By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
In the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, a CIA
honcho is criticized by a junior colleague for working with a disreputable
character. “Yeah, you’re right,” replies the spook. “We should just deal with
nice people.”
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk—it’s been a terrific
few weeks for Bond villains.
Trump is riding high just now. He has been elected
president again and did so while winning more votes overall than did his
Democratic opponent, whose name escapes me just now, as, indeed, it apparently
eluded millions of Democrats on Election Day. (There is no such thing as the
“national popular vote,” but, given that Trump won in 2016 with fewer votes
coast-to-coast than did the wife of that guy who used to be the president a
long time ago, the overall vote share is significant.) With his ridiculous Cabinet
nominations, he has once again demonstrated that there is no depth of
self-abasement to which he cannot bully Republicans into plumbing.
And he even got to MSNBC!
Joe Scarborough, formerly a Republican member of the
House and currently the host of the big morning program on MSNBC, became a
critic of Donald Trump after having been a key early booster. It would be fair
to say he has been a trenchant critic. It would even be fair to say he has been
a hair-on-fire critic—that is his own characterization, not mine. (In the
interest of full disclosure: I have been
a guest on Morning Joe a few times and have gotten to know
Scarborough a little bit over the years, and I think of him as a friend.) In
spite of his strong opposition to Trump, Scarborough and his co-host (and
wife), Mika Brzezinski, made the trip down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the
president-elect in the hopes of establishing a more productive exchange going
forward.
This was not what you would call “well-received” among
the MSNBC tribe.
Scarborough is in the funny position of being a former
Republican officeholder with a very big footprint on the cable channel that the
more energetic kind of progressives consider their own turf. While his views
and attitudes have evolved over the years, his baseline sensibility has always
been one shared with the very people who first rallied to Trump’s cause: New
York City outer-borough types and suburbanites with Catholic backgrounds of the
sort we used to refer to as “white ethnic.” Scarborough is a Southerner, but he
wouldn’t be out of place in Long Island; when I first got to know him, he was
living in the Connecticut suburbs of New York and seemed right at home there.
And, in fact, he took a rather
more positive view of Trump for a time.
Scarborough’s largely left-leaning audience of course
went ape when he reported the meeting on his show. MSNBC contributor Jennifer
Rubin unsubtly
pressed for a boycott targeting her own channel in response to the
“disgusting” spectacle of … well, what, exactly? Two people who host a
news-talk show meeting with an elected official?
Brzezinski pointed to the case of her father, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who was a major foreign-policy figure in the Johnson and Carter
administrations and who was the principal architect of the U.S. response to the
Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Students of 20th-century
history will no doubt be mindful that the anti-communist project involved
talking to a lot of people who were not very nice at all. One can be too
indulgent—even
the best of us easily can be too indulgent—but one of the lessons of the
anti-Soviet campaign is that it probably is better to maintain an open line of
communication to Idi Amin than to enjoy the fleeting moral satisfaction that
would come from cutting the lines.
(Jonah Goldberg will not forgive me if I fail to note Dr.
Amin’s full handle: His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji
Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Conqueror of the British Empire in
Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth
and Fishes of the Seas. Donald Trump is hardly the first specimen of his kind.)
The most important question in practical politics (and in
much else) is: “Compared to what?” If you believe that Scarborough has sullied
himself and MSNBC by meeting with the president-elect and then explaining the
meeting to his audience, then what do you imagine the preferable alternative to
be? As Scarborough concedes, the “Resistance” stuff and the hair-on-fire stuff
has failed—obviously and spectacularly!—on its own terms. I understand
the anathematizing impulse and sympathize with it to a considerable extent: My
writing this will lead to some awkward conversations in the near future, no
doubt, but I do not believe that there is any honorable way to serve in the
Trump administration. Joe Scarborough isn’t looking for a new job, though:
Covering politics is already his job.
What cable-news commentators do isn’t exactly what a New
York Times political reporter does in terms of the tenor of the journalism,
but it is a variation on the theme. The instinct of news outlets (and MSNBC,
whatever its deficiencies, is still one of those) to pet their audiences and to
flatter their prejudices has been one of the most destructive trends in recent
journalism—second only to the audiences’ own demand that their news and
commentary providers pander to them. About three times a week, somebody
criticizes me for failing to defer to my constituency, and I have to remind
them that I am not running for elected office.
(There’s only one elected job I think I’d enjoy having,
and Brewster County already has a sheriff, about whom I know nothing other than
the facts that he
looks exactly like a sheriff of Brewster County is supposed to look and
needs a new truck.)
In some ways, my judgment of Trump enablers such as Mike
Pence and Ted Cruz (and Mike Lee and J.D. Vance
and …) is more exacting than my judgment of Trump himself. Whatever else you
may say about Trump, he has nowhere and at no time given me the impression of
being a man who knows better. You don’t blame Trump for being Trump any
more than you blame a mosquito for biting you. You just hope you don’t get
malaria or dengue or West Nile or whatever.
Politics will be back. It will be back presently and with
a vengeance. One of the reasons for that—and I will have more to say about this
in Part 2 later this week—is that it is in the nature of factions to subdivide
into two or more new factions once they have achieved a position of dominance,
however temporary or unstable. The Trump element today owns the
Republican Party, most of whose members are happy to be owned, and, if nothing
else, the economics of competing grifts will ensure that the faction is
acrimonious, rapacious, and riven. And Trump is a lame duck before even being
sworn in. It is going to be a mess. But it is not going to be the end of the
world, or the end of these United States.
(Probably.)
I have interviewed all sorts of distasteful people over
the course of my career. In fact, I had agreed to an interview with Donald
Trump back in 2012, when he also was kicking around the idea of running for
president. I’ve interviewed communists, Nation of Islam representatives,
pornographers, Flat Earthers, conspiracy kooks, and Bernie Sanders voters who
checked more than one of the previous boxes. It’s what you do in my line of
work.
The politics of cooties is bad enough. Journalism of
cooties—where we just don’t talk to people we personally think poorly of—isn’t
journalism at all.
Scarborough notes that the internet world reacted
hysterically and histrionically to his meeting with Trump, whereas in the real
world, most people took the meeting and his reporting of it to his audience as
a matter of course. That is part of the problem, too: Since the introduction of
the first iPhone nearly two decades ago, the internet has been transformed from
a tool into an environment, from a kind of wide-open virtual
place one visits from time to time to a suffocating place one escapes from only
time to time, if at all. That, as much as the ghastly particularities of Donald
Trump, is the rancid secret sauce of our current political moment. But it is
possible to counteract it.
I do not think that temperateness probably comes
naturally to Joe Scarborough or to me—in our time, the commentary business
typically does not reward the even-keeled—but the pursuit of a virtue can be,
at times, as worthwhile as the achievement of it. And, as a cynical practical
matter, temperateness might end up being a better strategy for containing
Donald Trump, who thrives on drama, especially in the form of emotionally
charged adversarial performances. Trump does not want things to quiet
down—nominating Matt Gaetz as attorney general is at least as much about
the reaction to that nomination as it is about Gaetz himself, probably more. If
you wanted to torture Trump, all you would need is a quiet, comfortable room
with no television or wi-fi. He would rather be screamed at by his enemies than
sit in silence. If Trump could be shouted down or shamed into being a better
sort of man, we’d have stopped thinking about him at all around 1983.
Maybe Scarborough is right and that it is time to try
calming down. Because the other way of doing things hasn’t produced the results
we had wanted.
No comments:
Post a Comment