Vengeance is mine
Two things I was wrong about
It would be tempting to write a post saying, “Look at all the nonsense in the Trump administration, I warned you.” But that would be too easy. You guys read the newspapers. (If you don’t, this and this are just the tip of the iceberg.)
This post will mention a few Trump abuses that I predicted, but I’ll mostly focus on areas where I got things wrong.
The National Review is an interesting vantage point from which to examine recent political developments. Their reporters will criticize Trump on some occasions and defend him on others. You cannot always trust the liberal media when it reports on Trump’s misdeeds, but if the NR says “Yeah, that’s pretty bad”, then you can be confident that it’s a scandal.
Rich Lowry is one of the more Trump-friendly NR reporters, but he is on to something with this headline:
The Left Regrets Boosting Federal Powers
Unfortunately, the subsequent story illustrates Lowry’s annoying tendency to treat every GOP misdeed as an excuse to bash the left:
President Donald Trump is using every tool he has to challenge woke practices in America — and he has a lot of them.
Notably, none of the mechanisms that the president is using were put in place by conservatives for leverage against progressive institutions.
No, Trump is simply availing himself of the vast federal apparatus created by liberals on the assumption that an ever-more powerful and extensive federal government was synonymous with righteousness.
I’m as opposed to woke excess as the next guy, but this is not how one should think about what’s now going on in Washington. Even Trump’s attacks on woke are marred by the use of a sort of reverse wokism, a conservative cancel culture.
More importantly, the attack on woke excess is only a minor sideshow in a much bigger and more sinister project.
The 2nd first Trump administration
Godard called Every Man For Himself his “second first film”. I’m calling Trump 47 the second first Trump administration. Alternatively, Trump 45 was the first Trump administration, whereas Trump 47 is the first Trump administration. Still confused? Trump 45 was the first administration headed by Trump. Trump 47 is the first administration controlled by Trump.
In his previous first administration, Trump farmed out most responsibilities to mainstream Republicans, now called “RINOs”. At first, Trump seemed surprised to have won, didn’t know how the government worked, and wasn’t ready to implement major changes. During his exile on Elba, several things changed:
Trump felt persecuted on all fronts. It’s unclear whether he actually felt he won the 2020 election (I doubt it), but he did sincerely feel that we was being unfairly attacked by so-called “lawfare”, by the media, by intellectuals, by foreign leaders. Trump’s a bitter, paranoid old man, thirsty for vengeance.
Trump realized that he needed to achieve near dictatorial power in order to realize his ambitions.
Trump came to see Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin as the models he sought to emulate. He appreciated Putin’s desire to achieve national greatness through territorial expansion, but viewed Orban as the more realistic model—an authoritarian leader in a country with democratic elections.
People get upset when I call Trump an authoritarian nationalist. But Trump consistently describes other authoritarian nationalists in very positive terms while denigrating the leaders of our (former) allies. He’s not a wolf in sheep’s clothing; He’s a wolf in wolf’s clothing. He says what he thinks.
Orban is a much better model than Putin because he has achieved a great deal of power within a democratic system. Orban’s technique is to use the awesome power of the modern state to force other parts of society (business, the media, the universities, the courts, etc.) to bend to his will. This is precisely what Trump has done during the first two months of his administration.
Conservatives have long argued that big government will eventually lead to authoritarianism. Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom) were two of the more famous proponents of this view. Liberals responded that these fears were overwrought, pointing to examples like Denmark, where big government coexists with substantial political freedom. In the past, I tended to agree with the liberals. Now, I’m not so sure.
Trump is using the economic power of the federal government to punish those he dislikes and reward his allies. Antitrust law is being used to censor big media companies. The power of the purse is being used to punish laws firms that oppose his policies, or to punish universities with left wing ideologies. Business allies are rewarded with favorable regulatory policies and tariff protection, while enemies are subject to regulatory scrutiny. Many large businesses, media organizations, and universities have bended their knee and kissed Trump’s ring.
Trump’s defenders often point out that none of this is new. That’s true. What they miss is that when quantitative changes become large enough, they become qualitative changes. Yes, all of Trump’s autocratic practices have been employed by previous administrations. What’s changed is that Trump has done more of this in two months than most presidents do in 8 years.
In any case, I now see that I underestimated the validity of the Hayek-Friedman argument. It’s not that I thought they were completely wrong, rather I thought they overstated their case. I no longer believe that to be true, at least for the US. Perhaps it is still overstated for Denmark—but Denmark actually has a small government when you get past entitlements.
On a slightly related point, I once thought it was a good thing that Congress gave the president the power to adjust some tariffs, as presidents tended to be more trade friendly than Congress. I was wrong.
Where the left was right
Leftist get really annoyed when conservatives try to argue against big government by pointing to bad things happening under conservative administrations: “Conservatives have always argued that government is inept, and now Bush is showing that to be true.” I get their frustration. So let me throw the left a bone, and admit another area where I was at least partly wrong.
Leftists tend to argue that despite all their blather about “liberty” and “freedom”, below the surface most right-wingers are a bunch of crypto-fascists. That always bothered me, as I believed (and still believe) that many conservative intellectuals have sincerely held beliefs in liberty. In other words, many conservative intellectuals are basically classical liberals.
But now I see that the left had a valid point. While there are still some principled conservative intellectuals (many of whom oppose Trump), it’s clear that the conservative movement as a whole does not share those principles. Most conservatives do not oppose “cancel culture”; they oppose left wing cancel culture. The don’t oppose government abuses of power, they oppose left wing government abuses of power and support right wing government abuses of power. It isn’t just Trump that cares more about vengeance than he does about “the issues”, many of his supporters feel the same way.
Paul Krugman may have been a bit over the top in his criticism of people like Mitt Romney and George Bush, but I now believe he was more correct than I saw at the time. Perhaps the Iraq War was nothing more than Bush seeking vengeance against “the guy who tried to kill my dad”.
I still think Romney was unfairly portrayed by Krugman, but 90% of Romney voters are Trump supporters, and thus Krugman saw something in the broader conservative movement that I missed. Beneath all that talk of “liberty”, there is tribal instinct to reward your allies and punish your opponents. You might respond that many rank and file people on the left are crypto-socialists. Maybe so, but that’s a topic for another day.
The old assumptions no longer apply
The media still has not absorbed the fact that the old political reality is gone. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The same day that the Rich Lowry story appeared, there was another NR article that caught my eye:
On Signal Leak, Take the L
For 10 years, the NR reporters have been asking the Trump people to be more reasonable. Now they want the administration to stop denying the obvious—stop claiming that no classified information was being discussed in that Signal chat. But those arguments apply to a world that no longer exists. It’s as if they think Mitt Romney were president, not Trump.
I am currently reading the Neapolitan Quartet by Ferrante, and came across this passage:
A few hours later they both came to see me and the one who had accused me of being a thief apologized—she had found her money. I hugged her, said that her apologies seemed genuine, and I really thought so. The way I had grown up, I would never have apologized, even if I had made a mistake.
I found Lenu’s final sentence to be a bit jarring, as she seems like a thoughtful character. Perhaps it reflects the fact that she grew up on the mean streets of working class Naples, where nice people get pushed around, taken advantage of.
One characteristic of authoritarian regimes is that they don’t back down, unless absolutely essential. Thus a Naples gangster would only apologize to another gangster with even more power. To someone like Trump, admitting that mistakes were made is a sign of weakness. And if Trump says the sky is green, Fox News will back him up on it.
The only time I can recall Trump showing much contrition was right after the assault on the Capitol, when he felt a need to condemn the rioters to avoid impeachment and conviction. Even with that concession, 7 Republican senators voted to convict. If he’d called the rioters “heroes” and suggested they should receive financial compensation from the government (his current view), that number might have been far larger.
After Trump avoided conviction, his stance toward the rioters became much more favorable, and after the November 2024 election, it shifted to overwhelmingly favorable. He concedes just enough to maintain power, and no more. It’s long past time for the NR reporters to give up calling on Trump to be more reasonable. The National Review helped to elect a crazy old man out for vengeance, now they need to live with what they’ve done.
For Trump, policy is personal
The current trade war with Canada has confused many pundits. In 2020, Trump had negotiated an agreement that he had called the “best trade deal ever”. Although we have an overall trade deficit with Canada, we actually have a surplus in manufactured goods. Why go after Canada? Even by the perverted logic of mercantilism, it makes no sense. Unlike China, Canada is not a national security issue.
That is the wrong way to think about Trump’s policies. Trump likes Putin’s Russia, and hence wishes to have better economic relations with Russia. Trump despised Trudeau and covets Canada’s land, and hence he wishes to have worse economic relations with Canada. This is so far removed from traditional American policy that many conservative intellectuals have trouble processing the new reality. They keep calling for Trump to be more reasonable.
In the past, one could discuss the business world in its own terms. How is this or that company doing? How is this crypto project doing? At times, politics intruded (as when Biden snubbed Tesla), but it was usually in the background. Now, almost every discussion of business, every discussion of crypto, revolves around a single issue—its relationship to Trump. We’ve become like Hungary, with Trump instead of Orban. Trump is our caudillo.
For 10 years, I’ve been criticized for complaints about Trump that in retrospect underestimated his bad tendencies. Here are some claims that were once viewed as extreme, but are now becoming mainstream:
Suggesting back in 2016 that the US is becoming like a banana republic.
Predicting a Trump win in 2024 the day after he lost in 2020.
Suggesting that Trump wished to destroy Nato and the EU.
Suggesting that his second administration would be staffed with incompetent clowns.
Suggesting that he’d stab Ukraine in the back. (Even I didn’t predict he’d support Russia, I just assumed he’d make the US neutral.)
I told the left that wokism would backfire, and cancel culture would end up being used against them. You want the government to censor hate speech? What if Trump is “the government”?
I said Trump would follow Orban’s authoritarian model. What I underestimated was his energy level. He was lazy during his first term, but is now much more energetic, despite being 8 years older. I guess the desire for vengeance stirs the blood.
I suppose I should enjoy being right about of all these things, but instead I find it all to be rather sad.
PS. This part of the “Take the L” story really annoyed me:
But the Trump habit of always hitting back at perceived enemies and never admitting mistakes under any circumstances set administration officials up for what was easily predictable: Goldberg’s subsequent revelations proved that administration officials’ answers to the controversy were self-serving, Clintonian, and dishonest.
Clintonian? Really? I get that Clinton was one of our more dishonest presidents. But if Trump were truly to adopt Clintonian standards of honesty, he’d have to reduce his rate of lying by 90%. The NR still doesn’t get it. So sad.
PPS. Godard’s 2nd first film wasn’t exactly another Breathless.
PPPS. Vengeance is Mine is one of Imamura’s better films:
Thanks for a thoughtful piece that made me think. This is why I subscribe.
I don't like Trump. I didn't like Harris either, so either way we lost. So, I'm not sure criticizing NR for saying Trump is bad but not endorsing the truly awful Harris instead is fair. This wasn't an election the country could win.
More importantly, I think there is an important conceptual mistake here - Trump is not "conservative" in any sense of the word. He's a populist nationalist, which I suppose makes him a "right" populist (whereas Bernie Sanders is a "left" populist - 6 of one , half a dozen of another, in my view). Calling him a conservative means people think he wants to protect/conserve something. He doesn't - he wants to remake the federal government. One can believe (as SS does) that this is because he's a bitter vengeful man out to break stuff for the hell of it, or one can think he's got a purpose beyond vengeance (I go back and forth on that, but certainly many of those working for him have a broader purpose of rolling back the administrative state). The reason I go back and forth is there is a bunch of stuff that is clearly crazy (tariff wars!) and then there is stuff that might be crazy or might be strategic - one can argue, for example, that the cuts to the federal government might be "better" if done more deliberately, but then you can look at the long list of commissions etc that tried cutting stuff deliberately and utterly failed. So it might be that taking a chainsaw to the administrative state is the only method that might work, albeit at a high cost of collateral damage. In favor of a strategic element is that the order in which cuts are happening are teeing up some pretty shaky precedents (Humphrey's executor, which a DC Circuit Judge just savaged in a concurrence to an opinion staying a DCT injunction blocking the shut down of USAID). I doubt it was an accident that USAID was first up. And I'm old enough to remember when the idea that all federal spending might be on the internet so we could look stuff up and see where the money went was thought to be a dream, not a nightmare. We're certainly closer to that now. (Indeed, the Environmental Working Group on the left did some stellar work showing where USDA support payments went in the 2000s/2010s, as I recall). So, it could be that Trump is both a bitter, vengeful man AND has a plan that is accomplishing interesting and potentially good things in some areas.
A friend told me he saw a sign in 2020 in upstate NY that said "Vote Trump Because Fuck You". I think there's a lot of that sentiment. People had had enough of Bush/Obama/Biden - they voted for Trump over Harris and he's doing pretty much exactly what he said he would. If there's some vengeance going on, voters seem to have been buying something they were aware of.
On a slightly related point, I once thought it was a good thing that Congress gave the president the power to adjust some tariffs, as presidents tended to be more trade friendly than Congress.
They coud have given Presidents power only to reduce tariffs