By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 01, 2026
There was a good way off from
them an herd of many swine feeding.
So the devils besought him,
saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.
And he said unto them, Go. And
when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the
whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished
in the waters.
Matthew 8: 30-32
How to take the measure of today’s Republican Party?
Consider the Texas Republican Senate primary: In that race, not only did the
profoundly corrupt Trump sycophant top the merely cowardly and complicit Trump
sycophant, he beat him by a margin of nearly 2-to-1. Donald Trump’s Republican
Party did not reluctantly embrace Ken Paxton, whose personal corruption was
enough to get him impeached (though not convicted) by Republicans in
Texas—Texas Republicans stampeded to Paxton’s camp like that herd of demon-possessed
swine in Matthew 8. Republicans today call to mind Lincoln Steffens’
description of Philadelphia: “corrupt and contented.”
Republican complicity in the matter of Paxton is a
commonplace obscenity. Republican complicity in Donald Trump’s campaign against
E. Jean Carroll after Trump was found civilly liable—liable in a U.S. court of
law—for sexually assaulting her is an extraordinary obscenity.
The U.S. attorney for the Chicago area, Andrew S.
Boutros, says there is no criminal investigation into Carroll. But Boutros,
like any other member of the Trump administration, says a great many things
that are not true—so, who knows? His office infamously misled a federal court
in the matter of the so-called Broadview Six—a Trump administration effort to
criminalize protests regarding the government’s abusive immigration-enforcement
tactics—and got busted so hard that he felt compelled to go stand in court
himself to dismiss the charges in the case and receive a dressing-down by the
judge. Boutros—again, typical of a member of this administration—simultaneously
offered what the judge described as a “mea culpa” while also trying to
dodge any personal responsibility of admission of active wrongdoing, insisting
that “errors” in his case—whole pages of documents describing irregularities in
the grand-jury process were redacted for obviously self-serving prosecutorial
reasons—had not been intentional: Presumably, somebody in his office just
slipped on a banana peel with a big black Sharpie in his hand and marked out
whole pages of legal documents in a way that just happened to blot out evidence
of improper government conduct. The judge complained that Boutros’ shenanigans
were damaging the “presumption of regularity,” i.e., the confidence judges have
in trusting that government lawyers are not simply lying to the court.
Boutros’ office has been involved in other
overtly—obviously—political prosecutions on behalf of Donald Trump. A case
alleging that a certain man (with a Spanish name, no surprise) was a
high-ranking gang member who had put out a contract on the life of former
Border Patrol bigwig and Gestapo cosplay enthusiast Greg Bovino was laughed out
of court after prosecutors presented approximately squat in the way of
evidence. Grand juries simply rejected attempts to bring charges against
political targets (who says you can indict a ham sandwich?), while charges
against other immigration-enforcement protesters were quietly dropped for
being, in the technical legal term, baloney. So many veteran lawyers have quit
his office that Boutros is trying to lure retired prosecutors back into
service.
I.e., the usual Trump trash.
So when Boutros insists that his office “has not opened—and has never
opened—a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll” and that “any claim to
the contrary is categorically false,” he may or may not be telling the truth.
The Trump administration’s corporate commitment to dishonesty is deep and wide
enough that one cannot simply assume that anybody associated with it—including
a federal prosecutor making a case before a federal judge—is telling the truth.
The case against Carroll is, in the not obviously likely
event that Boutros is to be believed, only an indirect attack on the
woman Donald Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting. Carroll’s
litigation costs were offset by a nonprofit funded by Reid Hoffman, one of the
founders of LinkedIn, the irritating social-media site for puffed-up
“consultants” pretending not to be unemployed.
Third parties fund litigation for all sorts of reasons:
What used to be known (and legally prohibited) as champerty is the
practice (now generally legal and common) of financing a lawsuit in exchange
for a cut of the settlement, while what was known as maintenance (and
also once generally prohibited) consisted of “officious meddling” (per
Blackstone) in a lawsuit by a third
party without a financial interest.” Hoffman’s interest in the Caroll matter is
more like maintenance than champerty—a billionaire, Hoffman surely has little
interest in the paltry sums (a mere $88.3 million in total) involved in the
case sparked by Trump’s sexual assault of Carroll in a department-store fitting
room. Carroll is not the only woman to have accused Trump of sexual assault:
One of Trump’s wives accused him of raping her but later recanted the charge,
and she was far from alone. Wikipedia again: “As of October 2024, since the 1970s, at least 28
women have publicly accused Donald Trump of various acts of sexual
misconduct, including rape, sex with minors, sexual assault, physical
abuse, kissing and groping without consent, looking under women’s skirts, and
walking in on naked pageant contestants.” Not all such claims are equally
credible, of course, but, on a scale with Metaphysical Certainty at one extreme
and the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois at the other, some
of them rate.
The Trump administration is attempting to hijack some
$1.8 billion (possibly more) from the Treasury in order to compensate victims
of “weaponized” federal investigations, meaning the weirdo pillow guy and the
people who attacked police officers while rioting in the Capitol on January 6,
2021, while acting as the brownshirts in support of Trump’s failed coup
d’état. (And, of course, there’s a little
something in it for Trump, too.) Meanwhile, actual weaponization of federal
investigations is the administration’s current policy centerpiece. The sundry
jihads against Trump critics ranging from Mark Kelly to Jerome Powell and Lisa
Cook are risible, shameful, and plainly pretextual. Investigations and
prosecutions of even such unsympathetic figures as Letitia James and James
Comey (a self-aggrandizing dork, but not a criminal self-aggrandizing dork) are
no less offensive from a legal and political point of view. It is worth noting that
James was charged with alleged crimes related to buying a house—a case that was
thrown out—while Comey is in the dock for the earth-shattering offense of ... posting
a picture of seashells on social media.
E. Jean Carroll is an 82-year-old woman who worked as a
journalist and who was, for a time, pretty famous across a swath of about 60
blocks in Manhattan. The assault of which she accused Trump was awful. Trump
had his day in court to address those charges, and juries have now voted
against him twice in the matter. Yes, her litigation was financed by a
Democratic donor who holds Trump in utter contempt—as all right-thinking people
do, irrespective of political party.
But not all people are right-thinking: Those Republicans
and supposed conservatives who made careers advertising themselves as patriots
and friends of the Constitution—Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Chuck Grassley, John
Thune, Tom Cotton, the big names of cable news and talk radio, the heads and
boards of institutions such as the Heritage Foundation—have shown themselves to
be as gutless, bloodless, and boneless as lab-grown hamburger, utterly supine,
cowards and collaborators of the most unconscionable kind. And still these
sniveling miscreants stand by as the police power of the federal government is
turned against the supporters of a woman whose complaint that Donald Trump
sexually assaulted her has been ratified in our law courts. Qui tacet
consentire videtur.
This stuff is ridiculous, but it is not trivial. The
character of a republic, like the character of an individual, is a matter of
habit, of what we do, day by day, what we expect, what we tolerate, and what
causes us to say, “No, no more of this.” What was done to E. Jean Carroll—what
is being done—could be done to you. What was done to Renee
Good or Alex Pretti could be done to you—or to someone you love.
But do you know what the average Republican with any
power is thinking? I know. It is this: “What was done to John Cornyn could be
done to me.”
Profiles in courage, all around.
Words About Words
The good news for writers is that AI still doesn’t know
what “vibrant” means. If you will forgive me for quoting Google: “Sadu (or Al
Sadu) fabric is a traditional Bedouin textile characterized by geometric
patterns and vibrant desert colors like red, black, and beige.”
Nothing says vibrant like beige.
Why was I looking up sadu? I’m not planning to
move to Kuwait, but, if you are, and if, as Ferris Bueller says, you have the means …
In Other Wordiness ...
Sieur is an interesting French word, related (as
you will have guessed) to the English sir and sire and used, once
upon a time, as a courtesy title for landed gentlemen without other title.
After Thomas More was executed and dispossessed by that great glowering
prototype of the modern tyrant, Henry VIII, his house was occupied by one Louis
de Perreau, sieur de Castillon, the French ambassador. It was in reading about
More that I first encountered “sieur” used in that way.
When Perreau first met Henry, he described him as “a
marvelous man, with marvelous people around him.” He would later say of the
same king: “I have to deal with the most dangerous and cruel man in the world;
when he is in a fury, he has neither reason nor understanding left.” He
repeatedly requested to be called back from his diplomatic post, worried that
Henry (or Thomas Cromwell) might scheme to have him murdered.
Another French ambassador describes the Henry more
familiar to the popular mind: “very stout and marvelously excessive in eating
and drinking, so that people with credit say he is often of a different opinion
in the morning than after dinner.”
That is a very diplomatic way of putting it! “Often of a
different opinion in the morning than after dinner.” I will make a note of that
one.
The French are not as big on titles of nobility as they
used to be, before that nasty business with the revolution and all. But sieur
survives in modern French, most notably in monsieur.
In Closing
Over the weekend, I listened to some of the music from Man
of La Mancha with one of my triplets, E.J., currently the early riser of
the gang. He does not always know exactly what he wants—or, rather, he wants
many contradictory things at the same time, for example to be outside running
around and to be taking a nap, or to be playing catch and eating his
breakfast simultaneously. A few nights ago, we neglected to put up the baby
gate in the hallway outside his room, and so he toddled into our room at about
3:30 a.m. issuing demands: “Want snuggle!” (Worse demands have been made of
me.) He likes to lie with his back on my chest, a bottle of water in one hand
and a particular stuffed animal (his “guy,” in his lexicon) in the other, with
a blanket pulled over us, and alternate between dozing and wiggling. He wants
to be in the living room, where we often read, but he also wants to be with his
beloved brothers, who are still asleep, generally, in the early hours when E.J.
has been getting up these past few weeks. He’s a funny little fellow who has
not yet learned to modulate either the volume or affect of his voice: “Want see
mama! Want cookie! Want guy! Want song!” Etc.
Naturally, we listened to “The Impossible Dream.”
(And a few other Man of La Mancha songs, too.)
Man of La Mancha is very (very!) loosely
adapted from—more accurately, inspired by—Don Quixote, and it is great
for different reasons and for simpler reasons. Don Quixote is a novel
you can never really get your head around, entirely, because Cervantes is a
genius who never lets the reader rest, but Man of La Mancha seems to me
relatively straightforward once you figure out the main thing: Alonso Quijano,
who becomes the old-fashioned knight errant “Don Quixote,” is not crazy. He
knows that his Dulcinea is a prostitute and that Sancho is a farmhand—he loves
them with a particular kind of ennobling love that embraces the profound worth
of all of God’s creatures, be they kings and queens and heroes or the
superficially unimpressive rustic denizens of an elderly country gentleman’s
milieu. What is crazy is not to try to live
as a hero
but to fail to live as a hero, to live without honor, courage, charity,
humility, and perseverance and expect, somehow, to still be a human being of
any kind, much less one of the sort that anybody could call a man and
mean it.
Man of La Mancha is best understood as a
profoundly Christian work, which, like pretty much all of the great popular
Christian works of its time, was written by a son of Jewish immigrants,
bringing to mind the old formula holding that Hollywood in its golden age was
“a Jewish-owned business selling Roman Catholic theology to Protestant
America.” Don Quixote is not the guy who is always “winning”—his animating
dream is an impossible dream, his virtue displayed in his willingness “to bear
with unbearable sorrow” and to insist that this is not only a duty but a
privilege.
And the world will be better for
this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove, with his last ounce
of courage
To reach the unreachable star.
Corny? Maybe. But great. There are worse things that
could seep into a little man’s head in the ghostly hours before 6 a.m. And
what’s in Man of La Mancha is in some children’s books, too, including
one in our regular rotation: Oh, the Places You’ll Go.
I’m afraid that sometimes
you’ll play lonely games too.
Games you can’t win
’cause you’ll play against you.
All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you’ll be quite a lot.
And when you’re alone, there’s a
very good chance
you’ll meet things that scare you
right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road
between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you
won’t want to go on.
I don’t want my boys to grow up to be sad men or lonely
men, four little knights of mournful countenance—but I expect that they will be
acquainted with sadness and loneliness, as much as that hurts to think about
right now, and I want them to understand those things, to know what sadness and
loneliness are for, to make tools of them if not to make friends with
them. There are worse things than to be scorned and scarred—you could be in the mob screaming “Give
us Barabbas!” like a bunch of animals. (And we are all in that mob, at
times—the thing is to get out of it, by God’s grace.) Don Quixote’s armor is a
comical, makeshift ensemble, and he is outfitted with a rusty lance and a
broken shield. I hope my boys will try on that armor and see how it fits, that
they will take up that lance and shield and see how they feel in the hand, and
that they will know what Don Quixote knew: It isn’t the arms that make the
knight, and that it is not a jeweled pommel that makes a good sword.
Oh thou bleak and unbearable
world,
Thou art base and debauched as
can be;
And a knight with his banners all
bravely unfurled
Now hurls down his gauntlet to thee!
Mostly, they are still hurling quesadillas, not
gauntlets.
But E.J. has a good strong arm.
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