Squeak

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

Do you hear that? Skitter. Scuffle. Scurry ... splash!

 

The rodential squeaking started off sounding like the occasional whine of a rusty gate hinge. Pretty soon, it is going to sound like Indiana Jones in the catacombs underneath Venice. As the SS Trump founders and careens, it is impossible to miss the sound of rat bellies hitting the water, with the rats snug in their little rat life-preservers and praying for a ratty little lifeboat to come along and pick them up.

 

And you know what that means: It is time to strafe the lifeboats.

 

How bad are things for Donald Trump? His overall approval rating is down to 38 percent, according to the New York Times poll, a reminder that half of any population has below-average intelligence and that 38 percent evidently couldn’t beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe.

 

Trump’s numbers are even lower, hovering right around zero, among people who spent the 1980s more or less in drag or providing the music Milli Vanilli (RIP) lip-synched to. I can see how Bret Michaels might have got sucked into Trump’s orbit—given the soft transvestitism of his old band, Poison, he’s basically a kind of a rock ’n’ roll de-transitioner, and he now is down to no more than a little J.D. Vance-style smokey eyeliner. And that is to say nothing of the wreckage of that great Bavarian burlesque act, Milli Vanilli—was there ever another pop act that was quite as Trumpy, i.e., mired in fraud? You can see those sad sacks signing up for the Trump show—or probably any show that comes with a paycheck. But C+C Music Factory said, “Hmmm ... no,” and even Morris Day has no time for Trump. As the cretin in chief himself might tweet, “SAD!”

 

Celebrity-wise, Trump is down to his hardcore groupies: Kid Rock, a 55-year-old white rapper who cannot figure out which is the front end of a fedora, and Lee Greenwood, a guy older than Joe Biden (really!) who is known for one treacly anthem so deeply impregnated with artificial sweetener that it’ll probably give listeners cancer through their hearing aids.

 

Trump’s circle of sycophants had floated the notion that action stars such as Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham might attend the cage fight being staged Sunday on the White House lawn, but they are not coming: The stars of the Fast and Furious franchise all wash their hair that night, I suppose. The Trump gang should have asked Terry Crews, who did, after all, portray the patron saint of Trumpism, “five-time Smackdown champion, porn superstar, and president of the United States, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho,” in Mike Judge’s prophetic Idiocracy. Terry Crews is the rare sort of guy who could take a night off from America’s Got Talent, attend a Trump event, and very possibly raise the average IQ at both venues.

 

Even congressional Republicans are making squeaky little verminous noises vaguely suggestive of independence.

 

It is not much, to be sure: A few Republicans have very politely suggested that the president should not be permitted to loot the fisc to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off cronies who got themselves into trouble by helping him try to stage a coup d’état in 2021—but Republican senators under the leadership of John Thune, who miraculously manages to stand upright despite the absence of a spine, killed the effort to put anything down on paper in a way that would matter.

 

A few Republicans have suggested that the acting director of national intelligence should maybe not be Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, whose silver spoon apparently was filled with lead paint chips. He’s a poster boy for nepotism who somehow managed to get kicked off the board of a company his grandfather founded as soon as the old man assumed room temperature and yet somehow is also not as obviously incompetent as the most recent DNI, conspiracy kook Tulsi Gabbard. He’s another trust-fund henchman, a type Trump attracts like flies to whatever fecal euphemism you think works best in this context.

 

A whole seven Republicans cast votes to block funding for Trump’s batty ballroom project, but not enough to make any difference. House Republicans helped to pass a bill to sanction a few oligarchs in the circle of Vladimir Putin and fund aid for Ukraine, a country that inconveniently refuses to keel over and die as Donald Trump and J.D. Vance cheer on the Russians who are murdering and raping their way across the country. (The measure now heads to the Senate, where Thune has been content to let similar measures die.) Four Republicans in the House voted for a measure that would constrain Trump’s efforts to continue waging his illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran.

 

To repeat: It is not much. Not very much at all.

 

It is not enough to make a substantive difference, of course. To the considerable extent that President Trump has taken it upon himself to usurp congressional authority in matters ranging from war-making to the allocation of money, Congress has relatively little power to rein him in by means of statute or oversight. If Congress wants to stop the corruption, the illegal war, the trade anarchy, the massacres at sea, and the rest of it, then Congress can—and should—do what Congress has failed to do twice in Trump’s sorry career, which is to use the power of impeachment to remove him from office and to bar him from serving in any other office. Of course, Republicans will give no thought to doing that—it is, after all, the right thing, the patriotic thing, and the honorable thing.

 

It is not likely that this will be enough to make a political difference, either. Most of the frogginess we have seen from Republicans has come from dead men walking, such as Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, who bent themselves into positions beyond the flexibility of Yogi Coudoux and accepted degradations beyond the imaginings of the Marquis de Sade when they calculated that hugging Trump close would keep their political careers alive. Mike Pence, who was Trump’s most fervid and po-faced apologist for years until by means of some bizarre moral parthenogenesis he produced a conscience at the very moment Trump’s star seemed to be setting in 2021, is out there trying to rally Republicans to the banner of Reaganism when what he should really do, if he had an ounce of self-respect, is don ashes and sackcloth, or maybe set himself on fire on the National Mall like one of those Vietnamese monks protesting the Ngô Đình Diệm regime way back when, while those of us who were willing to pay the price to be on the right side of this question from the beginning (and it was not inexpensive) roast a few s’mores over the hot embers of his smoldering sanctimony.

 

Which is basically what we should be doing to the Republican Party as a whole, because the Republican Party is still going to be what it is—dangerous and depraved—even when Trump has left the scene. Republicans from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Johnson to their media cheerleaders, allies, and apologists should go down with the Trump ship—and, if necessary, they should be made to go down with it. The Republican Party has, in this past decade and some, shown itself to be willing to embrace anything, to tolerate anything, and to justify anything, no matter how fundamentally opposed to the values and virtues Republicans once claimed to cherish and champion, no matter how grotesque or unpatriotic or un-Christian, as long as it helps them stay in office—not even in power, which would be an almost understandable thing, but simply in office, sinecure-ensconced castrati who offer nothing to Congress and who cling to their seats only for the sake of their modest salaries and some staff and an air-conditioned place to hang out on Capitol Hill between Fox News hits.

 

In anno Domini 2026, there simply is no honorable way to be associated with the Republican Party. The notion of trusting anybody running for office under its banner—much less actively supporting any such person—is out of the question for the foreseeable future, at least as far as I am concerned. It is less a political party or a movement than it is an infestation, and there will be no return to normal politics possible until we have it out, which begins—and cannot proceed without—a full and forthright reckoning with the 2021 attempt to overthrow the government of the United States by nullifying the results of the 2020 election. A politician—or a party—who cannot simply tell the truth about that episode cannot be trusted with power.

 

So, rat-paddle away from the ship as fast as your little rat paws will carry you, Republicans. But the water is cold, and the sea is dark and vast.

 

Words About Words

 

One of the things that many readers of journalism (in print or online) do not know—or do not have reason to think about—is that different parts of a package typically are written by different people. Reporters and columnists do not write their own headlines. (As they will feel obliged to inform you, from time to time.) What is known as “display copy,” meaning headlines, subheads, decks, photo captions, etc., typically are written by someone other than the name on the byline, often by multiple people. Some of those people are writers and editors, and some of them are not: One of the reasons captions tend to be bad is that photographers often write them, and editors do not have the good sense to scrap what was written by the photographer, who might not be a photographer at all if he knew how to write.

 

So, for example, you’ll have things such as this Entertainment Weekly item about Val Kilmer, in which the deck reads:

 

Adam Marcus directed Val Kilmer, who died in 2025, in the 2008 action thriller

 

While another bit of display copy reads:

 

Conspiracy director Adam Marcus slammed Val Kilmer, who died in 2005, as the “worst human being I’ve ever known” in a social media post.

 

Time does fly, but 2005 is not 2025. (The item has since been corrected.)

 

All mistakes are embarrassing, of course, but mistakes in headlines and other kinds of display copy loom a little larger in the public conversation than those in the body copy, which is, of course, the meticulously groomed and carefully edited work of a reporter or columnist or another kind of writer. (Do I need to explain the tone of voice there? I don’t think I do.) In this, there is a confluence of artificial intelligence and organic stupidity: Many people fail to read past the headlines, and many automated systems for organizing and locating digital content in effect assign extra weight to content in certain contexts, which is why AI summaries of the reporting on any given subject often read more like bad headlines than good reporting. Nature of the beast and all that.

 

In a sense, we do not know very much about the past. About the Roman republic and empire, for example, what do we really know? We have a very, very small sampling of what the Romans wrote and said, without much context or any good way of evaluating how accurate or relevant most of it is, we have a similarly small and similarly unreliable sampling of what was said and written about them by others, and we have some durable things that were left behind. You’d be surprised by how little we really know about the Anglo-Saxon forebears to Britain and how much of that information comes from a tiny handful of church documents and tax records.

 

I sometimes wonder whether we really know all that much more about the present. In my own occupation, mainly writing about politics and public controversies, it is remarkable how little relatively well-read people understand about the political ideas and beliefs not only of those who disagree with them but also of those who agree with them. Most of us understand very little about how important institutions work, not only as a matter of formal procedure but also as a matter of institutional sociology. This is one of the reasons conspiracy thinking is so popular and so easy to fall into—and why it is the default position of so many people who would tell you that they are too smart to fall for a conspiracy theory.

 

This is getting worse, of course, partly for technological reasons (social media enables the spread of misinformation) but to an even greater part, I think, for moral reasons, with the waning of the ethos of active and responsible citizenship and the continued ascent of politics-as-entertainment. I am continually shocked by the number of young people I encounter—educated young people, people who can do calculus, engineers, and such—whose ordinary conversation contains a tremendous amount of uncritically accepted falsehoods or genuinely insane conspiracy stuff, along with a pronounced inability to maintain categorical boundaries. (By maintaining categorical boundaries, I mean being able to keep straight related but different sets, e.g., Arab and Muslim, something that has come up repeatedly in the past few months in the context of the Iran war and having to explain to reasonably smart people that Iranians mostly are not Arabs.) I suspect that this has something to do with asking people to pay attention to too many different things at once. I do not think the world was entirely better off when members of the lettered aristocracy of the 18^th century were all reading the same two dozen novels every year and had a lot in common to talk about at dinner parties, but I do think there is something to T.S. Eliot’s belief that his students might have been better off if they had read fewer books but had read the same books.

 

Knowledge is, ultimately, something that is held in common. There is no other way to keep it. When it is gone, it is gone, and what we have are fragments and errors.

 

In Other Wordiness ...

 

For a second there, I was not sure whether to write continually or continuously. Continuous means uninterrupted, as in the 3,000-year continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel. Continual means repeated, as in my continual conflation of “lay” with “lie,” which some of you were kind enough to point out in an earlier piece.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

Poor Bret Michaels was caught in my crosshairs today. For the record: I like Poison. And Poison’s guitarist, C.C. DeVille, is, in my view, terribly underrated. The band’s pop sensibility kept him from going full shredder at the apex of his fame, and I don’t suppose his hair-band image did his reputation a lot of good among nerds who were trying to figure out how to play Steve Vai compositions (which, good luck with that), but there are few hard rock guitarists of his era who produced music that is more fun to play. A halfway competent guitarist (and I am only halfway competent) can pretty much master the solo from “Talk Dirty to Me” in an afternoon, and it is really enjoyable to let that rip. Music in the 1980s was a bit more fun, and a bit less self-serious, than what came after in the lugubrious grunge years and in our own too-heavy times.

 

In Closing

 

I do not much care for terminological policing—you know what I mean: “We shouldn’t call it ‘capitalism’; we should call it ‘economic freedom.’” Or: “We shouldn’t say ‘abortion rights,’ we should say ‘reproductive freedom.’” Or: “We shouldn’t call it the ‘estate tax’; we should call it the ‘death tax.’” Etc.

 

But let me put in a word here for anti-liberalism as an alternative to illiberalism and to postliberalism. Illiberal does not describe a set of ideas, really. It describes an instinct, a tendency that is too broad to be useful as a political descriptor.

 

Postliberalism sounds to my ear like a suggestion that the people who champion the associated worldview have moved on from liberalism to something else. But they have not. They are very much stuck on liberalism, and how much they hate it. I know: I have read most of their dopey books, and there is no there there beyond objections to liberalism, which in practice mainly means objections to free enterprise and official social toleration. The so-called post-liberals are not, in my reading, very much or very consistently in favor of anything at all, their position being almost an entirely negative one.

 

And there is much to dislike about the combination of capitalism with general social toleration: You end up with a lot of porn and reality television, for one thing, but you also end up with a society that overvalues economic arrangements that are oriented toward profit-seeking and that has a hard time distinguishing between the police power (“You must not do that!”) and discernment (“You should not do that”) as though libertarian legal arrangements necessitated libertarianism in taste and judgement. Not only is it the case that a libertarian legal environment does not require a generally libertarian social ethos, it may also be the case that procedural libertarianism ultimately is incompatible with the most liberal kind of live-and-let-live outlook.

 

Which is to say, I think Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek would have written very good laws for a nation of Puritans and others living in a Puritan-inflected culture of restraint, moderation, and self-control, but maybe not for the kind of people who rally to the banner of Donald Trump, Graham Platner, et al. It is not mere coincidence that the United States and Europe have turned away from the idea of political freedom when personal libertinism is at what may very well be the apex. The anti-liberals are of course trying to pull on the wrong lever, but that is to be expected.