For My Friends, Everything

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 27, 2024

 

The great consolation for Never Trumpers as we wander the political wilderness is knowing that we’ve been right all along about you-know-who.

 

We can be smug about it at times, admittedly. Whenever some Republican hack scoffs on social media at warnings that Donald Trump will try to overturn this election if he loses, one of us reliably pops up to point out that the very same hack scoffed at the very same warnings before the last election.

 

It’s no wonder that conservatives who stuck with the tribe hate us. The most intolerable phrase in the English language is “I told you so.”

 

I’ve never been much for Never Trump triumphalism, though, because I wasn’t “right all along” about the man and his movement. Each has degenerated much further, morally and civically, than I expected they would in 2016.

 

I didn’t foresee January 6. I didn’t foresee Trump getting indicted (and indicted and indicted and indicted) and his primary polling going up. I didn’t foresee the endless wackaloon road show that right-wing political culture would become. And I certainly didn’t foresee the degree to which conspiracy theorizing would become the dominant mode through which grassroots Republicans engage with reality.

 

I underestimated how bad things would get and I’m not the only one, which I suppose is another consolation of a sort.

 

The latest example of how bad things have gotten on the right is, improbably, Eric Adams.

 

Adams is the Democratic mayor of New York City and, as of Wednesday, the defendant in a federal corruption case. Normally when a prominent left-wing politician is slapped with criminal charges, that’s a moment for right-wing partisans to engage in a bit of smug, triumphalist told-you-so-ing of their own. Adams is ripe for it, too: Before he’d even taken the oath as mayor, some who followed his career predicted he’d land in legal trouble.

 

They told us so.

 

He was all teed up to be the new main character in Republicans’ eternal narrative of how thieving Demon-crats can’t be trusted with power. The timing of his indictment so soon before an election should have made him especially attractive as a target, as rampant corruption in urban centers with large black populations is a core component of the MAGA “rigged election” mythos.

 

Look around social media over the last 48 hours, though, and you’ll find one right-wing populist after another riding to the mayor’s defense. 

 

Why?

 

The enemy of my enemy.

 

The cultiest element of Trump’s very culty political movement is that it has its own internal morality that supersedes traditional morality. That’s why so many creeps, crooks, and kooks are drawn to it. Like any cult leader worth his salt, Trump offers acceptance and community to those who find such things hard to come by in respectable society.

 

MAGA’s internal morality is based on two principles. First, Trump’s needs trump all other interests, political, moral, or legal, without exception. Second, one’s moral worth is measured by how antagonistic one is toward the enemy. No one who hates the right people can be truly “bad,” no matter how badly they’ve behaved in conventional moral terms.

 

Apply those two principles and you can safely predict how populists will react to practically any political development. Like, for instance, the indictment of Eric Adams.

 

One could argue that Trump’s great political need in the Adams case is to discredit Democratic leadership of America’s major cities, but that’s not a very useful argument to make regarding New York. After all, the election won’t be decided there. If Adams were the mayor of, say, Philadelphia, then he’d be an irresistible poster boy for left-wing sleaze.

 

Trump and his fans do see a useful lesson about liberal corruption to exploit in the charges against Adams. But it’s not the defendant who supposedly embodies that corruption—it’s the prosecution.

 

Donald Trump is facing charges in two separate federal criminal cases, one related to his coup attempt and the other to his concealment of classified documents after leaving office. Both cases are languishing as Election Day approaches, but they’ll pick up next year if he loses this race. And the fact that he’s under indictment increases the likelihood of that, of course. Diehard Republicans might not mind having a criminal suspect (who’s already been convicted of state felonies) as president, but plenty of normie voters do.

 

In a test of credibility between Eric Adams and the same Justice Department that’s prosecuting Trump, MAGA Republicans have a moral duty to convince the public that Adams is the more credible of the two.

 

Still, the fact that both the prosecution and the defendant are Democrats makes a firm preference between the two tricky for populists. Cue the second principle: In an important way, Eric Adams has an enemy in common with Trump and his supporters. With the possible exception of Sen. John Fetterman, he’s the most outspoken critic of mass immigration of any major official in his party.

 

For years, Adams has complained about the burden being placed on New York City by migrants who’ve crossed the southern border and then made their way north, sometimes with help from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and sometimes under their own power. That’s a twofer as far as Republicans are concerned. It’s sweet to see a prominent Democrat attacking the Biden administration, but it’s really sweet to see one doing so over Trump’s pet issue in an election year.

 

“Hate” is probably too strong a word to describe how Adams feels about the president and the migrants flowing into New York City, but it’s close enough for MAGA morality. Eric Adams hates the right people.

 

And so, bobbing around in the toxic waste of Twitter this week, you’ll find everyone from conservative Washington Post columnists to right-wing media firebrands to populist “influencers” to MAGA satire sites speculating that Biden’s Justice Department set its sights on Adams to punish him for his heresies about immigration. Trump himself soon picked up the claim, as inevitably happens whenever the grassroots right finds a new conspiracy theory to play with:

What’s stupid about all of this is that, given the screwy politics of this election, I suspect Kamala Harris would have relished having a scandal-free Eric Adams as a campaign surrogate. She’s visiting the southern border today in her latest sweaty ploy to put some political distance between herself and Biden’s record on immigration. Enlisting Adams—a rare Democrat with immigration cred—to vouch for her as a prospective tough-on-the-border president might have helped her build a touch of cred of her own.

 

But Adams isn’t scandal-free, so Harris stayed away from him and the DOJ moved forward. And why shouldn’t it have?

 

Had it decided not to charge Adams for the illicit political reason that it feared being accused of persecuting an anti-immigration Democrat, Republicans would have cried foul about that too and alleged that Biden’s Justice Department didn’t want a major Democratic scandal erupting so close to the election. Merrick Garland and his team were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.

 

Meanwhile, underlying all of these machinations is the right’s devout faith that federal law enforcement in the Trump era slavishly serves Democratic interests by harassing Republicans. The facts contradict that—ask Bob Menendez or Henry Cueller or, yes, Eric Adams—but where facts and belief disagree, the facts must yield. The MAGA effort this week to celebrate Adams as an “independent-minded Democrat” is transparently a scheme to salvage their theory that Trump’s criminal trouble is and can only be the fruit of scandalous partisanship, nothing more. It’s their own idiotic version of “I told you so”: By converting Adams into a de facto Republican, their claim that the DOJ lets politics dictate its charging decisions remains vindicated.

 

Someday, perhaps, they’ll explain how every MAGA Republican in Congress along with “independent-minded Democrats” like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who’ve been chronic thorns in the White House’s side managed to escape the Justice Department’s alleged ideological vendetta. But it won’t be today.

 

Friends and scapegoats.

 

There are other interesting elements to the Adams saga and the right’s reaction to it. One is that the mayor himself has begun insinuating that his stance on immigration had something to do with why he was prosecuted. Watch this video at around 1:10.

 

I assume that flourish was less about ingratiating himself to Republicans than with Adams being desperate for a pretext to remain in office while his case plays out. If he can’t convince New Yorkers that he’s innocent on the merits, maybe he can get them on his side by reminding them that he’s tried to reduce the burden migrants have placed on housing and social services.

 

But one never knows. Adams wouldn’t be the first Democrat to spare himself from criminal consequences by making himself politically useful somehow to Donald Trump. What separates Trump’s cult from every other is that its leader once wielded the power to place his disciples beyond the reach of the law and might soon do so again. Every creep, crook, and kook who joins it does so knowing that, with the right connections and enough obsequiousness, he too might see his legal jeopardy disappear as if by magic.

 

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” That’s how postliberalism works, by design, and never more so than when it’s under the influence of a narcissist as extreme as Trump. A man who divides the world morally between people who like him and people who don’t will judge everyone by whether they’re part of the first group, including foreign leaders. That’s why the hero of Ukraine was obliged to pay his respects at Trump Tower on Friday morning. He didn’t have important policy business that couldn’t wait; he had to reassure Trump, urgently, that he still liked him.

 

If you’re Eric Adams, facing years in prison, it’s suddenly very important that Trump views you as someone who likes him. Accusing the hated Justice Department of persecuting border hawks is a step in that direction. Un-endorsing Kamala Harris for president would be another. And nothing would please Trump more than to see Adams, a Democratic elector in New York, switch his vote from Harris to Trump when the Electoral College votes in December.

 

That vote wouldn’t count, mind you. But even an ineffectual show of loyalty at a moment of high political tension might be enough to assure him a pardon next year. For Trump’s friends, everything.

 

The other intriguing angle to the Adams mess also has to do with the election. It becomes clearer every day that, if Trump loses, this winter’s iteration of “Stop the Steal” will fixate on illegal immigrants supposedly voting en masse for the Democrats. And Adams, in his own small way, is now enabling it.

 

Trump has pushed that nonsense before, you might recall. His tender ego was bruised in 2016 when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton so he claimed that her margin must have been due to millions of migrants casting invalid ballots in states like California to help her run up the score. But the theory never got much traction, partly because victorious Republicans didn’t care about the popular vote and partly because it was never explained why Democrats would have launched a massive illegal-voting scheme in states they were destined to win anyway.

 

The theory seemed poised to come roaring back in 2020, when Trump ended up losing most swing states narrowly. Yet, weirdly, it never did. It remains a strange quirk of the original “Stop the Steal” hysteria that no core villain was ever identified. “Democrats” rigged the election, we were told, but how they did it remained scrupulously obscure. There were ballot “mules” and corrupt election workers and shadowy forces tinkering remotely with voting machines, but things never got much more specific than that. No scapegoat-in-chief was named.

 

Immigrants, the supposed shock troops of Clinton’s popular-vote victory, somehow escaped becoming the scapegoat four years ago. Probably that’s because, between Trump’s halting construction of the border wall and his use of Title 42, he and his fans were required to believe that he had solved the problem of illegal immigration as president. Four years and one protracted border crisis later on Biden’s watch, that logic no longer obtains.

 

So I predict that “Stop the Steal” 2.0, which is already in motion politically, will make voting by immigrants the scapegoat-in-chief. Everything points to it. Some of Trump’s most devoted cronies in Congress are obsessing about it. So is the world’s richest edgelord, an immigrant himself, along with many lesser examples of the species. The political pump has been primed by tales of migrant savages consuming pets in Ohio; surely a cohort as wretched as that won’t think twice about casting illegal ballots. Trump himself is so invested in the possibility that he warned this week of a Democratic plot to mail ballots overseas without verifying the recipient’s citizenship or even their identity.

 

The great conspiracy to let foreigners vote in our elections is so vast that it will even include foreigners who haven’t immigrated!

 

The “illegals stole the election” scam won’t be designed to convince a judge but to cast a political cloud over Harris’ victory so that Republicans in Congress have a pretext not to certify it on January 6. Mike Johnson sounds up to the challenge, assuming he’s still speaker by then. And Republican voters are more than prepared to rally behind anything Trump tells them about the election.

 

Whether Eric Adams realizes it yet or not, his demagoguery about supposedly being indicted for his dissent on immigration plays into the disinformation campaign to come. He’s essentially volunteered as a character witness in the looming trial in the court of public opinion over whether a Harris victory should be trusted as legitimate. Adams’ answer, implicitly, is no: An administration so committed to importing foreigners that it would prosecute him on false pretenses for opposing the policy is surely also an administration that would connive to let foreigners vote to maintain its grasp on power. At a certain point of extreme corruption, the graft turns indiscriminate. 

 

No wonder Trump and MAGA Republicans feel defensive on his behalf. In no time at all, Adams has gone from being an ally on a discrete issue to something like a friend—and in a second term, the law will apply only to their enemies. That pardon is in the bag.