By Nick Catoggio
Monday,
October 28, 2024
Note: This newsletter was
published before Washington
Post owner Jeff Bezos published
an op-ed explaining his decision to prevent the Post’s
editorial board from issuing an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election.
He denied allegations of a quid pro quo involving his business interests and
Donald Trump, and claimed the timing of his decision was the result of
“inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
If
you spend any time on Elon Musk’s propaganda platform, you’ve surely run across
this quote from
the author G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men
create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”
Practically
every populist on Twitter has approvingly tweeted or retweeted that line at
some point. And while I don’t agree with them on much, I confess that I see
some wisdom in it too. Our disagreement is over where to locate modern America
in the “hard times/good times” cycle that Hopf describes.
Populists
think we’re at stage one. The country has fallen on hard times, but fortunately
those hard times have forged “strong” men like Donald Trump who stand ready to
rescue us. Yes, really: “Hard times” in this case refers to an America that
isn’t at war, where unemployment is a hair above 4 percent, where the Federal
Reserve is now cutting interest rates, where the stock market hits
a new high seemingly every month, and where most people are quite
happy with their personal financial situation.
“Strong,”
meanwhile, doesn’t refer to physical strength or personal courage. (How could
it when the exemplar famously dodged military service during Vietnam?) To
authoritarians, “strength” is a euphemism for
ruthlessness. Part of Trump’s magical thinking about policy is that most
problems, like the “enemy
from within,” could be solved easily if only America’s weak leaders had the
strength of will to deal with them mercilessly. When he talks about Xi Jinping
wielding an
“iron fist” to “control” his subjects he means it as a compliment,
unambiguously and unabashedly.
If
you understand “strength” in those terms, as a measure of ruthless resolve in
subjugating one’s enemies, you begin to understand why the “America First”
forerunner of Trump’s movement in the 1930s had the foreign policy that it did.
It wasn’t the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy who exemplified strength.
It was the guys shooting at them.
In
short, the soft boys of the populist right are angry that liberals have more
political and cultural power than they’d like—and they want American leadership
that will behave
with utter ruthlessness to reduce it. To justify that, they’ve laughably
decided that the country must be at stage one in the Hopf cycle.
America
isn’t at stage one, though. We’re at stage four. We’re positively drowning
in weak men. And we’re about to face hard times because of it.
Let’s
talk about Jeff Bezos, one of the five richest people in the world and a weak
man.
We’re
not going back.
Kamala
Harris likes to say at her rallies, “We’re not going back.” Insofar as she
means “we’re not going to be so insane as to reelect Donald Trump president,” she’s
overestimated us.
But
it’s literally true that “we’re not going back” in a second Trump presidency to
the way the government operated during his first term. Millions of Americans,
whether out of ignorance, naivete, or dimwittedness, seem to believe that Trump
2024 will pick up right where Trump 2019 left off, perhaps even with prices at
the grocery store returning to prior levels. (Don’t ask me how that’s supposed
to happen. Strength, I suppose.) We’re not going back, though. Trump 2.0
will be different from Trump 1.0, more vicious by nature and denuded of
restraining forces in the Cabinet.
Jeff
Bezos, God-emperor of Amazon, is a weak man but an intelligent one. He seems to
understand that we’re not going back.
On
Friday, the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, announced
that it won’t endorse a candidate for president this year and won’t make
endorsements in presidential races going forward. There’s nothing wrong with
that in principle; The Dispatch doesn’t do endorsements either. You
might even argue that it’s good for major newspapers to get out of the
endorsement business. Why encourage readers to doubt the objectivity of the
newsroom by trumpeting the partisan bias of the editorial room?
The
problem with the Post’s announcement wasn’t the announcement itself, it
was the timing. According to the Columbia
Journalism Review, staffers had been working for weeks on a draft
editorial endorsing Harris. As recently as last week, the editor in charge
believed it was on track for publication. Only “within the past few days,”
allegedly, did someone up the chain suddenly decide to pull the plug.
Coincidentally,
it was also within the past few days that Trump confirmed he
would be in Austin, Texas, on Friday for an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
News broke after that interview took place that, while Trump was in town, he also
met briefly with the CEO and vice president of Blue Origin, a private space
exploration firm and top competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The owner of Blue
Origin is—ta da—Jeff Bezos.
To
repeat: Trump made plans to visit Austin, the Post’s Harris endorsement
was quickly and inexplicably quashed, and hours later the space team was
granted an audience with him. A quid pro quo, one might call it, to
borrow a phrase made
famous during his first term.
Theories
differ on whether Trump demanded
a favor before agreeing to meet with Blue Origin or whether Bezos spiked the
endorsement preemptively to butter Trump up before a scheduled meeting (call it
“anticipatory
obedience”), but no one seems to disagree on the bottom line. Bezos
understands that Trump is fanatical
about “loyalty” and will eagerly abuse his power as president to make
trouble financially for anyone who makes trouble for him politically, so he
chose to signal his “loyalty” to the next administration before it takes power.
And
Bezos has good reason. He paid the price for “disloyalty” once before.
For
my friends, everything.
During
Trump’s first term, the then-president reportedly
intervened to steer a $10 billion Pentagon contract away from Amazon and
toward Microsoft instead. That wasn’t because Microsoft was offering a better
product that would benefit the American people; allegedly, it was because Trump
resented
the unflattering coverage he got from Bezos’ newspaper and wanted to
retaliate for it, using taxpayer money. “He saw what happened to his Pentagon
cloud computing contract when he was a pr—k to Trump,” a source in Trumpworld reportedly said
of Bezos after the Post announced its new no-endorsements policy.
“What
is the point in having ‘f–k you’ money if you’re never willing to say ‘f–k
you’?” my colleague Kevin Williamson wondered
today, marveling at the unimaginably wealthy Amazon founder’s cowardice in
canceling the Post endorsement. But look at it from Bezos’ perspective:
There’s every reason to think a second Trump presidency will be much more
vindictive, and lawlessly so, than the first was. Trump has
campaigned on “retribution” against his enemies and is staffing up with
yes-men who’ll condone his most fascist impulses, and the electorate seems
poised to reward him with power anyway. If he wins, he’s going to treat that
victory as a mandate for government by vendetta.
We’re
not going back.
Bezos grasps that. And don’t forget, he has serious business pending before the
federal government: In a Trump administration, the
FTC’s antitrust suit against Amazon stands a much better chance of being
resolved to the company’s liking if the owner is on good terms with the
president. Executive branch policy will be set not according to statute or
what’s best for the public interest, but according to who is and isn’t owed a
favor by Trump—more so even than it was in
his first term, that is. For
my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.
Other
titans of industry are also realizing that we’re not going back and that
Trump’s next administration will behave like an oligarchy, requiring the
leader’s patronage for a business to flourish. Bezos isn’t the only publisher
lately to cancel
coverage that might offend Trump, and on Monday, a prominent newspaper reported
on a recent gathering of business executives in California where “attendees
wound up discussing how to protect themselves and their companies if Trump wins
the presidency next week and tries to use the power of the Oval Office against
his perceived enemies.” When the paper contacted a Trump aide for a response,
he assured them the executives are right to worry:
“I’ve told CEOs to engage as fast as possible
because the clock is ticking. … If you’re somebody who has endorsed Harris, and
we’ve never heard from you at any point until after the election, you’ve got an
uphill battle,” the Trump adviser said. “People are back-channeling, looking at
their networks—they’re talking to lobbyists to see what they can do to connect
with the president and his team.”
The
newspaper that published that scoop was … Jeff Bezos’ Washington
Post. Reporting on the weakness of cowardly oligarchs who are afraid to
take sides against Trump was the newsroom’s way of striking back at its boss
for quashing the editorial on Friday, I take it, and good for the staff for
doing so. But that can’t last forever. The Post’s reporters will
eventually get a hot scoop about a scandal inside the Trump administration that
could put Bezos’ bottom line at risk. Does he let his team run with it, forever
branding him as “disloyal” in the eyes of the new president, or does he start
censoring his newsroom too in order to protect his other business interests?
He’ll
have to decide. We’re not going back.
The
rules of engagement.
You
might ask yourself, “Why would Trump or Bezos care who the Post endorses?
Newspaper endorsements don’t move a single vote, especially in national
elections.”
That’s
true, but it misses the point. Trump wasn’t worried about losing the election
if the Post had backed Harris. Whether he asked for the editorial to be canned
or Bezos volunteered, I suspect he values this episode as an opportunity to
establish the rules of engagement for his coming term. In the same way that he
seems to take special relish in former Never Trumpers like J.D. Vance bending
the knee, presumably he was tickled and encouraged by the spectacle of a former
thorn in his side like Bezos cowering before him and canceling his paper’s
Harris endorsement. The once and probably future president sees the world in
terms of friends and enemies, loyalty and disloyalty; having a nemesis as
prominent and powerful as the founder of Amazon validate that approach by
acquiescing in it must have felt exhilarating.
“Unfortunately,
Americans fearing Trump’s wrath and adjusting their behavior accordingly is
going to become a regular feature of life over the next few years,” economist Patrick Chovanec
wrote of the canceled Post endorsement. “As is other Americans knowing
that Trump will pardon them for wrongdoing done on his behalf and acting
accordingly. This is our new America.” Those are the rules of engagement
now—and the more discretionary
power Trump gains in office, the more leeway he’ll have to set those rules.
We are about to face hard times thanks to weak men like Jeff Bezos.
Tell
me this, though: How much can we fault him for his cowardice when he knows he’s
surrounded by other weak men who won’t take sides with him against Trump?
Look
around American media today and, apart from the usual suspects, you’ll find no
anxiety about the Post’s capitulation and what it portends for how
Trump’s presidency will operate. Liberal outlets are exercised about it, of
course; so are the few remaining Never Trump precincts of the right, like The
Dispatch and The Bulwark. But across right-wing media, Bezos’
surrender is either unworthy of comment or an enemy misfortune to be reveled
in. In theory, populists should loathe seeing fantastically rich
oligarchs tinker with the press in order to flatter an authoritarian leader. In
practice, they’re delighted by it so long as the tinkering is done to benefit
their side.
If
the Post editorial had run as scheduled and a newly reelected Trump
retaliated by punishing Amazon for it somehow, the most Bezos could
realistically hope for in terms of popular support is a 50-50 deadlock in media
and across the wider public. Democrats would accuse Trump of an abuse of power,
but Republicans would uniformly laugh and insist that Bezos and the mainstream
media had it coming. Trump wouldn’t back down, knowing that his own people were
solidly behind him. Only by losing support on the right, among his loyal fans,
will he ever have occasion to question whether he’s gone too far.
So
you see why this is hopeless. As the past several years have demonstrated,
Trump will never lose meaningful support on the right: The proprietors of
right-wing media are too weak to ever challenge their audience’s tribalism, and
most of the doubters within the right-wing rank-and-file are too weak to risk
ostracism by challenging those around them. We actually ran this thought
experiment in 2022 with
Ron DeSantis and Disney in the Trump and Bezos roles, in fact, and the
right reacted exactly the way you’d expect. “The Bezos surrender isn’t just
a demonstration. It’s a consequence,” Jonathan Last wrote
Sunday. “It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a
point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can
protect him.”
Bezos
is making a rational, if cowardly, calculation. He’s calculating that there’s
no chance of a formidable bipartisan coalition forming during Trump’s second
term to oppose his abuses of power. I think he’s correct in that calculation.
There are too many weak men to stand up to Trump; that’s the whole story of the
Republican
hostage crisis and the whole story of how he escaped being convicted at his
second impeachment trial. If retaliation and government harassment are
acceptable enough to half the country to be treated as partisan politics as
usual, and they are, then Bezos faces a difficult choice. He can either resist
Trump and take the consequences or he can play ball.
He
took the coward’s way out. Many will. Those who refuse will face hard times,
thanks to weak men.
But
if you’re desperate to find a silver lining in this episode, let David Frum cheer you
up. “‘We’re withholding our endorsement because our owner is frightened of
government retaliation if Donald Trump wins’ is a more forceful and eloquent
statement than any newspaper editorial ever written,” he noted on Friday.
That’s true—an actual Post endorsement of Kamala Harris would have meant
nothing, but a suppressed Post endorsement driven underground by fear of
an authoritarian’s wrath is a forceful preview of what America is signing up
for. I’m too down on Americans to believe it’ll matter at the polls next week,
but every bit of information that adds to the immense shame of what this
country is about to do is welcome.
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