Trump is the GOP's Brain Worm

Plus: Not so immune after all.

Conservatism must… be wiped clean of the parasitic cant that defaces it and repels so many of those who approach it inquiringly. —William F. Buckley, Up From Liberalism (1959)

If only Bill Buckley could see them now.

But I digress.

We have a new superseding Trump indictment, which, despite the parsing of the smart set is, indeed, a BFD. Meanwhile, the former president of the United States is stacking his transition team with freaks from across the political spectrum, staging cheesy thumbs-up photo-ops at the graves of dead soldiers¹ and accelerating his perpetual grift by hawking electronic trading cards, and “a piece of the suit Trump wore at his debate with Joe Biden.”

Happy Wednesday.

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The Trump-RFK-Tulsi Axis of Crazy

Our national fever dream continues. The NYT reports:

Donald J. Trump plans to name his former rival, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, a one-time Democrat, as honorary co-chairs of a presidential transition team that will help him select the policies and personnel of any second Trump administration….

As recently as a few months ago, Trump was describing RFK The Lesser as a "radical left lunatic,” but obeisance to the Orange One covers a multitude of sins. In Kennedy’s case that not only includes dumping dead bears in parks, brain worms, and a fetish for all manner of conspiracy theories, from vaccines to chemtrails. Yes, chemtrails:

“‘We are going to stop this crime,’ Kennedy posted on social media Monday in response to an X (formerly Twitter) account sharing a conspiracy theory video, which claimed that pilots use their planes to secretly spray chemicals on unsuspecting populations. These pilots, according to the video, are ‘hardened to humanity’ and ‘could care less about killing off unwanted or leeching aspects of America and the world.’”

And because we live in the most bizarre of timelines, this was not actually the strangest RFK story of the week. ICYMI: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Sawed the Head Off a Whale and Drove It Home, Daughter Says.”

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Fittingly, word of the new Trump-RFK alliance was itself a perfect storm of crackpottery — announced on Tucker Carlson’s show, posted on Elon Musk’s X.

“I’ve been asked to go on the transition team, you know, and to help pick the people who will be running the government,” Mr. Kennedy told Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, in an interview posted on X.

Then there is Tulsi Gabbard, apologist for the Syrian butcher, Bashar al-Assad, and reliable shill for Russian propaganda. This Tulsi Gabbard:

Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee for president, was apparently referring “to a video posted by Ms. Gabbard that claimed the existence of ‘25 to 30’ US-funded biolabs that she went on to assert ‘if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world’.” This was, of course bullshit with hair on it, but typical of Gabbard’s conspiracist maunderings as she has drifted from far-left to far-right.

She will now be part of the team putting together a second Trump term.

In MAGA-World, this new axis of lunacy is being hailed as a political master stroke. But Noah Rothman begs to differ:

Yes, Gabbard and Kennedy speak to an unenthusiastic subset of voters who don’t believe either party is capable of producing meaningful (read, radical) change. But their absorption into the Republican coalition risks alienating a galactically larger host of voters who turn out to vote for establishmentarian figures on a regular basis.

Those voters are not paranoiacs who see their fellow citizens and the country of their birth as the locus of evil in the modern world….They may not trust the elite institutions that have done their utmost to sacrifice their own credibility, but they don’t believe Putin is the real victim, the water supply is glutted with mind-altering chemicals, and the only thing we have to fear is their neighbors.

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Bonus Read: Kash Patel Will Do Anything for Trump - The Atlantic

RE-INDICTED

Jack Smith is not playing. Via Politico:

The new indictment removes some specific allegations against Trump but contains the same four criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. It’s a signal that Smith believes the high court’s immunity decision doesn’t pose a major impediment to convicting the former president.

“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions,” Smith’s team wrote in an accompanying court filing.

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There are less than 70 days until the election… and this is what Drudge looks like this morning:

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What does all this mean?

LEGALLY:

• Trump is not that immune after all.

• Trump is still charged with the same four criminal counts:

  • Conspiracy to defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371);

  • Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding (18 U.S.C. §1512(k));

  • Obstruction of, and attempted obstruction of, an official proceeding (18 U.S.C. §1512(c)(2)); and

  • Conspiracy against rights (18 U.S.C. §241).

•  Smith could have just amended the indictment, but the special counsel went back and got a new grand jury to re-issue indictment...  

• Which may actually be stronger because it is now carefully crafted to comply with a pro-Trump SC ruling....

• This is the fifth grand jury to find that there is probable cause that Trump committed multiple felonies.

POLITICALLY:

• Smith puts J6 (which had seemed back-burnered) back at the center of campaign.

• The new indictment focuses attention on the attempts to overturn the last election... but also on the very real threat of a replay this year.

• The new charges clarify (again) the stakes of the election for voters just now tuning in. (And, nota bene: we're not just dealing with GOP primary voters anymore.)

• Smith’s aggressive move also super-clarifies the stakes for Trump himself... who either wins re-election or faces a federal criminal trial… and possible prison.

The conservatives who lost their minds for Trump

ICYMI: That magnificent beast, Tom Nichols, masterfully deconstructed National Review’s Rick Lowry.

Today, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”

“Character.”

Back in the day, Lowry was a serious and thoughtful person. He wrote smart things. Young conservatives wanted to be like him. He was literally the heir of William F. Buckey Jr. as editor of National Review.

So, attention should be paid to the fact that he authored a polemic of such rank imbecility that it will be studied by phrenologists for generations. A measure of its mindlessness: Lowry’s essay on “character” makes no reference to Trump’s toxic narcissism, his chronic deceit, his frauds, sexual assaults, indictments, or the fact that he is a convicted felon.

Instead, Lowry urges Trump to double down on his most juvenile instincts to belittle and insult his opponent. Writes Nichols:

Trump could beat Kamala Harris, Lowry wrote, not by running on his character but by attacking hers. According to Lowry, you see, one of Trump’s “talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.” Thus, he argued, Trump could hammer Harris into the ground if he called her “weak” enough times—50 times a day ought to do it, according to Lowry—and especially if he gave her a funny nickname, like the ones he managed to stick on “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Little Marco” Rubio.

Lowry concedes that these are schoolyard tactics but argues that they are part of Trump’s genius for “pithily and memorably” nailing his opponents’ weaknesses. The gravamen of his argument: MOAR of this. “Even people who don’t like Mr. Trump or his nicknames would end up using these sobriquets,” Lowry imagines.

Somewhere, Buckley weeps.

The project of his life was to breath intellectual coherence and even elegance into conservative thought. Now comes his successor, Rich Lowry, peddling the parasitic cant that we need to dumb it all down — replacing arguments about policy and ideas with middle-school taunts and epithets.

This is the conservative mind on Trump.

After nearly a decade of dominance, Trump himself has not changed at all (except for some signs of cognitive decline). But the conservative mind has been corrupted almost beyond recognition. As Nichols writes, this is the inevitable result of the bargain that many on the right — including the anti-anti-Trump right — have made.

Lowry and others in that group never became full-fledged MAGA warriors. Many of them hated Trump, as Tucker Carlson, now a born-again Trump booster, admitted in 2021; they just hated Democrats more. But they also hated being reminded of the spirit-crushing bargain they’d made with a tacky outer-borough real-estate developer they wouldn’t have spoken with a year earlier. As Charlie Sykes wrote in 2017, they adopted a new fetish: “Loathing those who loathe the president. Rabid anti-anti-Trumpism.”

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The anti-anti-Trumpers must now define Harris—and all Democrats—as evil beyond words. Otherwise, how would they explain the ghastly compromises they’ve made? How would they argue against voting to stop Trump? When other conservatives, such as noted retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, are enthusiastically endorsing Harris, some pretty fancy dancing is required to explain why your principles are more consistent than theirs. Unfortunately, when Trump is out there raising the bar on idiocy, cruelty, and anti-Americanism every day, that dancing looks more like Raygun than Fred Astaire.

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The behavior of the anti-anti-Trumpers continues to be an inexcusable betrayal of the values they once claimed to hold. Many of them spoke, even passionately, against Trump—and then they shuffled into line. And for what? One more federal judge? A few billion more dollars in the account of a donor?

It’s one thing to sell your soul cheaply. It’s another to keep taking out second and third mortgages on it until all that’s left is debt and shame.

You can read the whole thing here.

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BONUS: Tom answers one of the wooliest of the anti-anti Trumpers:

And, of course, dogs.

Zeke and Waldo!

1. It was actually much worse than merely cheesy. “Trump campaign staff had altercation with official at Arlington Cemetery : NPR”

Two members of Donald Trump's campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony, NPR has learned.

A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.

When the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering Section 60, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside, according to the source.