Nauseously Optimistic

A Letter from France

"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American" - Ronald Reagan, 1988

Greetings from sunny Angoulême. There are four days to go, and I’m grateful to be spending them adjacent to the Cognac region of France.

Zok and I take a walk in Angoulême on Thursday night.

**

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It Begins Again. Already.

Of course. There is, of course, zero chance that Donald Trump will graciously concede or even acknowledge defeat. Indeed, it’s a rock solid certainty that he will declare victory Tuesday night, regardless of he outcome. And, as we are seeing this morning, the threats will just get uglier.

Mood

France is as good a place as any to contemplate political catastrophe.

Americans have long been encouraged to contrast our successful Revolution with the bloody Terror of the French upheaval and its descent into Napoloeonism, war, and disaster. On my first visit here (for my daughter’s wedding to a Frenchman) I visited the great cathedral at Avignon, which had been stripped and gutted by revolutionaries. In the ruined church, I remember reading a small placard depicting the vicious murder of a young noblewoman by a revolutionary mob, and wondering what was it about the French that made them capable of such brutality and frenzied violence. I wondered the same thing about the Germans and the Russians.

Now, I often think back on the naivete and ignorance of thinking that American exceptionalism somehow made us immune to that sort of thing. Because, of course we never were. And we aren’t now, are we?

I bring this up because (1) I’m here in France again, (2) I’m remembering that moment of embarrassing wrongness, and (3) I’m thinking a lot about naivete.

And I’m thinking about something I had to write this morning.

I was asked to write a column that would be published in the event of a Trump victory next week. The assignment required me to enter that dark space and imagine what it meant. This is some of what I imagined I might have to write:

There will be the inevitable attempts to downplay the threat of a second Trump presidency, but this time we need to take Trump both seriously and literally. We can expect Trump to begin a massive purge of the federal workforce, and begin the process of mass deportations. The reign of Stephen Miller, Elon Musk and RFK, Jr. will begin. Trump will pardon the January 6 rioters, and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he will instruct the DOJ to go after his political opponents. He will abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump will gut or kill Obamacare outright, while imposing massive new tariffs on the economy.

We also know that the guardrails will not hold, because they did not hold before. If they had, none of this would have happened. Neither the impeachment process nor the justice system blocked his return to power. And now the ultimate guardrail has failed.

Whatever the final outcome, the American people (or enough of them) have returned him to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual assaults, the lies, the sedition, or the felonies. Not the raw bigotry of his campaign, not insults, nor the threats. In the most graphic terms imaginable, the American people were warned of the danger. His loyal vice president refused to endorse him; his top general called him a “total fascist”; some of his closest aides and cabinet members described his erratic character and his indifference to the Constitution.

But in the end, Trump was right. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any votes. But, we know now that it was worse. He stood at the center of our politics and incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. It didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that he tried to overturn a free and fair election. It didn’t matter that he he was found liable of raping a woman; and it didn’t matter that he had called for terminating the Constitution to restore him to power. And it didn’t matter when he called for the execution of Liz Cheney, threatened to use the military against his fellow Americans, or lied about migrants eatings cats and dogs; or called the United States a “garbage country.”

This is the hardest part about today: realizing that our fellow Americans saw all of that; watched all of that; listened to all of that, and said, “Yes, that’s what we want.” That’s who we are.

**

I devoutly wish that this article will never see the light of day. And I hope everything I just wrote there turns out to be wrong.

I’m not making any predictions, but one phrase (I don’t know who coined it) is sticking with me. I find myself “nauseously optimistic.” It’s not based on the polls, the odds, or the punditry. It rests solely on my (possibly naive) belief that the American people cannot and will not look at Donald Trump and say, “Yeah, that’s who we are.”

Because that, my friends, is what’s at stake on Tuesday.

Nota Bene

Peter Wehner: A Closing Case Against Trump - The Atlantic

THE STRONGEST CONSERVATIVE CASE for voting for Harris doesn’t have nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her opponent. Trump remains a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than Harris. Trump has, in a way no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within and broken with the most important tenets of conservatism. That’s no surprise, because his desire isn’t to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground. In that respect and others, Trump is temperamentally much more of a Jacobin than a Burkean. He has transformed the Republican Party in his image in ways that exceed what any other American politician has done in modern times…

Trump’s supporters may be enraged by the fascist label, but they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label applies. And the only way for the GOP to become a sane, conservative party again is by ridding itself of Trump, which is why even conservatives who oppose Harris’s policies should vote for her. Harris’s election is the only thing that can break the hold of Trump on his party.

Acquaintances of mine, and acquaintances of friends of mine, say that they find Trump contemptible, but that they can’t vote for Harris, because they disagree with her on policy. My response is simple: The position she once held on fracking may be bad, but fascism is worse. The position she holds on any issue may be bad, but fascism is worse.

A friend told me he won’t vote for either Harris or Trump. If Trump wins a second term, he said, “I suspect he will give more attention to his golf game than to siccing the IRS, FBI, or whoever on his political opponents.” His message to me, in other words, is to relax a bit. Trump may be a moral wreck, but he won’t act on his most outlandish threats.

My view is that when those seeking positions of power promote political violence, have a long record of lawlessness, are nihilistic, and embody a “will to power” ethic; make extralegal attempts to maintain power and stop the peaceful transfer of power; and use the words of fascists to tell the world that they are determined to exact vengeance—it’s probably wise to take them at their word.

...If Trump wins the presidency again, conservatism will be homeless, a philosophy without a party, probably for at least a generation. And the damage to America, the nation Republicans claim to love, will be incalculable, perhaps irreversible. The stakes are that high.

Harris becoming president may not be the best thing that could happen to conservatism. But if she becomes president, she will have prevented the worst thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more important, to the country.

…

Judge Michael Luttig: Trump Betrayed America.Republicans Must Put Country Above Party. - The New York Times

There could be no higher duty of American citizenship than to decisively repudiate a man who betrayed the nation when he was previously entrusted with the highest office in the land and now threatens the persecution of American citizens who have crossed him. In the almost 250 years since the founding of the nation, no president before Donald Trump has ever so betrayed America.

This is not a difficult decision for voters, though my fellow Republicans and conservatives will finally have to decide what they have long hoped they would never have to decide — whether to put their country above their party. Republicans and conservatives have always proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came. That time has come. If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they will never do so. They must be honest with themselves.

All Americans, but especially Republicans, will live with their decision the rest of their lives. This election is anything but politics as usual, no matter how desperately Donald Trump and the G.O.P. have tried to make it that.

Yes, there will be cognac…

From my wife’s newsletter:

Our daughter and grandsons live a stone’s throw from Cognac without actually living in Cognac. There is a particular distillery that we love whose products are nearly—although not quite—impossible to obtain in the U.S. I imagine we may be making a purchase. Or two.

Our daughter’s new house hasn’t had the wifi installed, and because it’s France you have to just wait. Not sure how much posting I’ll do while we’re there.

Meanwhile, and because I still have a lot to do this morning, today’s post will be lots of dog photos. I suppose some might consider them gratuitous, but I hear from many of you that they are essential.

They are for me.

Finally