Good and Hard

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, November 08, 2024

 

Being a writer means never being able to enjoy someone else’s prose without feeling jealous.

 

It happens to me every time I read Kevin Williamson. What a terrific piece. The bastard.

 

But not all good prose comes from professionals. There’s plenty of it in daily conversation for those who care to look, sometimes from people not known for intellectual bravado.

 

Think what you want about Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, but this is objectively good prose: “The American people, the voters that voted for Trump overwhelmingly, they are MTG. MTG is not radical or extreme. She’s mainstream America.”

 

Concise, vivid, forceful, and true. That’s the good stuff. I wish I’d written it myself.

 

Greene has spent the days since Donald Trump’s victory hinting that she wants—and deserves—a spot in his Cabinet. Asked Wednesday about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy landing big jobs in the new administration, she complained that “they both tried to beat [Trump] in the presidential race this year. … It’s important to realize who stood with President Trump from the beginning, never backed down, never stabbed him in the back, never tried to beat him.”

 

When Steve Bannon raised the possibility with her of taking charge of the Department of Homeland Security, which would place Trump’s “bloody” mass-deportation program directly under her command, she didn’t dismiss it.

 

DHS Secretary Greene? If Trump made that nomination and I were a senator, I would vote to confirm.

 

FDA Commissioner Robert F. Kennedy? I’d be a yes on him too. Attorney General Jeffrey Clark? Also yes. Supreme Court Justice Aileen Cannon? I don’t see why not.

 

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard,” H.L. Mencken famously said in another bit of prose I wish I’d written. I find that logic insuperable under the present political circumstances. The American people are MTG; MTG is mainstream America. By what right should their representatives in the Senate deny them the government they’ve asked for?

 

Give it to them. Good and hard.

 

The will of the people.

 

There’s more to this argument than spite. Although I will admit that spite is a big part of it.

 

Two years ago, Steve Hayes hosted Tim Miller of The Bulwark for a chat about Miller’s book, with the conversation coming around to the fact that Trump had appointed mostly qualified deputies in his first term. I’ve written about their debate before. Steve was glad that President Trump had been advised by proverbial “adults,” noting that a government led by irresponsible people can cause immense human misery. Tim countered that Trump might not have remained politically viable after leaving office if those adults hadn’t restrained his most despicable impulses until the final months of his presidency.

 

Because of the adults in the room, American voters never got to experience Trumpism. What they experienced was Trumpism sanitized by Mike Pompeo and John Kelly and James Mattis and Mark Milley, which wasn’t that scary until election night 2020.

 

Steve had the better of the argument at the time, I think. Many Americans didn’t know what they were getting when they gambled on Trump as the lesser of two evils in 2016. In fact, most didn’t vote for him at all; it was his opponent who won the popular vote. Handing the Department of Homeland Security to a creature like Marjorie Taylor Greene under those circumstances would have extracted an awfully steep price for a simple electoral mistake. Civic-minded officials in the Trump administration behaved honorably in trying to mitigate the damage of that mistake. 

 

Sitting here now, three days after a sweeping Trump victory and outright popular-vote majority, the strength of Miller’s argument seems overwhelming in hindsight. This morning, a Dispatch colleague said that the “normie” Trump supporters he spoke to this week have all tended to justify their votes the same way: “We experienced life under a Trump presidency, and life under a Biden presidency, and the country and the world were better off under Trump.” But they didn’t experience life under a Trump presidency. They experienced life under a sanitized Trump presidency thanks to the “adults in the room.”

 

It’s high time they experienced an actual Trump presidency, no?

 

I’m being only half-cute in saying that. If you believe in democracy, you should find it earnestly troubling when a majority votes for a candidate expecting one thing and then gets something very different once he’s in office.

 

The sole virtue of Trump’s campaign this year was his honesty about his goals and the personnel he intends to deputize to achieve them. He campaigned side-by-side with America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic, promising to “let him go wild on [public] health” after returning to the White House, then won the presidency going away. The people elected him with eyes wide open. Under what theory of democracy should Trump now break his promise to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of America’s health bureaucracy? Under what theory should the Senate reject Kennedy if his nomination is submitted?

 

We could navel-gaze here about the paradox of a democratic republic, in which representatives simultaneously have a duty to carry out the will of the people and a duty to ignore the will of the people when the people want to do something particularly stupid. The Founders distrusted the members of America’s popular majority enough to have denied them the right to choose their own senators, leaving that job to state legislatures instead in hopes that those legislatures would select men of (giggle) virtue who’d demonstrate wisdom in the people’s best interest.

 

That duty to behave wisely is the best case one can make, I think, for senators to reject Kennedy, Greene, Jeffrey Clark, and any other cretin who might come before them. If you believe that Liz Cheney, representing America’s most Republican state, did the right thing by voting to impeach Trump after January 6, then you presumably agree. Representatives should exercise good civic judgment even when their constituents don’t. 

 

But what about their other duty, to carry out the will of the people?

 

“Mandate” is a dirty word here at The Dispatch, so I won’t bother arguing that Trump has earned a mandate for his agenda. He won his election, yes, but the senators and House members who prevailed on Tuesday won theirs too. They don’t owe him their votes—except, maybe, for mediocrities like Bernie Moreno, who almost certainly wouldn’t have prevailed in Ohio without Trump dragging them over the finish line.

 

Trump doesn’t have a mandate. But populism has something like a mandate, don’t you think?

 

Republicans won the presidency and a Senate majority and are very likely to narrowly retain their House majority. That’s total control of government, gift-wrapped and delivered on a silver platter at a moment when a legislative check on the incoming president was direly needed. Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote and did so by making meaningful gains with nearly every major demographic group. And he and his party achieved all of that while being remarkably forthcoming about their malevolent intentions. Tariffs, isolationism, “retribution,” anti-vaxxism—any and every species of woo-woo populism you can imagine, up to and including removing fluoride from the water supply, was on the menu. And more than half of this country ordered it.

 

Trump winning wasn’t a mistake this time. It was a choice, and a very deliberate one. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it—good and hard. Who are their representatives, including representatives in the other party, to tell them that they can’t have what they knowingly chose when Trump sends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s nomination to lead DHS over to Congress?

 

Do you support self-government or don’t you?

 

Learning the hard way.

 

If appealing to democracy doesn’t sell you on rubber-stamping Trump’s nominees, though, then how about deterrence?

 

All I’ve wanted since January 6 is deterrence. America needed to punish the instigator and his accomplices, I thought, not chiefly as a matter of justice but to show the fascists of tomorrow what awaited them if they ever dared try to pull what Trump pulled. You throw the book at coup-plotters for the same reason you throw it at any major criminal, to warn other degenerates in the population that crime doesn’t pay.

 

But at every step since the insurrection, America has turned around and said that crime does pay.

 

It paid when Senate Republicans declined to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial because they feared retaliation from him and his crazed supporters. It paid when Trump’s polling in this year’s GOP primary improved following his criminal indictments as Republican voters guzzled down argle-bargle about a deep-state witch hunt. And it paid when a convicted felon, with dozens of felony charges still pending against him, easily won the presidency over a career prosecutor.

 

The American people have done everything they could reasonably do to weaken the taboo against authoritarian criminality. The only thing left that might work to deter them from ever doing something like this again is making them live with the consequences of their decision.

 

Give them Trumpism red in tooth and claw, unsanitized this time. If he nominates out-and-out cranks for major Cabinet positions, confirm them. The Senate will confirm them, I think: Marco Rubio, a “good Republican,” all but admitted it this week when he was asked about the prospect of a Kennedy nomination. Once the GOP reached 52 seats on Tuesday night, rendering Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski irrelevant, any chance of this party of geldings resisting Trump’s demands in the upper chamber disintegrated.

 

“The American people have chosen. They should not be insulated from the consequences of their choice,” Jonathan Last wrote on Friday, urging Democrats not to block elements of Trump’s agenda that will primarily harm his own voters. It’s really that simple. If you want to stop future generations from experimenting with postliberalism, they’ll need to see the results of the experiment that our generation is conducting. Let Trump carry it out.

 

Maybe it’ll turn out okay. Secretary Greene could prove as effective a public servant at DHS as she is a prose stylist. Perhaps the many fond wishes at the start of Trump’s first term that he’ll “grow in office,” briefly interrupted by his attempt to end American democracy in early 2021, will at last bear fruit in a second term. Taking fluoride out of the water and resurrecting measles outbreaks could usher in a new era of health, wealth, and prosperity, I suppose.

 

But if not, your kids and grandkids will benefit from the disastrous political history lesson you and I are about to live through. Assuming they survive those outbreaks, I mean.

 

Full Trump, no limits. We’ll get the deterrence I wanted in the end. It’ll just be much, much more expensive than it needed to be.

 

It’s not so simple, though, is it?

 

If all of us were destined to suffer the same under Trump’s government, it’d be simple. We aren’t. “Despair is an elite luxury that vulnerable communities cannot afford,” David French wrote on Thursday. “If Trump was telling the truth about his intentions—and there is no good reason to think he wasn’t—then he will attempt a campaign of retribution and mass deportation that will fracture families, create chaos in American communities and potentially even result in active-duty troops being deployed to our cities.”

 

It’s easy for me to say “bring on Secretary Greene!” when I’m at no risk of being tangled up in some inept, gratuitously brutal deportation dragnet or being shot at by regular military after joining a left-wing protest.

 

But look at it this way: Even if the Senate were to reject Greene in the name of defending the vulnerable, Trump would just scrape some other ruthless unqualified populist toady off the bottom of his shoe and nominate them for the position instead. We’re going to get miscreants in this Cabinet one way or another. Isn’t it better that they be high-profile ones, with neon reputations for crankery and incompetence, to help the public draw clear conclusions about the caliber of Trump’s henchmen?

 

There’s another problem with my argument. The prospects for deterrence depend an awful lot on the decency of the American people, no? Most of us have spent our lives taking that decency for granted, but we really should stop.

 

If there’s a shining lesson from Trump’s reelection it’s that Americans no longer care even a little bit about decency in their leaders, at least not when eggs are more expensive than they used to be. “Faith in the inherent goodness of Americans has failed us,” attorney Ken White declared after Tuesday’s results. “Too many people saw it as a self-evident truth that the despicable rhetoric and policy of Trump and his acolytes was un-American. … Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.”

 

Americans will revolt against postliberalism, fulfilling my dreams of deterrence, if and only if Trump’s policies hurt them personally. Tariff-palooza is high-risk for him because of that, since an aggressive trade war that triggers stagflation will shatter his silly mystique as some sort of economic magician. The tacit bargain he made with voters is that he’ll make the trains run on time and they’ll look the other way at his abuses. If he can’t keep up his end of it, his supporters will wonder what they’re getting in return for amorality.

 

But if he can, where’s the problem? So long as Secretary Greene and the other goblins in Trump’s Cabinet stick to harassing undesirables—immigrants, Democrats, transgender people, enemies of populism various and sundry—there’s no reason to expect a sharp decline in the president’s job approval or anything more than throat-clearing from the evaporating “respectable” right. The results of this election have given us every reason to believe Americans will tolerate Trump’s brand of politics to the extent it’s competent in administration and judicious in who it persecutes—“judicious” in this case meaning Them, not Us.

 

With apologies to Mencken, one might say that democracy under postliberalism is the theory that the common people get what they want while the less common people get what’s coming to them, good and hard. If that’s so, a Cabinet of cretins won’t put most Americans off of Trump. It might be just what they’re hoping for.