Running the Asylum

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, September 12, 2024

 

Nostalgia is a thief and a liar. It steals the pleasure we should take in progress and replaces it with nonsense about the past.

 

If you find yourself pining for days gone by, chances are you’re not pining for an era that was “better.” You’re pining for the simplicity of youth. 

 

I hate nostalgia, especially as a reactionary political gimmick, but we’re all prone to it. This week, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the relative sobriety and judiciousness of … Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.

 

I realize that I’m fooling myself, as nostalgists usually are. After all, from his first moments as a presidential candidate in 2015, Trump was demagoguing illegal immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He landed on America’s political radar in 2011 by tantalizing suckers with lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He’s always been a cretin and a smear merchant with a taste for intimidating critics. If he had displayed a shred of sobriety or judiciousness as a candidate in 2016, he wouldn’t have become a darling of feral populists to begin with.

 

But if you were the sort of partisan conservative who was keen to find reasons to support him that year, you could find them. He chose the very sober Mike Pence as his running mate. He ended up with Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus as a top adviser, both of them old political hands. After he won and began to fill out his Cabinet, he selected sensible figures like business executive Rex Tillerson and retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for top positions.

 

You could also assure yourself that there were alternate power bases in right-wing politics that could and would check him as needed. Rush Limbaugh, the most influential man in populist media, was still a Reaganite. Fox News under Roger Ailes remained a propaganda organ committed to the best interests of the Republican Party more so than of the party’s new leader.

 

Trump would never be sober or judicious himself, but it was conceivable that the political operation supporting him would be.

 

Not anymore.

 

This week, in the span of about 96 hours, a lie about Haitian immigrants killing and eating people’s pets made it from the dregs of online populism to J.D. Vance’s social media account to Trump’s own lips before a national TV audience. When Trump visited New York and Pennsylvania on Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he brought with him a 9/11 truther who recently mused about how the White House might smell with Indian American Kamala Harris living there. And his self-discipline, which has always been terrible, was exposed at Tuesday’s debate as worse than it’s ever been for the second time in less than two months.

 

Any 2016-vintage pretense that the inmates aren’t running this asylum is gone. The man in charge can’t restrain his worst impulses, assuming he ever could, and the people around him seem eager to encourage rather than restrain them.

 

Do Americans realize it? Do they care?

 

Bad impulses.

 

“Trump has decided to pal around with someone whom MTG thinks is too racist,” one of my editors noted on Thursday morning.

 

“MTG,” of course, is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the kookiest, least decorous populist figures in a party that’s chock full of ‘em. Even Greene was offended, though, when MAGA “influencer” Laura Loomer sneered that a White House inhabited by Harris will “smell like curry” and would probably employ a call center with an unintelligible customer satisfaction survey tacked on at the end.

 

“This is appalling and extremely racist,” Greene said of Loomer’s jab, reviving an old beef between them. “It does not represent who we are as Republicans or MAGA.”

 

Doesn’t it? Loomer posted her shot at Harris on September 8; two days later, she was by Donald Trump’s side as he arrived in Philadelphia for debate night. She’s also the 9/11 conspiracy theorist who accompanied him on his visits to New York and Pennsylvania on Thursday. She represents “who we are” as Republicans better than Greene herself does, it seems, if proximity to the party’s leader is any indication.

 

It’s hard for me to believe that anyone in Trump’s 2016 operation would have allowed him to be seen publicly with Loomer, particularly at moments when public scrutiny would be higher than usual.

 

Granted, that might be the nostalgia talking. The candidate of eight years ago would have had no moral misgivings about showing off Loomer on the trail. But as recently as last April, he retained the basic good sense not to offer her a job on his campaign after his aides advised against it. The fact that he’s now willing to treat her like a member of the inner circle at prominent political events feels significant.

 

Maybe it’s another example of his degrading impulse control. He couldn’t resist ranting for an extra hour during what was supposed to be a short, powerful convention speech, Axios noted Thursday. Then, at the debate, he couldn’t resist letting Harris get under his skin repeatedly with calculated barbs, throwing him off-message. Perhaps, egged on by his yes-men, he can also no longer resist including some of the sleaziest, most sycophantic demagogues in his movement in his personal entourage.

 

Or perhaps it’s a calculated choice, a signal by Trump that his second term is all about letting the inmates run the asylum. Loomer, after all, isn’t the only crank he’s fine being seen with. He had dinner with two famous antisemites at Mar-a-Lago around the time he launched his 2024 campaign, and in nine days his VP will follow through on a scheduled event with Tucker Carlson fresh off Tucker’s credulous chat with a guy who thinks Churchill, not Hitler, was the main villain in World War II.

 

Even if you prefer “poor impulse control” to “calculated choice” as an explanation, though, you’re left with two questions. First, what sort of political impulse is Trump feeling that would lead him toward a character like Loomer? And second, what does this extremely poor impulse control portend for how he’ll govern in a second term?

 

“Even by the standards of the first Trump administration, Loomer is a completely unserious political figure, an order of magnitude beyond your generic unserious politician,” congressional expert Matt Glassman argued this week, sounding nostalgic. “She’s operating completely outside of reality. It’s hard to emphasize how concerning it is that she’s in the room.” Imagine who else will be in the room with President Trump in 2025.

 

That said, I think it’s possible to make too much of his association with Loomer. She’s a convenient—frankly, too convenient—scapegoat for what’s wrong with him and his political operation.

 

Semafor reported on Thursday that some Republicans (anonymously, as always) suspect Loomer of having poisoned Trump’s brain with the fake news about immigrants eating cats and dogs. She flew with him to and from the debate, so she had his ear; and in a universe of Too Online populist chuds, hardly anyone is more Too Online than Loomer. She had the means, motive, and opportunity to supply him with the pet-eating anecdote, probably his worst and weirdest moment at the debate. It’s easy to blame her.

 

Easy, but probably wrong. Isn’t there a more obvious, and much more significant, culprit in this case of brain-poisoning?

 

Pet sounds.

 

It wasn’t Laura Loomer who made the “Haitians eating pets” lie break big in right-wing media. It was the Republican nominee for vice president.

 

“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” J.D. Vance tweeted on Monday. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” Some 24 hours later, his running mate was repeating the claim at a debate watched by 67 million people.

 

I don’t have the space to rehash how those “reports” came to be, but Zaid Jilani did a fine job of it elsewhere on the site today and the Washington Post fact-checked it in considerable detail in its own pages. The nutshell version: Racial tensions flared in Springfield last year after a Haitian immigrant killed a local boy in a car accident; in an unrelated incident, a black woman (and U.S. citizen) elsewhere in Ohio was charged with killing and eating a cat; also unrelated, someone took a photo of a black man carrying a dead goose in yet another city in Ohio; and at some point, someone called the police in Springfield to report seeing “a group of Haitian people” who “all had geese in their hand.”

 

Somehow, this all came together into a narrative about the large Haitian migrant community in Springfield catching, killing, and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. That narrative, which ended up in the lap of a U.S. senator who might be next in line to the presidency in a few months, seems to have originated on a white-nationalist social media platform.

 

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, did his best to set the record straight, and the parents of the boy killed in the car accident begged Trump and Vance to stop exploiting their son’s death. But Vance was unbowed, as any good Trumpist must be at moments when shame is appropriate. The rumors of pet abduction may or may not be true, he conceded Tuesday, but the Haitians in Springfield are a scourge regardless. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” he told populists who have been promoting the smear. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”

 

It’s hard to know where to begin.

 

Start with this: Vance, the apprentice, seems to have already adopted his master’s propagandistic habit of caring only whether an allegation is useful and not at all whether it’s true. Maybe the Haitians are eating cats, and maybe they aren’t; what’s important is that, by using his high public profile to promote the claim, Vance has legitimized it in a way that will leave uninformed people convinced—wrongly—that it’s true.

 

Trump has done that for ages, from using his fame to promote the Obama birth certificate lie to laundering smears of his enemies through the “journalism” of the National Enquirer. A patina of respectability is all you need to lend credibility to the sleaziest slanders. Vance is a quick study.

 

This incident should also finish off any pretensions that J.D. Vance might be “a different kind of populist.”

 

To a certain kind of nationalist-curious conservative intellectual, having a fellow traveler with J.D.’s brainpower so close to the presidency raises tantalizing possibilities about enacting family-forward populist economic policies. Trump will always be Trump, but Vance supposedly represents something smarter and more substantive. He’s the thinking man’s MAGA, a more cerebral America-First-er who prefers kitchen-table issues to demagoguery.

 

In reality, it turns out he’s a sewer rat, the same gutter Know-Nothing populist trash that you’ll find among the worst elements of Trump’s movement. Let’s hear no more after this, please, about Vance being “different” now that he’s started a Two Minutes Hate directed at a group of immigrants.

 

The real significance of this episode, though, lies in how difficult it is to imagine his predecessor on the Republican ticket stooping to the same behavior. Mike Pence is no angel—no one who spent four years apologizing for Trump could be—but he was certainly more immune to the scummiest impulses of populism than Vance is.

 

For evidence, look no further than J.D.’s appearance this week on the All-In podcast, where he interrupted his posts about Haitian pet-eaters to again confirm that he would have blocked the certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6 had he been in Pence’s shoes. Nowhere is nostalgia for Trump’s first term more potent than it is on this point: Vance would have been an eager enabler of the single most destructive authoritarian impulse his boss had during his first term, not a constraint on it as Pence was. The replacement of one man by the other on the ticket is the radicalization of Trump’s operation in miniature.

 

With Vance whispering in Trump’s ear in a second term instead of Pence, the pipeline from white-nationalist Twitter memes and Russian-bot talking points to the Oval Office will operate more efficiently. Jonathan Chait aptly described him as “an important bridge between the GOP and elements of the radical right that have been activated by Trump.” A figure like Tucker Carlson doesn’t need J.D. to convince Trump to take his calls, but the advice he gives Trump might prove more influential now that Vance is there to amplify it behind closed doors. 

 

And not just Vance, of course. The Tillersons and Mattises will be replaced with Jeffrey Clarks and Mike Flynns next time. Millions of Americans will vote Republican this fall out of a foolish sense of misplaced nostalgia for the first Trump administration, expecting that the second will pick up right where the first one left off in 2020 before COVID arrived. (Especially with respect to grocery prices.) They’re in for a surprise.

 

I’m too jaded at this point about the American character to believe they’ll find it an altogether unpleasant one.

 

What’s left?

 

On that note, two questions. One: Are we sure Trump’s digression at the debate about Haitian immigrants eating pets will hurt him?

 

It was received wisdom on Wednesday among the commentariat (including me) that the smear would show swing voters that he’s the same old crank at best and even crazier than he used to be at worst, but I confess that that’s mostly wishful thinking on my part. A Dispatch colleague told me this afternoon that their Trump-supporting friends are completely convinced that migrants in Springfield are chowing down on cats and dogs despite the total lack of evidence and the fact that those friends are quite well-educated.

 

How many people who watched the debate, having heard nothing about the Haitians before, saw Trump mention it and assumed there must be something to it if he was willing to bring it up? And then went online and found scores of MAGA drones frantically tweeting that it’s true?

 

Trumpist righties have had lots of practice at creating their own reality. They’re good enough at it to have given their man a 50-50 shot at the presidency after four criminal indictments, two impeachments, and one insurrection. I would not bet against them on this.

 

Now, the other question: What’s left in this deplorable party for traditional conservatives?

 

In terms of policy, each leg of the three-legged stool described by Ronald Reagan has either collapsed or is collapsing. In terms of personnel, practically every sensible, trustworthy human in the Republican chain of command has been chased out of the party and replaced with glassy-eyed power-worshippers or mega-kooks. Even the supposedly serious conservatives who remain … aren’t.

 

It’s not enough to say that a second Trump term is “unlikely to be good,” although that’s true enough. The party of Vance and Loomer will be dangerous, embarrassing, and often both at once. And that will prove true this winter even if Trump ends up losing after all.

 

His operation thrives on threats and propaganda, fantasizes about persecuting its political enemies, hatches malign schemes to install coup-enablers in influential positions, and on most issues, apart from immigration, barely makes a pretense of having a policy agenda. Its popularity can’t even be excused as a reckless backlash to mass privation, as happens sometimes in countries following an economic calamity. There’s nothing civically healthy or politically redeeming about any of this. What on earth are people doing supporting it?