MAGA's Flying Monkeys Were Even Worse Than You Remember
Nancy French's horrifying new account
Look, this is not a daily (or even a weekly) newsletter; it’s a random, unscheduled, irregular sort of thing. Some days, however, just cry out for some not-insane commentary. And this is one of those days, my friends.
Aileen Cannon turns out to be exactly who we thought she was; more great moments in presidential rhetoric; MTG folds; and a reminder of the rank awfulness of MAGA’s flying monkeys.
But first, of course, the obligatory dog pictures.
The boys, in a rare moment of repose, contemplation, and amity.
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Auggie has plans this morning.
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Eli explains his relationship to Auggie as he sees it.
Another great moment in presidential rhetoric
Via NBC: Judge admonished Trump for 'cursing audibly' while Stormy Daniels testified about sexual encounter.
[Judge] Merchan told Blanche, “I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous,” according to the transcript.
“It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that,” he added….
“One time I noticed when Ms. Daniels was testifying about rolling up the magazine, and presumably smacking your client, and after that point he shook his head and he looked down. And later, I think he was looking at you, Mr. Blanche, later when were talking about The Apprentice, at that point he again uttered a vulgarity and looked at you this time. Please talk to him at the break, Mr. Blanche,” Merchan said, according to the transcript.
“Yes, I will,” Blanche responded.
Mainstreaming the hate
My latest piece at MSNBC Daily: Nancy French's 'Ghosted' recounts the damage Trump wrought with the GOP.
Donald Trump’s hush money trial has highlighted the ugliness at the heart of his first presidential campaign in 2016. Not only did his allies at the National Enquirer “catch and kill” embarrassing stories, we learned during trial testimony, but they also worked feverishly to spread false stories, conspiracy theories and slurs against his political opponents. As former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified last week, sliming Trump’s enemies was as much a part of his deal as protecting Trump from stories about porn stars and Playboy models.
As awful as all of this was, a new book by author Nancy French, a prolific ghost writer for conservative figures, reminds us that the Enquirer’s flood of invective was only part of what was being unleashed by the MAGA trolls against Trump’s critics and opponents. It’s also a powerful and horrifying account of how a once fringe movement, the alt right, has come to occupy the central seat of the Republican Party….
In “Ghosted: An American Story,” French recounts the vicious racist attacks against her and her family after she and her husband, David French, a well-known conservative commentator who is now a New York Times columnist, broke with Trump.
Suffice it to say that the attacks were much worse than you remember.
How bad was it? The gas chamber imagery was just the start.
In late 2015, online trolls seized on the existence of their daughter Naomi, who the Frenches had adopted from Ethiopia, as an attack tactic. In her book, French recalls the moment she saw the picture online: a photoshopped image of 7-year-old Naomi “in a gas chamber, with Donald Trump — wearing a Nazi uniform — pulling a lethal gas lever.”
There was more. Other online trolls photoshopped the girl’s face onto images of enslaved people and identified her with racial slurs that don’t bear repeating here.
“The alt right tried to inflict as much personal pain as they could on us, in the most intimate ways possible. These radicalized Trump supporters harassed us, mocked us, maligned us, and believed we should lose our jobs, and — at least according to our email inboxes — our lives,” French writes.
At the time, the alt right was not dominant within the GOP, but it was growing in influence and power.
Over the past eight years both Trump and his loudest cheerleaders have legitimized and amplified language and ideas that had once been confined to the darker corners of the right-wing fever swamps. Writes French: “Alt right cheerleader Bannon was Trump’s most trusted advisor, and Trump himself retweeted the same sort of alt right accounts that had attacked us.”
The hate became a torrent.
White nationalist websites began labeling David French a “cuckservative,” a racist and sexist term suggesting that he was a racial “cuckold.” Alt-right trolls spun their family makeup into ugly comments: “Instead of having another child of their own, they deliberately decided to adopt someone who is alien to them — genetically, racially, culturally — as possible.” And it got worse, evolving into faked photos of French edited to depict pornographic and racist images.
And then “American Greatness” weighed in.
In 2019, the Trump-supporting magazine American Greatness published a blatantly racist poem titled “Cuck Elegy,” which accused “parasites” of surrendering to the “mocha-skinned” and “low-life reprobates.” In case the references were too subtle, the magazine accompanied the poem with a photo of David and Naomi French.
As French writes, “this was not fringe.” The harassment she and her family endured marked an ugly turning point of sorts, as language and imagery that was once restricted to far-right racist websites edged closer to the Trumpified mainstream. As The New York Times’ Jane Coaston noted at the time the poem was published, American Greatness was “a publication that is attempting to put meat on the bones of Trumpism, so to speak.” At the time, David French worked for National Review magazine, and one of his colleagues, Victor Davis Hanson, was a prolific contributor to American Greatness. And at the time, National Review’s editor Rich Lowry noted that American Greatness “imagines itself an intellectually serious tribune of Trumpism.”
Despite those pretensions to seriousness, the editors of the Trump-aligned magazine continued publishing content that attacked the Frenches.
In 2016, Nancy wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, recounting her sexual abuse as a child at Bible school, titled, “What it’s like to experience the 2016 election as both a conservative and a sex abuse survivor.” But when she spoke out on the sexual abuse allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a writer for American Greatness, Julie Kelly, mocked her trauma.
“OK — Nancy French screwed around with her preacher when she was a teen,” Kelly posted on the platform then known as Twitter. “So IF Kavanaugh groped a girl 36 years ago, he can’t be on SCOTUS?”
“That tweet was a punch in the stomach,” French writes in her book. “To discredit me, Kelly used the common tactic of the alt right cruelty. She sexually weaponized her insult instead of dealing with my actual arguments.”
But none of this stopped the legacy media — and others — from treating “American Greatness,” and its editor, Christopher Buskirk, as if it was a legitimate mainstream-ish voice.
Until at least 2021, Buskirk was a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His website boasts that he has been published by The Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and The Hill. He’s been featured on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” "PBS Newshour" and on CNN.
And, for Nancy French, that is the point: “This casual racism and brutality was not pushed by a fringe element,” she writes in her book. “It had become the main political strategy of many conservatives. These people spouting conspiracy theories and shouting invectives were now embedded, wrapped up, and intertwined with mainstream Republicans.”
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BONUS, back in November 2019, I spoke with Nancy on the Bulwark Podcast and discussed some of the incidents she is now describing in her book.
You can listen to the whole thing here.
Nota Bene
I’m imagining a thought experiment in which I had a conversation with political observers from decades past. “Well, Americans elected a television personality to the nation’s highest office,” I’d say, “and after he was thrown out of office for being a corrupt and incompetent failure, he was accused of several dozen felonies, including falsifying business records related to the hush-money payments he made to a porn star he allegedly had sex with while cheating on his third wife.”
“Oh,” I’d add, “and this is barely in the top 10 of the biggest scandals surrounding the former president.”
It’s at this point that I’d wait for the inevitable questions about whether social conservatives and evangelicals consider the defendant one of the biggest villains in modern American life, leading me to explain, “Actually, they revere him with borderline-religious reverence.”
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Judith Shulevitz: Listen to What They’re Chanting
The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.
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On the stand, Daniels provided ugly details about how Trump treated her, and about how Trump treats, and views, women. These insights are notable, but they’re not new. In 2016, leaked audio of Trump making grotesque and sexist comments about women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush almost derailed his presidential campaign. Last year, Trump was held liable for sexual assaulting and then repeatedly defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
But Daniels’s testimony is a reminder that contempt and mistreatment of women is a core theme of Trump’s life and politics. Both the press and Democratic opponents have struggled to make this issue central to 2024, even though abortion rights and women’s health care are the key issues of the campaign. It’s unclear whether the trial will spark more reporting and discussion of Trump’s treatment of and attitudes about women. But it should.
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Paul Ryan has no interest in giving Donald Trump another chance come November.
The former House speaker told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday that he doesn't plan to vote for the former president, adding he would be writing in a Republican candidate instead.
“Character is too important for me,” Ryan told us at the Milken Institute Global Conference. “[The presidency] is a job that requires the kind of character [Trump] doesn’t have.”
And finally, this is NOT The Onion:
Thank you for doing this Charlie. It’s good to still get my Sykes fix.
I plan to buy Nancy French's book. The harassment she and her husband have endured is criminal. Beyond that it's pure evil.