Pot-Committed

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

 

If Kamala Harris loses this election, as the current “vibes” suggest she will, she’ll be second-guessed ruthlessly for having leaned too hard down the stretch on the idea that Donald Trump is evil.

 

It’s not that she’s wrong, it’s that voters have heard it all before. That’s why Liz Cheney feels obliged to address abortion in her appearances on the trail with Harris. “Trump is evil” ain’t gonna cut it with persuadable conservatives who long ago grew numb to that claim, I argued in yesterday’s column. “Trump is evil and also it’s reasonable to support a pro-choicer in this election given the state of abortion policy” might do better.

 

Or it might not. When Harris goes down in flames, critics will demand to know why she didn’t ditch the attacks on Trump and reach out to the center by candidly acknowledging the flaws in her party or specifying how she intended to work with Republicans as president. The obvious answer, that she feared moving any further to the right would begin to cost her support on the left, will be grumbled away.

 

Regardless, the point stands: “Trump is evil” won’t win this election for Democrats. Will it?

 

Last weekend I was chatting with one of my Fox News-watching, Trump-supporting relatives and she asked me what Project 2025 is. Somehow my answer led me to start ranting about Trump’s plans to stock the government with zombie loyalists, which led me to warn her about the likelihood that he’ll abuse state power to harass his political enemies, which in turn sent me off on a tangent about how members of his own party in Congress privately fear what he and his diehard fans are capable of.

 

On and on I went. You know how I am.

 

At the end of it she paused and said, “See, I didn’t know any of this.” True story, scout’s honor.

 

As impossible as it may seem to Dispatch readers (never mind Dispatch writers), there’s reason to believe many voters still don’t know “any of this.” This morning Bill Kristol pointed to a survey by the Democratic firm Blueprint gauging how different messages about Trump play with voters. Tell them that he’s selfish and lacks the character to be president and the needle doesn’t budge—and why would it? They already know. They’ve known since the summer of 2015.

 

But tell them that half of his own Cabinet has refused to endorse him and that he reportedly said “so what?” upon learning that Mike Pence was in danger on January 6 and the needle jumps toward Harris, more so among independents than among voters generally. It was the single most effective message that Blueprint tested, beating even abortion and Social Security.

 

Americans know Trump is a bad guy but some don’t know quite how bad. (Although many do, which is why their faith in their country is about to break.) More to the point, many have no idea that by reelecting him they’re signing up for something qualitatively different in a second term than what they got in his first, which they remember for low inflation and less immigration and little else.

 

So here comes John Kelly, very belatedly, to tell them.

 

It can’t happen here.

 

Amid the anguish of the national identity crisis that Trump’s victory will trigger, Americans will hotly debate the motives of his supporters. How many voted for him because of the evil stuff? How many voted for him despite the evil stuff? How many voted for him more or less clueless about the evil stuff, somehow overlooking his prior coup attempt?

 

It’s important to make that third group as small as possible on Election Day. Not just for civic reasons, because we want voters to be informed when they choose their leaders. And not just for political reasons, because Harris is more likely to win if undecideds realize Trump is a threat. It’s a matter of moral clarity: If Americans truly understand who and what he is and opt to hand power to him anyway, that will tell us something momentous about our country.

 

I don’t want to spend too much time detailing the revelations from Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff and homeland security secretary, that appeared on Tuesday in the New York Times and The Atlantic. You should read both pieces; you’re not a fully informed voter in this election if you haven’t. Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government” and “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world—and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Kelly told the Times, which pretty well summarizes his various objections to his former boss. 

 

Some of what Kelly said, captured on audio, confirmed previous claims. Yes, then-President Trump described fallen U.S. soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” and couldn’t understand why they sacrificed for their country. Yes, he disliked being seen with veterans who had been grievously wounded in war, believing it “doesn’t look good for me.” And yes, he’s as fanatical about loyalty from government deputies as we’ve been led to believe. It was “a very big surprise” for him to learn that the military’s allegiance was to the Constitution rather than to him, supposedly. Once, Kelly told The Atlantic, Trump compared Hitler’s generals favorably to American generals because of their absolute unquestioning obedience to their leader.

 

Oh, and then Kelly talked about fascism.

 

He read a definition of it aloud to the Times’ reporter—ultranationalist, dictatorial, militaristic, consumed with suppressing internal opposition—and said yup, that’s Trump all right. “Certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America” was his exact quote.

 

Forget the fact that half of Trump’s Cabinet, including his former vice president, has refused to endorse him this cycle and just sit with this: Kelly is now the third high-ranking alumnus of the administration to accuse Trump of being not just unfit for office but an out-and-out fascist. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described him to Bob Woodward as “fascist to the core.” James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, seconded the critique in an email to Woodward.

 

Those three aren’t run-of-the-mill political hacks plucked from the local country club to serve in the White House. Each earned four stars in the military. Republicans cited their appointments during Trump’s first term as proof that he was governing responsibly. They’re exactly the sort of flinty battle-hardened patriots whose opinion would be exalted by the right as unimpeachable if that opinion were favorable. “You can take what John says to the bank,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said on Tuesday night of Kelly’s credibility. “If John says that Donald Trump said [the things he claims he said], then I believe them implicitly.”

 

Three officers who reached the top of the U.S. military and then worked face-to-face with Donald Trump in the Oval Office came to believe he’s a fascist. It should matter. Will it?

 

Maybe a little. True undecideds might be swayed by it, which could be enough to win this race for Harris if the election is as tight as the polls suggest. It’s worth it to her to promote Kelly’s comments far and wide, as she began to do this afternoon.

 

But it won’t matter as much as it should, and plausibly not enough to prevent his victory. For what it’s worth, after telling me that she “didn’t know any of this,” the relative I mentioned earlier felt obliged to add, “I’m not changing my mind.”

 

Never mind the election, though. What if Trump behaves in a second term the way Kelly, Milley, and Mattis fear? How far will the right and its coalition of malicious populists, indifferent partisans, and clueless leaners be willing to go to enable him?

 

The answer, I think, is that they’ll be as fascist as he asks them to be.

 

Lafayette Square revisited.

 

Many Trump critics entertain a fantasy about him doing something so abhorrent that “the fever” that’s gripped the right since 2015 finally breaks.

 

I’m not one of them. If the fever was going to break, it would have broken during the insurrection. The fact that it didn’t is what leads people like me to return to that moment again and again in our commentary. It’s not what happened on January 6 that haunts us, it’s what happened on January 7. When the right rallied behind Trump after he attempted a coup, it signaled that they were pot-committed, to borrow a term from poker, to his political success.

 

They’re not going to fold. They’ve bet too much. They’re going to continue to play this hand no matter how bad it gets. We should all understand that so that, if things get really bad, we don’t delude ourselves into believing that his support is on the brink of collapsing.

 

As an example, imagine a second-term version of the infamous incident in Lafayette Square in 2020. A huge crowd of left-wing protesters masses outside the White House—but this time, instead of cops clearing them out, Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and orders the regular military to deal with them. It’s not far-fetched: Based on what Kelly told the Times, Trump “was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so” yet continued to raise the possibility with advisers. Mark Esper, Mattis’ successor as defense secretary, claims Trump frankly suggested shooting protesters in meetings with him and Milley.

 

There will be no Milley or Esper to restrain him next time. In my scenario, some commander in the Mike Flynn mold, handpicked by Trump for his fanaticism, will be ordered to lead his men to remove the protesters from the square by any means necessary and will obey. A confrontation will follow; at some point the troops will open fire. It will be Kent State but worse.

 

What will the reaction be among Trump supporters upon seeing John Kelly’s warnings confirmed, possibly in real time on cable news?

 

It won’t be “we should have listened” or “what do we do now?” On the contrary, the sophisticated propaganda apparatus behind Trump will launch a frantic, all-hands-on-deck effort to convince its audience that someone in the crowd shot first. Footage will be scrutinized to a Zapruder-esque degree to try to locate the shot; audio will be isolated and amplified in hopes of “proving” that some indecipherable sound somewhere in the area was a pistol firing. We’ve been through this before.

 

Trust a man who’s worked in this miserable industry for 20 years: However one-sided the facts are, there’s no scenario in which the troops don’t receive effusive support from the right for having supposedly acted in self-defense, never mind that the regular military has no business confronting American citizens. And among rank-and-file Republicans who don’t work in the media, opinion will be even more ruthless. Trump and his Flynn-ish commander will be celebrated forthrightly for having given the left-wing hordes a whiff of grapeshot. America wanted law and order, right? Well, we got it.

 

People don’t like to be called fascists. The term still carries a stigma a hundred years later—although I suspect that’ll change as the nature of the postliberal right becomes harder to deny and Republicans conclude it’s easier to destigmatize the label by leaning into it. For now, however, all of what Trump does in a second term will be justified with euphemisms. He isn’t a fascist, he’s “tough.” “Strong.” Like accused war criminal Eddie Gallagher, whom Trump regards as a “hero” according to the new Atlantic piece.

 

Can a political movement rightly be described as “fascist” if few of its members are calling for fascist governance explicitly? Sure, I think so—if those members are willing to rationalize any form of fascist behavior that their leader engages in. Populists will thrill to Lafayette Square 2.0, partisan Republicans will rationalize it as self-defense, and the clueless among them will assume that the troops must have had a reason. That’s what we have to look forward to in a second term. 

 

They’ll rationalize anything Trump needs them to rationalize in order to mitigate the political damage from his excesses. They’ll be as fascist as he asks them to be. They’re pot-committed.

 

Things to come.

 

The reaction online to the Kelly revelations in the Times and the Atlantic was telling in that respect. 

 

Whenever a damaging story about Trump breaks, the playbook for his apologists is always the same: Attack the source or attack the sourcing. If the source is a Democrat, they’re lying for partisan gain. If it’s a Republican, they’re lying because they’re a RINO with an ax to grind. If they’re anonymous, the reporter made everything up whole cloth. Obsessing about the source means never having to consider the substance of allegations about what Trump is and what his movement has become.

 

For instance, this passage from the Atlantic piece is Trump to a T, entirely consistent with the hyper-narcissism he’s evinced in full public view for the past nine years and with the disdain he famously expressed for prisoner of war John McCain:

 

Trump, those who have worked for him say, is unable to understand the military norm that one does not leave fellow soldiers behind on the battlefield. As president, Trump told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action. To him, they could be left behind, because they had performed poorly by getting captured.

 

I believe it. But because it’s sourced to unnamed Trump deputies, loyal Republicans aren’t just free to ignore it, they’re obliged to do so. Who are they supposed to believe, Donald Trump or anonymous “fake news” sources painting a, er, perfectly recognizable picture of Donald Trump?

 

Practically any source can be impeached in the way I’ve described—but John Kelly is a tricky one. One can’t help but respect his military service and sympathize with him for having lost a son on the battlefield in Afghanistan. And he’s no RINO: Trump admired him enough to put him in charge of immigration enforcement at Homeland Security and then to move him into the White House as his right-hand man. How does a Republican voter deal with him accusing their candidate, on the record, of being a fascist?

 

Do they … maybe consider not voting for Trump after all?

 

Of course not. They have lots of other options.

 

They can simply ignore what Kelly said and gate-keep the hell out of it to minimize the risk that persuadable voters will find out about his remarks.

 

Or they can treat what Kelly said as irrelevant because insanity is already priced into Trump’s political stock, an argument heard on Wednesday from certain Republican governors, if you can believe it.

 

Or they can push propaganda mocking those of us who worry about electing a fascist, which is what you might do if you’re known for “jumping around, skipping like a dips–t” onstage at Trump rallies.

 

Or they can try the old standby of whatabout-ing their way out of the situation by changing the subject. Social media was filled on Tuesday night with grumbles about the anonymous sourcing for certain anecdotes in The Atlantic piece, conveniently deflecting attention from the fact that the same piece quoted Kelly by name and that the Times’ story quoted him at great length, replete with audio clips. 

 

They’re not going to pressure Trump not to behave like a fascist in a second term if and when he starts. They’re going to run interference for him as they always do; it’s practically a Pavlovian response by now. This is a movement in which a person can go from promoting denunciations of the Capitol riot on January 6 to leading Donald Trump’s campaign less than four years later. There’s no limit now to the degradation of which they’re capable. They’re pot-committed.

 

You can stop Trump by defeating him at the polls next month but you’ll get no help from the right in stopping him after he’s sworn in. Vote accordingly.