Jonah Goldberg:
I have nothing but sympathy for those of you who are sick of my wasting the precious space of this “news”letter on Donald Trump. How you feel about Donald Trump and this “news”letter is how I feel about the raging Trumpster fire raging through my party and my country: Would that we could spare time to talk about something else.
I feel a bit like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. No one has strapped me to a chair or attached those metal scaffolds to my eyes to keep them open as I watch that oleaginous clump of non sequiturs sweat his insecurities on national television. But I still feel drained as I try to resist what feels like a kind of crowd-sourced brainwashing spread across the land like a wet rolling fog.
At times, I sometimes think I’m living in a weird remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you’ve seen any of the umpteen versions, you know the pattern. Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew.
Except.
Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care about the same things they used to. It’s almost like they became Canadian overnight — seemingly normal, but off in some way. Even once-friendly dogs start barking at them. I live in constant fear that I will run into Kevin Williamson, Charlie Cooke, or Rich Lowry and they will start telling me that Donald Trump is a serious person because he’s tapping into this or he’s willing to say that. I imagine my dog suddenly barking at them uncontrollably. (I don’t worry about this with Ramesh because Vulcans are immune.)
I’ll say, “I’m sorry Rich, I don’t know what got into her.”
And I can just hear the Lowry-doppelganger replying, “When Mr. Trump is president, dogs will behave or they will pay a price. Just like Paul Ryan and Michelle Fields.”
“Lowry you bastard! You went to sleep! Why!? You went to sleep and now you’re gone!”
And that’s when he’d give me the Donald Sutherland finger.
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW ORANGE OVERLORD
I’m losing the will to rebut Donald Trump’s “arguments” because he really doesn’t make any. First of all, most of his interviews are rapidly becoming as journalistically adversarial as the infomercial host asking, “Mr. Foreman, is it really true I’ll lose weight and save money by using the George Foreman grill?”
But more importantly, if you listen to Trump’s answers to almost any question about how he will fix a problem, he uses up the first 95 percent of his time explaining, re-explaining and demagoguing about how bad the problem is. (That is, if he’s not talking about polls.) Then in the last few seconds, he says we’ll fix the problem by being really smart or by winning or by hiring the best people.
In other words, he has no idea how to fix it.
Before Trump gelded him, or before he went to sleep and awoke from his husk with a strange, new, Renfield-like respect for his master, Chris Christie was very good at pointing out how Trump can’t explain how he will do anything. Now no one seems to care.
What I can’t get my head around is how other people can listen to this stuff and hear something substantive or serious. I truly don’t understand it. Or maybe I do understand it, and I just don’t want to because I don’t like what it might say about a lot of people I respect.
THE STAGES OF TRUMPODISM
Among the commentariat, the first signs of creeping Trumpodism take the form of anti-anti-Trumpism. The argument usually starts off by grudgingly and bloodlessly conceding that Trump is imperfect — who isn’t? Wink wink. Then comes the extended and passionate diatribe about how the real nuts are the ones who are making a big fuss about how awful he is. Sometimes, they talk of “Trumpophobia” without the slightest acknowledgement they are buying into the left-wing crutch of attaching the suffix “phobia” to delegitimize arguments they can’t or won’t deal with.
Politically, anti-anti-Trumpism, as Orwell could have told you, amounts to being objectively pro-Trump, even if it doesn’t sound like it.
Often, the next stage is to lock into a face-palmingly stupid logical fallacy: People said Reagan was awful, therefore people who say Trump is awful must be wrong, too.
In part because I think the word “meme” should be banned, I suspect this argument is an earworm. (That’s a calque for ohrwurm for those of you who subscribe to this “news”letter for the pretentious Tuetonic-tinged sesquipedalianism. (“‘Sesquipedalian’ refers to long words, not obscure ones, you fraudulent logophile!” — the Couch.)
But this earworm isn’t Milli Vanilli’s “Girl You Know It’s True . . .”; it’s “They Called Reagan Bad Things, Too.”
I shouldn’t have to explain this, but you could replace “Reagan” with “Charles Manson” or “Carrot Top” or “Bud Gretnick the narcoleptic plumber of Muncie, Indiana” and it would have exactly as much logical power. Just because some people were wrong about one politician nearly 40 years ago, doesn’t mean completely different people are wrong about a completely different politician four decades later.
For a pristine example of this argument, see Edward Luttwak’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from earlier this week. (Or stay tuned to this “news”letter because it will come back.) The really infuriating part is the hidden bait-and-switch buried in this fallacy. The people who said that Reagan was a dunce, a fool, or fraud were liberals. The alleged “Trumpophobes” the Trumpods are aiming their fire at are actually conservatives. It’s a weird kind of stupid to say that Trump is like Reagan because liberals said Reagan was a fool — in response to conservatives who say Trump is a fool.
The next stage of conversion is the power-lusting gaze at Trump’s popularity. “He’s tapping into something real,” is repeated endlessly as if tapping into anger justifies pretty much anything.
