Ten Years of Trump

The world turned upside down.

After shilling for Putin and humiliating himself at the G-7, Donald Trump left early to let the actual leaders of the free world confer on their own. Meanwhile he flip-flopped on his latest deportation TACO; even as dreams of bombing Iran danced in his head.

And it’s only Tuesday.

June 16, 2015

Ten years ago yesterday, Donald Trump came down the golden escalator, and we still struggle to grasp how much the world has changed since then. Not just the politics, but the culture, ourselves, and the tides of history.

Back then, it would all have been inconceivable and are-you-fuqqing-kidding-me unbelievable.

Imagine telling your 2015-self, how this cartoonish joke would come to dominate American politics. Imagine trying to explain January 6, the election to the presidency of a convicted felon, or the empowerment of freaks, geeks, and conspiracists.

Indeed, try to imagine explaining pretty much anything that happened in the last 48 hours. It would be like talking to someone from a different century.

No that’s not right; it would be like talking to someone from a different reality.

Donald Trump was, of course, both the symptom and the cause of what has happened. But his descent on the escalator was a decisive moment in our own descent during the decade since.

Conventional political analyses do not come close to describing the way our world has been turned on its head. Yes, the GOP lost its spine and its balls; Democrats flailed; the electorate realigned. The entertainment wing of the GOP routed the establishment. Much of the rest of the media has been enshittified.

But that really doesn’t capture the velocity or the scope of the transformation. It’s not just our politics. America has become dumber, crueler, crazier, and more violent. To much of the rest of the world, we have become unrecognizable.

Institutions we thought were solid turned into vapor. “Principles” were discarded like used Kleenex. Truth was battered, twisted, and drifted toward irrelevance. Ancient bigotries were revived and became mainstream. The fever swamps overflowed. The best lacked all conviction while the very worst were full of passionate intensity.

Imagine telling your 2015-self how the party of law and order would embrace rioters who beat cops; or that the party of “character” and “values” would turn power over to a convicted felon and a ketamine-soaked oligarch with a chainsaw. Imagine trying to explain how the party of American Exceptionalism would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vladimir Putin. Or that America’s fattest law firms and billionaires would grovel at his feet.

In the Before Times, conservatives used to say that character mattered. Bragging about rape and grabbing women by the “pussy” used to matter. So did sedition, fraud, graft, and chronic lying.

Ten years on, they are our daily companions, and we almost numb to it. Ten years on, nothing matters.

On Today’s “To the Contrary Podcast”, Ryan Lizza and I discuss how much the world has changed in the last decade.

Subscribers can listen to an ad-free version right here… or you can watch on YouTube / Listen (and subscribe) on Apple/ Spotify / iHeart / RSS Feed.

Mike Lee and the Broken Brains of MAGA

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"Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?"

How The Right Lost Its Mind (Revisited)

The 10-year-anniversary inspired me to go back to what I was thinking a decade ago. Honestly, I had no idea how bad it would get. But here’s what I wrote — and we have spent 10 years living in this world.

From “How the Right Lost Its Mind” (2017)

[Somehow] a movement based on ideas had devolved into a new tribalism that valued neither principle nor truth; a Brave New Age that replaced Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. with Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos. Moral reasoning was supplanted by polls; ideas were elbowed aside by charlatans, grifters, and media clowns; while ratings spikes were proof that one was not “out of touch.” The gleeful rejection of established norms of civility, tradition, and basic decency played well in an era of reality television, but was the antithesis of what conservatism had once represented.

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Unfortunately, the effects of Trumpism cannot be measured solely in terms of policy, but also in the way it has coarsened the culture as a whole. The election marked not only a rejection of the Reagan legacy, but also the abandonment of respect for gradualism, civility, expertise, intelligence, and prudence—the values that once were taken for granted among conservatives. This isn’t to say that conservatism was ever strictly genteel; that is obviously not the case, especially in recent years. But the distinctive element of 2016 was the open ridicule and contempt for notions of civility, or even basic decency, as values that needed to be protected and advanced.

In the 1990s, as Bill Clinton’s scandals unfolded, conservatives insisted that character mattered and worried deeply and often loudly about the toxic effects of our politics on the culture. What message, they asked, were we sending our children? So, what is the message now?

Consider the problems of raising children in in an era in which our most famous role model is Donald Trump, a new symbol of power, success, celebrity, and masculinity. As parents we struggle to teach our children empathy and compassion. We hope to teach them character, humility, impulse control, kindness, and good sportsmanship. We want them to learn how to win and lose graciously, treat others with respect, avoiding name-calling, and tell the truth even if it’s inconvenient. But young people only need to flip the channel to see what success looks like in America today. Whatever we tell them, young people have a keen sense of what traits are behaviors are rewarded and celebrated. They have an acute sense of the hypocrisy of a society that touts virtue but lavishes fame, wealth, and power on people who flout them. Especially for young men still searching for a model of what it means to be a man, Trump’s behavior will carry significant weight. And why not? He may be a bully, a fabulist, a serial insulter and abuser of women, but our alpha-male president is a billionaire, married to a super model, who has been elevated to the most powerful job in the world.

And the folks who had been the culture’s chief defenders of character and virtue seem to be okay with that. In August 2016, Bennett wrote an essay making the case for overlooking questions of character in choosing a president. "Our country can survive the occasional infelicities and improprieties of Donald Trump," Bennett wrote. "But it cannot survive losing the Supreme Court to liberals and allowing them to wreck our sacred republic. It would reshape the country for decades."

Like Bennett, most conservatives have been willing to make the tradeoff: they were willing to inject toxic sludge into the culture in order to win a political victory. Needless to say, this is a dramatic reversal for the right. Conservatives once recognized that politics was a means, not an end, because they believed that we live in communities sustained by moral capital, recognizing as Jonathan Haidt notes, that moral communities are “fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.”

But now, for many conservatives, a willingness to ignore, rationalize, or defend lies has become a test of tribal loyalty. At the same time, Trump’s acolytes in politics and social media have modelled their behavior on his, combining the worst traits of the school yard bully, the thin-skinned nastiness that mimics confidence; the strut and sneer that substitute for actual strength, vindictive smash mouth attacks have replaced civil engagement. For many of us, this has a familiar feel; it is as if we’ve all been sent back to the 6th grade playground…

In 2016, the various denizens of Crazytown who had made cameo appearances on the national stage were first emboldened, then empowered, gleefully crashing the party, overturning the furniture and settled hierarchies as they raucously dismissed traditional gatekeepers.

Those who were slow to join the bacchanal were denounced as sellouts and traitors, or perhaps, even worse, elitists. This was all heady stuff that required extraordinary nimbleness: conservatives who had just five minutes earlier agreed that Russia posed a global threat pivoted to embrace Vladimir Putin as an exemplar of white Christian civilization; Tea Party activists who had railed against deficit spending now accepted calls for massive stimulus spending; the party of free markets endorsed protectionism and an economic policy that seemed driven by personal fear and favor; constitutionalists watched silently as the rule of law was undermined and norms of public integrity ignored. Activists who had clamored to “burn it all down” suddenly pivoted to demand party loyalty and virtual lockstep support of policies, even when they conflicted with fundamental principles or contradicted what the dear leader had previously said.

A movement once driven by ideas found itself dominated by Kardashian-like talking point reciters, intellectually dishonest shills, cynical careerists, and alt right bullies. Recent debates among conservatives, one commentator gibed, “show[ed] the nuanced differences between a YouTube comments section and a chain email to your grandfather.” Conservative “leaders” did not merely regurgitate “talking points” but became addicted to word salads of conservative clichés—“establishment,” “globalist,” “elites”—that became substitutes for actual thought. This has paralleled a surge in the anti-intellectualism in American life, perhaps facilitated by compromises among the people whose judgment and ideas I once relied upon and trusted.

Tuesday dogs

Before I tackled today’s newsletter, the boys and I decided to go for a walk in the woods.