Lindsey Wants Biden Prosectued; Burgum Says He's A Dictator; Gaetz Wants A GOP Just Like Himself

And Jonathan Chait Wants His Readers To Think He's A Liberal

Silly South Carolina closet queen, Lindsey Graham doesn’t want to run again— and his seat is up in in 2026. He’s much rather that Trump gives him a Cabinet position, so he’s behaving exactly how Trump requires of job-seekers— craven attack dog divisiveness. On Fox News Sunday yesterday, he said Biden forgiving student loans in “beyond lawless and beyond dangerous… Joe Biden better hope and pray that there’s presidential immunity because… I think he’s subject not only to a law suit but criminal prosecution.”

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum is running for vice president full time and, if anything, he was evermore craven and debased than Graham yesterday. He was on State of the Union claiming Trump is the best politician and best debater “ever.” The host Kaitlan Collins asked him about his deranged “we’re-living-in-a-dictatorship” remarks which all Trump’s brain-dead sycophants are repeating:

“Let's talk about being a dictatorship, that this is the— this is what's happening under Biden. Under Joe Biden, we're actually living under a dictatorship today.

“If you want to find out what it's like to live in a dictatorship, we're living in one now.

“Well, we know what it's like under dictatorship, and that dictatorship right now is Joe Biden.”

Yep… and he tried defending that nonsense:

Ass-lickin’ BURGUM: [T]his president, more like any other, has bypassed Congress, because, as a governor of a natural resources state, a big ag state, we're facing over 30 rules and mandates. Each one of those could be 800 pages to 1,400 pages' long. None of them have come from Congress, and all of them could literally kill the industries that we have in our state, including baseload electricity, which we need to be competitive in the arms race around A.I. with China, who's building baseload electricity plants, like two a month.

So that's happening without Congress. And then, of course, on the student loan thing, when the Supreme Court ruled against him, then he just said, hey, we will figure a different way to do it.

So I just think that there's, again, a double standard here. He is bypassing the other two branches of government to push an ideological view, whether it's on economics or whether it's on climate extremism. He's doing that without using the other branches. And I think...

COLLINS: You don't like his executive orders and you don't like his policies. I understand that. I don't think anyone expects the Republican governor to agree with President Biden on that.

But that's not a dictatorship.

Ass-lickin’ BURGUM: Well, I think again, part of where this word has come from has been a nonstop media attack on President Trump saying that, oh, that he might use executive orders when he takes office.

And I'm just— was trying to make— again, make the point here that, under this current administration, most of the changes that are driving inflation in our country, the stuff he's not doing on the border, which he could be doing with executive orders— I mean, the open borders and the inflation are things that he's doing by himself alone, ignoring the other branches of government.

COLLINS: Well, I counted. Trump signed 220 executive orders when he was in office. President Biden so far has only signed 139, the same time span.

And on executive action, on immigration, it was Speaker Mike Johnson who was calling on President Biden to take executive action, saying it wasn't Congress' responsibility. It was his.

But let me move on, because, as I mentioned, you are one of Donald Trump's top contenders to be vice president. I have heard from sources that, really, they believe it's down to you and to Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Of course, the caveat, Trump could change his mind.

But when you look at the ticket and we look at vice presidential selections in the past, Joe Biden helped Barack Obama with foreign policy and experience. Mike Pence helped Donald Trump with evangelicals, Kamala Harris, black voters, women voters for President Biden.

What would you bring to a Trump ticket specifically?

Ass-lickin’ BURGUM: Well, I think we have to just look at the fact that President Trump can win this race regardless of who is vice president. He's got the luxury of not having to pick someone.

And I think, if we actually look in political history, the last time a vice president will pick actually helped swing an election was when Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson and Lyndon Johnson helped Kennedy win that race.

And with President Trump right now, where he is with Hispanics, with blacks, with people under age 30 and with independents, I mean, he's very strong across the board. So he can pick someone that you can focus on, like, hey, let's get someone who get stuff done. Let's get someone who helps him govern. He doesn't have to make a choice like some of the other names that you cited, where maybe they needed a blend to actually get the electoral bloc.

COLLINS: But what would you bring to the ticket specifically if you're on it? Would it be your business experience? You talk about governing. What is it specifically? Why should he pick you, basically?

Ass-lickin’ BURGUM: Well, I think that's up to President Trump. President Trump understands the criteria that he wants. He's going to make that choice at the time he makes it. He's got a lot of great choices.

And I think everybody— everything, the whole country maybe knows my background, which is both success in business and success as— in the executive branch as governing. But that's his choice on what criteria that he wants.

And, again, when we have got this big week and the big debate going this week, nobody's really thinking about the V.P. thing this week. And we should really be focusing on, how is Joe Biden going to defend his record on an open border?

I mean, we take a look at what's happening in our country with the migrant crime that's happening, whether it's teenage girls, whether it's mother of five, or whether it's young college-age women, we have got an issue with an open border. And Joe Biden needs to answer why he keeps insisting on having this open border policy.

COLLINS: But you're one of Trump's busiest surrogates. I mean, you make arguments like that right there multiple times on cable news. Obviously, you do a lot of the Sunday shows. You're here today.

Do you think that you're best positioned to serve on his ticket?

Ass-lickin’ BURGUM: I think that question is up to President Trump.

What we decided when we decided...

COLLINS: But if he's watching right now, what's your argument to him, I guess, for why you would be a good choice?

Ass-lickin’ BURGUM: Well, that could be a— that's a conversation between President Trump and myself.

But I think, right now, I'm doing what I think that everybody that cares about the future of this country should be doing, which is understanding that, if you care about inflation, which is hurting income, producing low-income people the most, because it's affecting food, price of energy, the price of electricity— the American dream is being killed by high interest rates.

Housing costs have gone up by over 30 percent. If you care about that stuff, then you should be out campaigning for President Trump. And there is no expectation that Kathryn and I have on this thing about some job at the administration or anything else. We're doing this because I know that our state of North Dakota can't take four more years of Joe Biden.

Trump is unpredictable but no one thinks he’s considering Matt Gaetz for vice president. What Gaetz wants— though he denies it at every opportunity— is to get out of Congress in one piece so that he can run for governor of Florida with Trump’s endorsement. Not quite as craven as Burgum or even Lindsey, Natalie Andrews’ Wall Street Journal interview was still pretty ass-kissy.

She began by reminding her audience that “Eight months after plunging the Republican Party into a deep crisis, Rep. Matt Gaetz says he doesn’t want to divide the GOP. He wants to make it to be just like him. ‘I’m trying to reshape the House in my image,’ he said in an interview in his hometown after announcing his re-election campaign. Asked to describe what that looks like, Gaetz said it is a Republican who can ‘end the wars, shut the border, reduce the spending’ and is a ‘fighter.’ The sharp-tongued Gaetz has been the antihero of Republicans’ fevered spell running the House, engineering the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker last year. He remains a leading voice of the party’s conservative populist wing, unabashedly pro-Donald Trump while a hard-liner on the budget and foreign aid, regularly aggravating colleagues, some of whom see him as a grandstander who undercuts Republicans’ efforts to govern.”

Gaetz has fought his battles both in Washington and across the country. He has jumped into 2024 primary races to try to mold the next class of conservatives and is working to defend the seven Republicans who joined him in toppling the speaker and others facing tough races. He faces his own primary challenge as well, while also being investigated by the House Ethics Committee.

In the interview, Gaetz also said he wasn’t planning to run for a statewide position— such as governor, as has been speculated— or a job in a second Trump administration.

“I am singularly focused on what the House of Representatives will look like and ensuring that Donald Trump is elected president,” he said.

Gaetz, 42 years old, regularly blasts “wokeness” and diversity programs. He has falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen and advocated abolishing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. But he has also staked out some positions that appeal to Democrats. He wants a ban on stock trading by lawmakers and strict rules on lobbying, and he joined Democrats in pushing to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act.

A new fight over spending looms in September, just ahead of the election. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is urging Republicans to put down their knives and put on a unified face for voters this fall to build a bigger majority. Gaetz, who says Johnson has been a letdown as speaker but didn’t join the failed effort led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to remove him in May, is set to be a loud voice in the debate.

“I like Mike personally, and it’s been very painful to be so disappointed,” he said. Gaetz hasn’t laid out his plans, but he threw cold water on possible tactics the party could use to delay or avoid a government shutdown. “We are not here to vote for continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills that jam everything together,” he said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

…Gaetz is a polarizing figure. “It’s basically 4-D chess on a regular basis,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) on Gaetz’s smarts. Others aren’t so generous.

Later this summer, Gaetz has his own primary challenger in Aaron Dimmock, a former Navy aviator who has ties to McCarthy. The former speaker is focused on beating Gaetz, and people close to the California Republican say he plans to funnel millions into the race. McCarthy declined to comment. The contest is Aug. 20.

Gaetz moved to the Florida Panhandle, known for its sugar-sand beaches and emerald waters, when he was 10 years old. He recalled long car rides with his dad, a state legislator, who he said would play Winston Churchill’s speeches on the way to school and make him debate on the way home. 

At a bayfront venue in Fort Walton Beach, Gaetz recently took the stage to Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation,” getting cheers when he said “the special interests in Washington hate my guts.” That night, about an hour’s drive away in Pace, Fla., Dimmock held a small fundraiser at a local brewery.

Dimmock wasn’t available for an interview. He said in an email: “Matt Gaetz has become blinded by his ambition for higher office and his need for the spotlight, and is completely distracted by the never-ending ethics investigations into horrific allegations against him.”

Last week, the House Ethics Committee said it is probing whether Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, among other allegations. Gaetz denies wrongdoing, blaming McCarthy for pushing the ethics panel to do the investigation. McCarthy, no longer in Congress, says he had nothing to do with it.

On Friday, Gaetz launched his first ads, which accuse Dimmock of being a “raging liberal.” 

Gaetz spends most of his time on the road, often wading into Republican primaries in which allies of McCarthy are on the other side. The result has been an unprecedented amount of sitting Republican lawmakers who are working to oust GOP colleagues. Outside groups, including those with connections to McCarthy, have spent millions in the races.

In Texas, Gaetz backed Brandon Herrera, a social-media gun influencer who fell just short of upsetting Rep. Tony Gonzales in a GOP runoff last month. Gonzales said ahead of the election that Gaetz was one of the “scumbags” in Washington. At the Capitol recently, Gonzales said he was done with names. “I want the House to thrive… somebody has to stop the retaliation,” he said. 

Gaetz says he speaks to Trump nearly every day. He is at Mar-a-Lago frequently— it is where he met his wife, Ginger Luckey Gaetz, 29, in 2020 and where he proposed. The two are also close with the former president’s daughter Tiffany Trump and her husband, Michael Boulos.

Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, said at the Turning Point Action conference earlier this month that Gaetz is a “very popular guy.”  

The two have sometimes backed opposing candidates. In South Carolina, Gaetz supported an unsuccessful challenger to Rep. William Timmons, while Trump backed the incumbent. In Virginia, Gaetz threw his support behind Rep. Bob Good, who had backed Gaetz in ousting McCarthy but hadn’t initially endorsed Trump for president. Trump supported Good’s challenger, John McGuire, who had a razor-thin lead in the vote count as of Friday.

“I think people give me grace for disagreement because they know I’m not full of shit, and with so many politicians you can’t say that,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz is one of the few GOP lawmakers in Washington who doesn’t take any money from political-action committees or lobbyists. He said that might cost him in not being able to spend high-dollar amounts in races for other candidates.

He has raised $4.6 million this year and has $2 million in the bank, according to Federal Election Commission records, his biggest haul since coming to Congress. Because Dimmock only just entered the race in April, he hasn’t filed a finance report yet. 

“I’m going to be outspent by multiples for the first time in my political career,” Gaetz said, referring to expected involvement from outside groups. Throwing out a hypothetical number, Gaetz said if Dimmock “didn’t have Kevin McCarthy’s $10 million, he would be a laughingstock. Now he’s a laughingstock with $10 million.”

I always pegged Jonathan Chait as a conservative Democrat but in his New York Magazine column yesterday he offered reasons why conservatives should vote for Biden and asserted he was doing so as “a liberal.” OK, whatever; I think he’s referring to a kind of liberal that is really a conservative, hates progressives and “leftists,” and loves to smear them. I’m sure Hillary Clinton, who is helping to finance AIPAC’s and the crypto-criminals’ candidate against Jamaal Bowman, thinks she’s a liberal too. You know, the kind of liberal who was an activist Republican until she married a Democrat and switched parties, in not ideology— at least not completely. But let’s hear Chait out, (even though he can’t help but attack jokes almost soon as he started writing the piece): why conservative Republicans should vote for a conservative Democrat instead of a fascist imbecile desperate to stay out of prison.

Let’s see… violent crime is way down— which Trump and the GOP and their media mouthpieces deny. “Republicans,” he wrote, “feel that murder is spinning out of control, and they are entitled to say so, even if it is, in cold reality, falling sharply… But I want to suggest that it emblematizes a deeper reality about the contest between Trump and Joe Biden. On one side is a campaign that stands for catastrophism about American society, arrived at via post-truth moral relativism. On the other side is the quiet, unappreciated success of a president who has presided over a steep drop in violent crime. Why aren’t more conservatives supporting the latter campaign, rather than the former?”

In 2020, American conservatives believed, correctly, that American society was undergoing a wave of crime, chaos, and dangerous radicalism. I am a liberal, not a conservative, though I have sympathy for at least some conservative goals, such as social stability and maintaining law and order.

Of course, not every faction of the American right values stability and the rule of law. Some conservatives oppose democracy or social equality, or otherwise wish to heighten the contradictions in a polarized system and hasten some cataclysmic rendering of American politics and society. For those factions of the right, the upheaval of 2020 brought their desired social conditions thrillingly closer at hand, and they have good reason to believe restoring Trump to office would do so again.

But many conservatives instead believe in maintaining social peace and the rule of law. And for those conservatives, a second Biden term is by far the superior choice.

Joe Biden campaigned in part on a promise to cool the tensions that were fueling this wave of anger. Of course, Biden, didn’t only run as a calming unifier. He also promised transformative change on a Rooseveltian scale that would create new social benefits and dramatically reconfigure the contours of the economy. [I recall Biden promising a roomful of Wall Street executives that “nothing would fundamentally change”]

The left-wing aspects of Biden’s platform mostly fizzled out. Opposition from [conservative] Democrats in Congress forced Biden to abandon almost all his proposed safety-net expansions: a public option for health care, a lower eligibility age for Medicare, permanent Medicaid expansion, universal pre-kindergarten and child care, and a more generous child tax credit and Earned Income Tax Credit.

As a liberal, I found the failure to pass these items disappointing. Conservatives ought to have met this failure with relief. After all, in 2020, the ambition of Biden’s domestic agenda was a major argument against crossover Republican support for him: rejecting Trump meant having to swallow a permanent Bernie Sanders-style expansion of government. That prospect did not come to pass, which is to say, the conservative case for Biden is much stronger now than four years ago.

In stark contrast, Biden did succeed in reviving bipartisanship. The frequency and magnitude of bipartisan legislation under Biden has surpassed anybody’s expectations: legislation on infrastructure, microchip onshoring, gun safety, nuclear energy, and many others. Looking back four years, Biden’s most progressive backers have the greatest cause for disappointment, and his most conservative supporters have the least.

When conservatives think about the excesses of 2020, they mostly have in mind events that occurred beyond the federal government’s direct control: the homicide spike in American cities and the wave of cancellations and groupthink sweeping through campuses and other progressive spaces.

Conservatives consider it self-evident that putting Democrats in power could only worsen these trends. They often respond with  mocking incredulity when faced with evidence that those trends have attenuated under Biden. Yet there is actually a serious case to credit Biden with tempering the left-wing excesses that flared up under Trump.

Consider the upheaval that followed George Floyd’s murder. Obviously, the social isolation caused by the pandemic (the fault for which can be debated, but does not rest entirely on Trump) was an important aggravating factor behind the explosion of anger and crime.

But the direct reason the streets exploded is that America watched a police officer in broad daylight murder a Black man who posed no violent threat. Why did Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd? A critic on the left would say that police have always brutalized Black people, generally with impunity, and I would tend to agree. Because this ghastly murder dramatized the deeper sickness in the policing system, progressives preferred to emphasize the wider systemic evils that caused it.

This paradoxically served to obscure the more direct culpability of Trump himself. The left wished to use the George Floyd case to press the broadest possible indictment and had no incentive to concede that the crisis could have been averted if we simply had a different guy in the Oval Office.

But the facts suggest a different guy in the Oval Office very well may have averted the crisis. In 2016, Trump campaigned on the theme that a wave of rising crime (which had not yet materialized) needed to be put down by unshackling the cops. He took office and immediately dismantled the slow, patient campaign by his predecessor’s Justice Department to identify and correct excessively brutal or ineffective policing. Seven months before the George Floyd murder, Minneapolis Police Union president Bob Kroll appeared with Trump at a rally and gloated, “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable. The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder– Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start taking — letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

Trump’s encouragement, through both word and deed, led directly to the tragic murder that was the spark for the George Floyd protests. Of course, it’s impossible to prove that Derek Chauvin would not have killed George Floyd in a hypothetical world in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. But if Biden gets the blame for inflation— a global phenomenon mostly caused by events that preceded his tenure in office— doesn’t Trump get blame for the crime that spiked on his watch?

At minimum, there is nothing in the record to suggest Trump’s approach to crime worked. To the contrary, crime spiked during his tenure and receded under the tenure of his successor, who has resumed the slow, patient work of identifying pattern-or-practice failures.

Indeed, there is very little in Trump’s history to suggest he even wants to tamp down violent crime. Since at least the Central Park Five episode, when he shelled out for an ad demanding the execution of five innocent young men, he has always grasped the demagogic potential for violent crime to excite passions that he can marshal in his favor. Reducing crime requires bureaucratic reform and cultivating the trust of low-income communities. None of these things fit Trump’s style or serve his interests.

Or consider illiberalism on campus and elsewhere. Trump did not cause this phenomenon— it began to spread at the end of the Obama era. (I wrote the first treatment in the media identifying the trend). But almost any observer who follows these trends would agree that it got much worse during Trump’s tenure in office and has gotten much better under Biden.

…Some two dozen former Trump officials— his former vice-president, chief of staff, multiple cabinet secretaries— have publicly called him unfit for office. They paint a picture of him as vindictive, ignorant, and hostile to the rule of law. Republicans have tried to even out this issue by painting Joe Biden as too feeble to handle his job. But not a single former Biden staffer has called him unfit.

Republicans in Washington, who are the conservatives who know Biden best, consider him a decent, reasonable man with whom they can do business. Here is Lindsey Graham in 2016 choking back tears while expressing his admiration for Biden as a person. There is not a single example of a Democrat in Washington who would say the same about Trump. Hell, there probably isn’t even a Republican who would, unless they were performing for an audience.

Conservatives believe Donald Trump’s legal travails are unfair, a point on which I don’t think they’re entirely wrong, even if they dramatically understate his own culpability. Nonetheless, they should not let this feeling blind them to the risks of returning him to the world’s most powerful office. They will have empowered a desperate man who has no stake in maintaining the legitimacy of the system he will command.

Deciding to take a gamble of this magnitude requires believing you are desperate yourself. The bulk of conservative propaganda has accordingly pressed the theme that America faces imminent destruction if Republicans do not return to power. Conservative polemicist Niall Ferguson, writing in the Free Press, likens the United States to the late-stage Soviet Union. An op-ed comparing the United States to the Soviet Union is inherently self-refuting, since an important characteristic of the USSR was that Soviet professors couldn’t publish an op-ed denouncing their country’s leadership in such vitriolic terms. Propaganda collapsing the cavernous gap between America and the USSR is a staple of communist rhetoric. It is revealing that Trump’s apologists have resorted to this trick, too.

But really. Just turn off the television, open your front door, and look around. The stock market is way up. Unemployment is rock bottom. We have problems, but they are all open to being solved through democratic contestation. The president’s opposition enjoys a thriving, uncensored media ecosystem and a gigantic fundraising base. We live in a free, prosperous country.

Why would you risk handing its future to the whims of a man consumed with resentment and rage, even if you share some of the same enemies? A man who refuses to recognize any limits to his power, the necessity of compromise, or the legitimacy of defeat in any situation, and thrills at violence and chaos? His final act as president was to summon a paramilitary mob into the streets, and he is promising to set that mob free from prison.

Trump’s advisers are investigating how he can use the Insurrection Act to suppress protests. Aren’t you better off in a country where the president is not invoking the Insurrection Act? Or even thinking about it?

History is littered with men who believed they would benefit from these kinds of wild gambles— that the passions and violence unleashed would resettle the game board with themselves resting on top. Such calculations usually fail. The most important insight conservative thought can bring to bear on this election is that we have far more to lose than to gain by entrusting the system to a man who wishes to burn it all down.