I Don't Want To Blame Kristol, Sykes And Cheney... But It Wasn't Just Fox
In 2020— after 4 years of watching the worst president in history in action— 74,223,975 of our fellow Americans (46.8%) voted for Trump in a higher turnout election than any since 1896 and 1900 when William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan twice. That’s right, Biden v Trump drew a greater percentage of the electorate than any of FDR’s elections, JFK’s election, LBJ’s election, either Reagan election, either Obama election…
And it wasn’t just a bunch of tobacco-chewing primitives in Wyoming, the Dakotas and the old Confederacy who voted for Trump. Trump voters in states where normal people predominate:
California- 6,006,518 (the most of any state)
Pennsylvania- 3,377,674
New York- 3,251,997
Michigan- 2,649,852
Illinois- 2,446,891
Yep, as my old pals in New Math used to say, they walk among you. And speaking of Wyoming— where Trump won 70% of the vote and every county but two— including 7 counties where Biden got between just 9 and 15%, on Thursday night, in Glendale, Arizona— on stage with Putin propagandist Tucker Carlson— Trump said of that state’s former congressman Liz Cheney (R) “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.” Was that a threat to her life? A not so subtle message to his Proud Boy followers?
In her New Yorker essay yesterday— Garbage Time At The 2024 Finish Line— Susan Glasser wrote of her up and close nd personal experience of the Madison Square Garden hate fest last weekend, where she watched in horror as thousands of Trump supporters, mostly males, came alive. “They had cheered at the mere mention of Trump’s name and applauded— some more enthusiastically than others— as a parade of warm-up acts slung hate speech with reckless abandon. Of course, they loved it when the ex-President savaged Kamala Harris as a ‘very low-I.Q. individual’; when he claimed that Harris had personally unleashed hordes of foreign criminals, mental patients, and gang members to rampage through American cities; when he said of his political opponents, ‘they are indeed the enemy within.’ By now, you’ve most certainly heard about the most shocking comments from the rally at the Garden: the comic who joked about Puerto Rico as a ‘floating island of garbage’; the childhood friend of Trump’s who called Harris ‘the Antichrist,’ while wielding a crucifix before the audience like some medieval Crusader; Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr., promoting the white-supremacist ‘replacement’ theory that claims Democrats want to get rid of native-born Americans and put foreign people of color in their place. When Trump’s longtime adviser and chief anti-immigration ideologue, Stephen Miller, said, ‘America is for Americans and Americans only,’ did he know that it was a direct echo of the Ku Klux Klan’s ‘America for Americans’ slogan? Or the Nazis’ ‘Germany for the Germans?’ It did not seem like a question that needed to be asked— it had already been answered. I can assure you that the night was not, as Trump tried to claim a couple days later, ‘an absolute love fest.’ What was sickening about being there in person was watching the Trump fans around me and realizing that there was nothing shocking about it to them.
“The hate was the thing that they were there to cheer for; the nastier the nickname, the cruder the slur, the bigger the roar. The people around me were not threatening or particularly angry, but they were all in, it appeared, on the worst aspects of Trumpism— the cult of personality, the calculated hurling of vicious insults, the demonization of entire groups of people. ‘Tampon Tim’ and Harris’s ‘pimp handlers’ were not regrettable aspects of the rally, as the Trump apologists, in what remains of the Republican Party’s old establishment, still pretend. (See: Haley, Nikki.) They were the attraction. It’s also true that most people in the audience sat politely for hours, some of them munching on popcorn or texting their friends during the dull parts. Call it the banality of evil. When Trump finally came onstage, many of those sitting near me jumped up to take selfies— from our nosebleed seats, the backdrop was a sea of red hats, the tiny figure of Trump on the stage far below us, and a giant screen much closer by with the strongman slogan ‘Trump Will Fix It.’”
In 2018, Sam Dresser, writing for aeon, asked “Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for the New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic,’ but ‘terrifyingly normal.’ He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness.’ a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else.’ Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong.’ Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner,’ in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened.’”
“And yet,” Glasser continued, “afterward, I found myself oddly optimistic for a few hours at least— perhaps it’s just too hard to believe that this dark, cramped, hateful vision of America is actually shared by a majority of Americans. I had a similar sense at the end of the GOP convention in Milwaukee, this summer: his Trumpified Republican Party feels too much like a religion that demands excessive suspension of disbelief from its followers.”
Imagining what he would write if Trump wins next week, former GOP propagandist Charlie Sykes knew who he would pin “the banality of evil” sticker on— his former listeners: “Whatever the final outcome, the American people (or enough of them) have returned him to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual assaults, the lies, the sedition, or the felonies. Not the raw bigotry of his campaign, not insults, nor the threats. In the most graphic terms imaginable, the American people were warned of the danger. His loyal vice president refused to endorse him; his top general called him a ‘total fascist’; some of his closest aides and cabinet members described his erratic character and his indifference to the Constitution. But in the end, Trump was right. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any votes. But, we know now that it was worse. He stood at the center of our politics and incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. It didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that he tried to overturn a free and fair election. It didn’t matter that he was found liable of raping a woman; and it didn’t matter that he had called for terminating the Constitution to restore him to power. And it didn’t matter when he called for the execution of Liz Cheney, threatened to use the military against his fellow Americans, or lied about migrants eatings cats and dogs; or called the United States a ‘garbage country.’ This is the hardest part about today: realizing that our fellow Americans saw all of that; watched all of that; listened to all of that, and said, ‘Yes, that’s what we want.’ That’s who we are.”
He’s nervous but optimistic that he won’t have to published that next week. Bill Kristol pointed out that when “an increasingly unstable Donald Trump took his increasingly unhinged campaign to Arizona [and that] image of violence against Liz Cheney… [the audience] cheered. They joined their master in the sick thrill of voyeuristically imagining an act of violence against an American political opponent. One reason demagogues are so dangerous is that their moral sickness is contagious.”
Neither Sykes, Kristol nor Cheney want to take any responsibility for creating that mob of monsters. Yet the Trump saga will have to acknowledge the grim irony that figures like Cheney, Kristol and Sykes, who now express horror at the rise of Trump— and virtually every Republican in Congress who don’t or, if they do, strictly behind closed doors— helped manufacture the very electorate they now fear. For years, they stoked the flames of resentment, dehumanized opponents, and fed the narrative of grievance and victimhood that built today’s Republican base. They courted the far-right fringe, dismissing it as a useful tool, not realizing they were building a loyal army for someone like Trump— who would come along with fewer scruples and far greater ambitions. Now, as they recoil at the monster they helped create, they distance themselves, unable or unwilling to take responsibility for the movement they shaped. The crowd’s cheers for Trump’s most vile slurs, their roaring approval of his threats, and their fervent belief in his promises aren’t anomalies— they’re the logical conclusion of a party culture that establishment Republicans helped cultivate. They can try to condemn Trump now, but the forces they unleashed aren’t so easily put back in the box.
And yet, Sykes wrote that “This demagogue is the man that nearly the entire Republican party and conservative movement are assembled behind in the contest for the presidency of the United States. This demagogue is the man respectable Republicans and high-toned conservatives rationalize supporting. This demagogue is the man other Republicans and conservatives won’t oppose directly and unequivocally, even if they won’t cast ballots for him. So now we have a stark threat of violence against Cheney. In the vast mob of Trump acolytes, apologists, and accommodators, will any voices be heard to speak up? Will any of Cheney’s former colleagues from the House rebuke Trump? Will any of Cheney’s former supporters and admirers from the Wall Street Journal and National Review say a chastening word? From George W. Bush and Condi Rice to Paul Gigot and Rich Lowry, will we hear anything in defense of Cheney? Anything denouncing Trump for his threat of violence? I expect not… If someone’s not anti-Trump and anti-Trumpism, how seriously can you take that person’s profession of respect for the Constitution, or for liberal democracy at home or abroad, or for the cause of decency in politics?