The Nastiness Is the Point
It’s not enough to deprive your foe of policy wins. In MAGA world, you must humiliate them too.
The YIMBYs are organizing! Politico’s California Playbook reports that California Rep. Robert Garcia plans to launch a pro-housing “Yes in My Backyard caucus” this year in support of Kamala Harris’s plans to juice housing supply across America.
“There’s a real movement happening around a pro-housing agenda,” Garcia told Politico. “It’s a huge way of bringing in all types of new voters, younger people as well.” Happy Wednesday.
A Movement Without a Moral Compass
—William Kristol
Last night I watched the new and terrific video takedown by Tim Miller and Sam Stein of Donald Trump’s latest grift. Those of you who aren’t avid followers of all of Trump’s enterprises may not be aware that he’s selling a new series of digital trading cards. To sweeten the offer, if you buy enough of them, Trump offers an additional reward: Snippets from the suit he wore during his debate with Joe Biden. What an incentive! You can own a relic of the holy garment that adorned his body on that majestic occasion.
It’s one of Trump’s most tasteless and shameless ever grifts—which is saying something. It’s ludicrous. It’s farcical. Tim and Sam brilliantly deconstruct Trump’s video sales pitch, and have a great time doing so. I laughed out loud several times, and I’m not a big laugh-out-loud guy.
But of course it’s creepy as well as funny, as Tim and Sam point out. And the creepiness isn’t confined to Trump. It’s pervasive. MAGA world is a creepy world.
Consider the latest weird statement by JD Vance to emerge. Vance disagrees with the education policies pushed by the American Federation of Teachers and its president, Randi Weingarten. He doesn’t like Weingarten’s political activities either. Fine. That hardly makes him unique among Republicans.
But apparently he can’t just say that. He has to attack her personally. Weingarten, it seems, doesn’t have children. And Vance has a view on that. What’s more, he has a view on the character and effectiveness of teachers who have kids and those who don’t, and has decided he’s “disturbed” by those who don’t.
One could ask, are the private lives of millions of teachers any of JD Vance’s damn business?
He thinks so.
Why? Because one belief of MAGA world is that everything is your business. For MAGA—as for other authoritarian movements of the left and right—the personal is the political. MAGA is about judging and disparaging other people, whole classes of people, whole groups of our fellow Americans.
It’s why the Trump campaign, yesterday, defended its bullying of an Arlington National Cemetery official who, following regulations, tried to stop it from taking videos that were going to be used for political purposes. A campaign spokesman didn’t just say there had been a misunderstanding, or that the families had given them permission. The spokesman groundlessly asserted the cemetery official was “suffering from a mental health episode.”
Why? For the same reason Vance feels entirely comfortable to weigh in on his political opponents’ personal choices about kids and families. The routine slander of individuals and groups is part of the essence of the movement.
Vance embodies that aspect of MAGA intolerance in a pseudo-intellectual way. Rep. James Comer, Republican from Kentucky, chair of the House Oversight Committee, does so in a more straightforwardly stupid way.
Rep. Comer doesn’t think Tim Walz has been a good governor of Minnesota.
Fine. But he can’t simply say that. He wants to make a more all-encompassing point. Not that Walz’s policies don’t work, but that Minnesota is a bad place. “Minnesota is not your normal state,” he said last week, “You have a huge population of residents in Minnesota that have come from other countries and have very different ideologies that don’t really respect capitalism.”
This is beyond stupid. For one thing, this whole nation has been settled by people who came from countries that didn’t really respect capitalism. That’s one reason our forebears came here. But if you’re MAGA, you never want to miss a moment to appeal to the prejudice of nativism.
One could also point out that Minnesota has a lower percentage of foreign born residents than the national average. And it’s also perhaps notable that Minnesota has a much higher per-capita GDP than Comer’s home state of Kentucky. Capitalism seems to have done all right in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
But none of that matters. Facts and evidence don’t matter. A decent respect for our fellow citizens doesn’t matter.
The nativism is the point. The prejudice is the point. The bigotry is the point. The cruelty is the point. The slander is the point.
The wonderful song from My Fair Lady, “You Did It,” has a memorable description of Karpathy, “that dreadful Hungarian,” at a ball:
Oozing charm from every pore
He oiled his way around the floor.
About MAGA, one can say that oozing creepiness from every pore, it oils its way around the floor of American politics. It will take a long time to clean up the oil slick left in its wake.
It can be unpleasant work, but tackling the oil slick is what we do here. Grab a mop:
A Circular Firing Squad
—Andrew Egger
The beating heart of MAGA-ism, as Bill notes, is the bedrock desire to be nasty to one’s opponents. But sometimes that nastiness gets directed within the tent—as we saw in an odd dustup this week.
In recent years, Julie Kelly—a self-described “insurrection denier” and “J6 conspiracy theorist”—has been one of the online right’s more interesting figures. She’s a conspiracy-brained crank who approaches her work with some genuine elbow grease, regularly surfacing ominous-sounding nuggets from court filings involving the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago or the criminal cases against the January 6th defendants.
This week, however, Kelly has become persona non grata for much of the online right, for a simple reason. They’ve discovered she and her husband have previously given money to Democrats.
We won’t bore you with the details, but the gist is this: Kelly’s husband John is a prominent Democratic lobbyist in Illinois state politics, who has given heaps of cash to Democrats. Julie dripped out a few bucks as well: A couple thousand to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, and a few thousand more to Joe Biden during the 2019 Democratic primary.
These donations aren’t new. Again, they were made in the LAST presidential election. But critics of Kelly resurfaced them this week to act as if they’d exposed a great deception on her part. Why did they do that? Because Kelly had gently pushed back against an erroneous, viral report from another J6 truther alleging the person who planted a pipe bomb on Capitol Hill on January 6th had been in cahoots with Capitol Police. “Everyone makes reporting mistakes,” Kelly wrote, “but this gives fuel to the other side.”
In one indicative post, radio host John Cardillo accused Kelly of posturing as an advocate for January 6th rioters while “donating tens of thousands of dollars to the Democrats prosecuting the J6ers.” Nevermind that Kelly’s donation came years before January 6th.
I bring all this schoolyard nonsense up only to make a brief point. Over the last few years, I’ve frequently been struck by the MAGAites’ paranoid tendency. When internal discord emerges, they jump instantly to accusing each other of being closet leftists or other suspicious characters.
In fact, Kelly’s own response to her critics did the same thing. “Few people know what we went through during early years of exposing J6,” she posted this week. “Now some late comers and suspicious actors want to discredit me and my family. Probably to stop [me] from reporting the truth.”
At a Stop the Steal rally in Georgia in 2020, I saw a crowd convince itself that a press photographer was actually an Antifa interloper because he had a camera and was wearing a black tracksuit and a COVID mask. One guy who saw me talking with the photographer tried to convince those around him that I was Antifa too.1
Months later, in the crowd on January 6th, I saw one man trying to share with those around him the terrible news that Mike Pence wasn’t going to cooperate with Trump’s scheme to steal the election. And I heard another man refusing to believe it: “It’s fake news. He’s trying to incite the crowd. He’s Antifa!”
Internal right-wing policing is nothing new, of course. Conservatives have long been obsessed with conversations about who “counts” as genuine members of the movement. But a decade ago, being a card-carrying movement conservative was a straightforward matter of embracing the policy agendas being pumped out from places like the Heritage Foundation.
Now, “belonging” on the right is, in some ways, simpler. You just have to display a fervent allegiance to Donald Trump and a fiery hatred toward his Democratic (and RINO!) enemies. But that also means that you can never focus even gentle fire on other Trump supporters—because what, do you want the Democrats to win? The Julie Kelly dustup just goes to show: Not even MAGA’s strongest soldiers are immune to becoming the objects of a little paranoid panic.
Quick Hits
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal case against Donald Trump was upended earlier this year when the Supreme Court rolled out its shiny new standard on presidential immunity. Now Smith—having slimmed down his case accordingly—is back in court with a superseding indictment that excises some conduct deemed out-of-bounds by the court ruling, although none of the four charges have been dropped.
“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 in Trump v. United States,” a spokesperson for the special counsel’s office said Tuesday.
DON’T ASK, WON’T TELL: Will Donald Trump tip his hand on how he intends to vote in Florida’s ballot initiative to restore abortion rights this November? As Marc Caputo reports for the site today, many evangelical leaders are hoping he’ll just keep his mouth shut: “If he said nothing about abortion from now until election day, it wouldn’t bother me simply because we do know where he stands,” one anti-abortion activist said. “I don’t need him to give pro-life speeches. It’s my job to articulate pro-life principles and it’s his job to get elected and govern.”
Cheap Shots
No comment.
Here's a suggestion for Kamala for the first debate.
The first time Trump says something nasty, she needs to take a long pause, give him a warm, calm smile and say
"Be nice, Donald. Don't forget you'll be asking me for a pardon in 3 months"
Frankly, I’m surprised Trump isn’t selling pieces of the suit he wore when he was shot, if we’re speaking of “holy relics.” Given the Lord’s intervention and all.