “What in the skibidi sigma is happening here?” and I hear something about hepcats and swingin’ and jive and whatnot.

 

The most obvious difference—and by difference I mean deformity—associated with the smartphone generation has to do with the psychological elimination of private life. Young people tend to be performers in all generations, but performance as a kind of unchangeable default setting in social life is … I don’t know—hell? Something very like it? The ultimate purpose of all jargon is exclusion, whether we’re talking about a shibboleth (a local pronunciation that marks you as a member of a tribe), Mandarin (originally a court version of Chinese that marked one as a member of the Ming Dynasty administrative class), or youth slang. The current exaggerated youth-culture mandate to be a performer inevitably intensifies that.

 

So while I very much doubt that any Reagan-era youngster actually said, “The rents will pay for the shwench’s za,” it is easier to imagine a similarly ridiculous equivalent being observed in the wild today. And, of course, social media gives us a more comprehensive and encompassing instrument for such observation than we have ever had before, whether we want it or not.

 

In Other Wordiness …

 

From the comments:

 

It is nice to read one of KW’s otherwise interesting editorials without having to listen to a nearly endless run of useless and annoying ad homonym diatribe.

 

Two thoughts about that:

 

1.     Homonym is a homophone for hominem, but not a homonym for hominem, much less a synonym for hominem.

2.     Don’t come into a French restaurant and complain that there’s no chop suey on the menu.

 

And Furthermore …

I’m so disappointed Pete Hegseth’s leaked phone number isn’t 588-2300—sad days for the empire.

 

In Closing

 

Pope Francis had his detractors in conservative-leaning Catholic circles, me among them. But he is a man who gave his life to serving God and the church, with a special emphasis on the poor. And I write “is a man” rather than “was a man,” because, when it comes to the most important question, I believe what he once believed and now knows. Whatever errors he carried with him have (I am very much inclined to believe) been left behind forever on the far side of a chasm that could not be crossed by any of us poor creatures if not for the One who built a bridge for us out of His own body.

 

A man who becomes a priest—to say nothing of a pope—puts his soul in special peril: What Francis taught and did matters; he was playing at a table where the stakes are high. (If I get something very wrong, I just publish a correction and feel grumpy for a couple of days.) I trust that Francis is now in a much happier state than we, his surviving critics, are, and I hope that he will, having a blissful eternity to get around to it, put in a good word for me.