St. Ronna of the Team Players

Plus: Careening toward authoritarianism with eyes wide open.

Another little TikTok tidbit for you before we get going, per the New York Times: “Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor who is a major investor in the parent company of TikTok, was also the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that recently merged with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company.”

We wrote earlier this month on Yass’s apparent involvement in Trump’s TikTok flipflop; we had no idea then Yass’s financial stake in Trump’s ongoing solvency was so direct!

Hope your weekends were pleasant and your brackets are intact. Happy Monday.

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(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos via Getty Images / Shutterstock.)

Blessed Be the Team Players

Some very interesting quotes from ex-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel this weekend in her first Meet the Press appearance as a paid contributor for NBC!

On Trump’s calls to free those jailed for their participation in January 6th: “I do not think people who committed violent acts on January 6th should be freed.”

On whether Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was legitimate: “He won. He’s the legitimate president. Fair and square he won. It’s certified. It’s done.”

And most remarkable of all, on why she is suddenly willing to take the obviously true and correct stances on these matters: “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself.”

This is no small shift! Just last year, McDaniel was insisting to CNN’s Chris Wallace that “I don’t think [Biden] won it fair. I don’t. I’m not going to say that.”

There’s been a lot of #media #discourse about whether it was ethical or prudent for NBC to hire McDaniel. (We’ve got a good piece up on the subject ourselves.) But her Sunday interview was extremely useful for at least this reason: It’s maybe the starkest example yet of the “team player” sickness that was so instrumental to Trump’s utter co-optation of the institutional GOP.

Now, look: It’s good to be a team player! National politics is chockablock with preening egomaniacs, with lots of perverse incentives for them to build their personal brands even at the expense of their supposed political projects. Look at how the House Republican Conference has imploded on itself over the last two years thanks to the self-centered actions of folks like Rep. Matt Gaetz and you will begin to appreciate how being a team player is a genuine political virtue. Without a critical mass of team players willing to keep their heads down and work—even to take the blame with voters for hard political actions sometimes—nothing would ever get done.

In the age of Trump, however, many institutional Republicans in the Ronna McDaniel mode made a fetish of being team players. The fact that they personally loathed the guy, knew him to be an incontinent boor, a liar, and a jerk—and then went out and carried his water anyway—wasn’t, in their minds, a testament to their weakness and cowardice: In fact, it was just the opposite! It was noble, to their minds, that they were still willing to carry that water despite their own personal feelings: because that is what it is to be a team player.

To go out and endorse Trump after he called your spouse a million racist names? To grit your teeth and repeat his comically thin election lies, knowing you’re torching your professional reputation by doing so? This is superhuman, saintlike team-player behavior.

If you’re wondering how people like McDaniel sleep at night, this is how: To the repeated mantra of well done, good and faithful team player.

—Andrew Egger

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Democracy Dies in Daylight

In 2017, with some fanfare, the Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” To this day it sits, in italics, right under the newspaper’s logo on the front page.

It’s a reasonable claim for the Post to embrace. Conspiracies tend to originate and develop in darkness. The media seeks to expose such conspiracies. Watergate, for example, was hatched behind closed doors. When fully exposed, the conspiracy crumbled, and the perpetrators were held accountable.

More recently, in Trump’s first term, many attempts at concealment were exposed, and various nefarious enterprises then became more difficult to pursue.

So our media are understandably committed to the belief that, as Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Now, one can poke holes in this sometimes simple-minded progressive view. Even in a healthy democracy, the shadows sometimes have much to recommend them. But there’s truth in the hostility to darkness. Enlightenment has accomplished a lot over the centuries!

And there’s still much enlightening to be done.

But in 2024, it also turns out that dispelling the darkness isn’t enough. Democracy can die in darkness. But democracy can also die in daylight.

Isn’t that our current situation? Don’t we spend an awful lot of time looking around in dark corners, while failing to come to grips with what is evident before us, in broad daylight?

One of our two major political parties is fully under the control and at the service of an authoritarian demagogue. The bulk of elected Republican officials are enabling Trump, and most of the others are failing to stand up to him. And this is all happening in broad daylight.

House Republicans are betraying Ukraine in broad daylight.

The conservative movement is defending authoritarianism, embracing Viktor Orbán and for that matter Vladimir Putin, in broad daylight. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for an authoritarian Trump second term exists in broad daylight.

Meanwhile, the less brazen but important capitulation of “normal” conservatives and respectable “mainstream” institutions is mostly happening in broad daylight. The business leaders who say they can live with a Trump second term—and those who even say they would welcome it—all do so in broad daylight. Major media organizations hire political operatives who have spent years spreading Trump’s lies in broad daylight. And a federal judge is working diligently and successfully to ensure that Trump’s crime of taking and concealing classified documents doesn’t come to trial before the election, in a courtroom, in broad daylight.

More broadly, Trump Normalization Syndrome and Trump Rationalization Syndrome are visible everywhere and every day, in broad daylight. And the desperate attempt to minimize the importance of January 6th happens in broad daylight.

So daylight doesn’t solve all our problems. We children of the enlightenment might like to believe, as Matthew Arnold memorably put it, that our troubles come the fact that 

We are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

If only, we think, the darkling plain were well-lit! If only we were not swept up by confusion and afflicted by ignorance!

But wait! But what if the problem isn’t simply the darkness, or the confusion, or the ignorance? What if we’re marching wide awake behind a demagogue into an authoritarian abyss?

Dealing with this challenge is different from, perhaps more daunting than, that of dispelling the darkness. And it’s one that we—and I include myself in this—are less prepared for.

—William Kristol

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Catching up . . .

• Gaza’s risk of famine is accelerating faster than anything we’ve seen this century: Vox

• Biden signs $1.2 trillion funding package, averting U.S. government shutdown: Al Jazeera

• More than 130 dead in Russia concert hall attack: Islamic State group claims responsibility: Associated Press

• As Russia mourns attack victims, state media intensifies blame of Ukraine: New York Times

• Trump expected to appear in court for hearing in hush money case: NBC News

• J.D. Vance is new GOP money magnet: Axios

• Maryland Rep. David Trone apologizes after using inadvertent racial slur: Associated Press

• Black Democrats endorse Angela Alsobrooks over Trone in Maryland Senate race after slur: Axios

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House GOP: Impeachment Is Stupid, Actually

The House Republican investigators who have spent the last few years hunting for a pretext to impeach Biden have an announcement: They’re not going to impeach him because that wouldn’t hold him accountable enough.

Here was House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer on Newsmax Friday: 

We said when we launched this investigation, we want to provide the truth to the American people, and then provide real accountability. So what does real accountability look like? Does it look like impeaching Joe Biden in the House, and then the Senate tabling it, like they’re going to do with the Merrick Garland impeachment? Or does it mean providing real criminal referrals to the Department of Justice? I think the latter . . . I believe that the best path to accountability is criminal referrals.

It’s amusing to watch Comer make this case with a straight face, steadfastly ignoring the real reason why Republicans aren’t going to impeach Biden: They just don’t have the votes. (Other pro-impeachment Republicans characterized this numerical problem as a deficiency of “will” or “guts” on the part of some of their fellow GOP lawmakers, as though Republican voters around the country were gearing up to punish their elected representatives for a vote to impeach “Brandon.”)

The idea of criminal referrals against the president is a head-scratcher too, given the Justice Department’s longstanding policy (remember Robert Mueller?) that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. And at any rate, as Rep. Jamie Raskin asked last week, “if they had what they thought were felony offenses against the president of the United States, why wouldn’t they impeach him?”

Nevertheless, moving to a criminal referral strategy would have one major benefit for House Republicans: It would pass the ultimate decision for whether to hold Biden “accountable” out of their hands and into the Justice Department’s, where they will be able to pretend that a lack of further action is proof Biden is blocking further “accountability” for himself.

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