Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tim Coffey's avatar

JVL: "But if I described the state of affairs as they exist on January 27 to you 12 weeks ago, you also would have thought that I was crazy and hysterical. You would have said, 'I guess that’s possible, but you’re talking about something close to a worst-case scenario.'"

No, I would have said that given Trump's sociopathy and the temperament of his most radical enablers, the worst case scenario was very likely. When JVL does an analysis of Trump and his actions, he doesn't really get into his various character disorders as a driving factor in his decision making. When I look at Trump, all I see is character disorders. The truly dangerous part of all of it is given the large number of holes in his psychological makeup, no matter what he does, he will never, ever be whole. He will never be satiated. But he'll keep on trying, sort of like someone who keeps doing heroin in order to capture the bliss of using it for the first time but never quite getting there.

Never forget that 49.8% of the electorate looked at Trump's sociopathy and didn't give a shit. Also never forget that if one day Barack Obama "fell out of a window", somewhere in MAGAstan, Cletus would be cheering it on.

Expand full comment
William Anderson's avatar

Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Hugh Hewitt doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

Hugh Hewitt will insist, until the moment it happens, that the high-risk and worst-case scenarios are fanciful and absurd. And then, once they happen, he will say that he doesn't approve of the high-risk scenarios, that no one could have possibly foreseen the high-risk scenario even as you point out all the times you told him about the worst-case possibility, and that even though the high-risk scenario is bad, he is forced to do absolutely nothing to mitigate the worst-case scenario that he obviously never could have anticipated or approved of.

People tell me "never assume malice when incompetence will suffice." I can't help but notice that people get a lot more incompetent whenever incompetence serves as a shield for malice. Susan Collins keeps making assumptions about how Donald Trump will act chastened and wise in the future, and these assumptions are always proved false. This is assumed to be a mistake on her part. She always makes mistakes that help radical Republicans. She never makes mistakes that would help radical Democrats.

Hugh Hewitt knows that all of the things you point out to him now and could point out to him in the future are possible. He also knows that if he did anything to prevent those outcomes, he would have to say something like 'the enemies of Donald Trump deserve legal protection' or 'there is more to life and America than the temporary goals of the Republican party'. He has been trained, over years, since long before Donald Trump came down to elevator, to never, ever defend someone a Democrat wants to see defended. And so he claims to have no idea what's happening.

He knows what's happening. He's got a notion of the sons-of-censored that are huntin' people. He's seen the same things I've seen, and it's certainly made an impression on me.

Let's stop pretending that he doesn't.

Expand full comment
800 more comments...