A Question for Republicans

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

The largest factory fuel tank on a Ford Super Duty truck holds 48 gallons. In my neighborhood, the average price of a gallon of diesel over the past month has been $5.60.

 

Do the math. 

 

You see a lot of Trump bumper stickers on those big diesel trucks. And when the total at the pump hits $270 to fill up that truck, I want to ask the gentleman paying the bill:

 

“Do you feel smart?”

 

Writing in the New York Times about “The Good That Can Come from Platner’s Candidacy,” Bret Stephens puts forward the possibility that Americans could move in a salubriously amoral direction when it comes to evaluating political candidates, “on the grounds that we elect or install people in high office to achieve the results we desire, not to serve as paragons of moral rectitude.” At least, he writes, that would represent an improvement over “inconsistent standards selectively applied according to our political bias.”

 

There is something to be said for that approach. One of the problems with our politics is that politicians—especially presidents—are treated as embodiments of the nation, the people, and our values, to such an extent that members of a party feel alienated and humiliated when the other party’s leader occupies the White House.

 

Some years ago, I made a similar argument about Marco Rubio and his various evasions and exercises in political finesse: “Some people demand that a president not only share their values but act as a vessel of them, serving as a kind of moral mascot for the country or even a personification of it. Not me. I just want to know what I can use him for.”

 

I have not entirely repented of that opinion, but Donald Trump’s performance in office has shone a light on the eminently pragmatic aspects of republican virtue or its absence—it can be very difficult to get what you want out of a man with Trump’s low character, and you cannot count on getting it at all. Pragmatism, like any good or useful principle, extends only so far.

 

For the partisan, inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step.

 

There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism: “He isn’t running for pope”—well!—“and I like his policies.” Further pressed, “policies” mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy.

 

Turn around and press the embarrassed Trump cultist on the pragmatic questions—like that $270 fill-up—and he often will retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist.

 

The “woke” phenomenon, by attaching a kind of quasi-religious energy and rhetoric to ordinary progressive clichés, was a great boon to Trump and to Trumpism, providing a spiritualized target of opportunity: the infidel, or, in the case of anti-Trump conservatives such as myself, the heretic. The Democratic embrace (in some quarters) of socialism, in name and in fact, has been similarly fortifying for Trump-era Republicans: To be against is simpler than to be for, and socialism is a simple (and proper) thing to be against.

 

And so when We the People cough up a corrupt imbecile such as Ken Paxton, whom Republicans mean to put into the Senate, or when proximity to Trump debases and degrades such infinitely plastic men as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, the rationalization is: “Well, think of the policies!” But I wonder what those beneficial policies are. The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation? Steve Guest, a servile hack of the sort that gives servility and hackery a bad name, believes it is very important to appreciate the … refinishing of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. Failure to be impressed by this titanic achievement represents an “incurable case of TDS,” he writes, providing yet another (superfluous) example of the fact that writing about “TDS” is a nearly foolproof indicator of brain death.

 

Oh, but they like the policies! Except for the inflation, and the trade chaos, and the war, and the corruption, and the enshrinement of utter incompetence. Republicans evidently do not mind the murder at sea so much—the dead are, after all, Spanish-speaking foreigners nobody has ever heard of. It is something remarkable to have produced an administration corrupt and incompetent enough to embarrass a donkey-souled sack of ham like Dan Bongino—I hadn’t thought that could be done.

 

You can two-step around reality any way you like, but the fact is that right now Republicans are offering both Ken Paxton and $5.60 diesel. And so I repeat the question to my Republican friends:

 

“Do you feel smart?”