Hating Donald Trump in the hater’s eyes makes one moral. But in the real
world, such pathological fixations usually result in abject immorality
and moral decline.
Over the last five years, the
pathology of Trump Derangement Syndrome has been widely described. It
was more than a chronic disease and was often characterized by an array
of rapidly advancing symptoms of deterioration in reasoning, emotional
stability, and personal ethics.
More practically, often the deranged
Trump hater found in his odium a cover for all sorts of prior personal
intemperance and careerist dissipation. Loudly hating Trump became a
passport for excess, private and public, and a sort of preemptive
insurance that excused or rather greenlighted smears, slander, and
personal misdeeds.
The Anti-Lincoln Project
For over a year, the theme of the
NeverTrump Lincoln Project was the organizers’ professed superior
morality. They had it; most others on the Right did not. Only a select
heroic few of the Republican Party would dare to break ranks to end the
danger to the country posed by a supposedly morally inferior Donald
Trump.
Forget Trump’s economic, domestic,
cultural, and foreign policy record that had belied critics by its
successes—despite historic opposition, investigation, denigration, and
obstruction. No matter. Character was king. Again, the Lincoln Project
had it; Trump followers did not.
The Lincoln Project’s Band of
Brothers—initially four financially strapped, embittered middle-aged
white male Washington insiders—lectured the country that those few,
those happy few, that band of brothers would fight for us. If only they
were adequately funded, they could save us from the moral turpitude of
four more years of Trump.
Their ostensible promise to the Left
was that they would hold down their end of the bargain by maintaining
the 10-12 percent of Republicans who did not vote for Trump in 2016. In
truth, they may have had nothing to do with preserving a bare six
percent of Republicans who would again vote against Trump. That was a
modest aim, but apparently, every bit of Trump derangement was fundable.
Or as the departing, now mansion-buying Steve Schmidt put it, “I really didn’t give a sh-t how many Republicans were voting for Trump or not.”
If one were to believe all the
sermonizing of these latter-day Elmer Gantrys, then their inherent
paradoxes, hypocrisies, and selfish agendas might magically disappear.
For example, it was quickly evident
that the Lincoln Project luminaries were not just fixated on destroying
Trump and derailing the most conservative presidential agenda since
Ronald Reagan’s, but also on refuting their own supposedly lifelong
commitment to conservative causes by abetting the Biden campaign and the
hard-Left interests that drove it.
When Republicans hired them, they
were conservative; when they did not, these buskins were liberal. To
ensure their own continued largess, they were not just to be Romneyite
rejectionists, not just Bidenites, but abettors of the neo-socialist
cause of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and the squad.
Money was the prime impetus to the
project. Again, we were supposed to forget that some of the Lincoln
Project luminaries were flat broke. Who cared that others owed huge sums
in back taxes, with no apparent way of repayment—given their own
reputations for failed campaigns and expensive, but otherwise mediocre
consultancy?
Almost all were eager to set up
shadow service companies to siphon off the expected huge sums from rich
leftists. The project’s directors eagerly assumed their roles of useful
idiocy, their donors that of cynical manipulators. Both conspired to
destroy their shared bogeyman, Donald Trump, and with him all obstacles
to the new hard progressive future.
Before November 3, the media was not
so much interested in the backgrounds or details of these handy moral
preeners. Then suddenly Trump lost the election. Biden was inaugurated.
And, again mysteriously, a recalibrated media found the grifters of the
Lincoln Project expendable, although not so idiotic—given that they had
diverted millions of dollars into their own private coffers in the form
of “consulting fees.”
After November 3, we also learned that co-founder John Weaver was a sexual bird of prey.
He had leveraged his newfound Lincoln largess and influence as quid pro
quos for his own sexual predations—with little apparent regard for the
age of his targeted young male victims.
This sordid fact was apparently known
to many of the pre-election sermonizers at the Lincoln Project. But
again, disclosure of that fact, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, was
considered secondary to preserving the growing revenue stream from the
Left.
So these moralists lied about their
ignorance of their own pederast, and apparently on one occasion at least
would-be pedophile, in their midst.
Only after the election, we learned
that Rick Wilson and Weaver in particular were raking in and largely
disguising exorbitant fees, in part to pay huge back tax bills. After
the election, the project’s legal consultants suddenly were “shocked” by
such disclosures, and began leaving the now-discredited project—at
precisely the time when it was in dire need of a legal autopsy and full
disclosure.
Rarely has the abyss between the
pretense and the lie been so vast: a group subsidized on purported
conservative moral principles, and aimed at stopping the cultural damage
to the cause by Donald Trump, was funded by left-wingers eager to buy
off a few financially imperiled has-beens, who exaggerated their
vestigial consulting clout among the Washington swamp. But then again,
beggars cannot be choosers.
In turn, the Lincoln Project spent
much of its near $100 million on themselves. And the grift sort of
worked, as they puffed themselves up about the Biden win, rescued
themselves from the IRS, splurged on opulent vacation homes and
appurtenances—and declared that ending Trump was the only the lucrative
beginning, as they made lists to hound and denigrate his former
appointees.
But the con sputtered out, as they
ended up accusing each other of improprieties. Rodent-like they
scrambled overboard from the now rotting, putrid, and sinking ship.
The loudest of the moralists, Steven
Schmidt, epitomized the absurdity of the project when he contextualized
his silence about the free-wheeling Weaver. Schmidt, you see, was a victim himself,
as he related a long ago purported childhood abuse trauma. And in
racialist and chauvinist fashion, as Schmidt left he announced that he
wanted a non-white male to replace him in the almost all-white male
partnership.
Think of the condescending absurdity:
Mostly all-white male swamp creatures were happy to rake in millions.
But when their own moral lapses and depravities destroyed their grift,
they quit—and only then invited in more women or people of color to sort out the mess they left in their wake.
The only mystery in this entire moral
putridity was who deserved the most censure: the cynical rich leftists
who funded the charade hoping to manipulate pseudo-conservatives to
serve their hard-Left needs—or these two-timing, born-again charlatans
who masqueraded as conservatives to shake down millions from those who
could afford to so indulge themselves.
The common denominator, again, was Trump hatred. And so that noble aim excused every sordid means to enhance it.
Gubernatorial Lethality
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo should
have become a political pariah by summer 2020. His handling of the
COVID-19 virus was all in all the worst in the country. At first, like
most politicians, Cuomo had downplayed the chance of a pandemic. Then,
like most politicians, he blamed other politicians for downplaying it as
he had, once the coronavirus swept his state.
Where were the ventilators, the hospitals, and the beds, once the virus struck?
For a brief moment, Cuomo praised
Trump, who had sent a hospital ship to Manhattan that went unused, who
gave him a plethora of ventilators that were stockpiled, and who sent an
entire tent hospital to the Javits Center that mostly stayed empty. But
as the death toll mounted, and as the 2020 election heated up, and as
Trump’s popularity dipped in the polls, Cuomo pivoted.
Abruptly, he now blasted Trump as
negligent, derelict, a veritable killer of the innocent. He appeared on
his brother’s CNN show, as they yucked it up to showcase his pandemic
competency—and always the federal government’s purported sudden laxity.
His self-serving daily press
conferences amplified his bombast and snark. And ostensibly they won
Cuomo an Emmy for his televised theatrics. Hollywood’s subtext was that
by weaponizing the epidemic against the now candidate Trump, the useful
idiot Cuomo at least deserved some sort of acting award.
As with the grifters of the Lincoln
Project, as long as Donald Trump was on the ballot, Cuomo was deified.
He wrote his own hagiography about the arts of dealing with a pandemic.
He, not COVID-19 and its victims, was the story. He bantered, strutted,
and cajoled on national television—always eying either the 2020
vice-presidential nomination or at least the attorney generalship in the
Biden Administration.
Cuomo may have had the second-worst
record of any governor in the United States, in terms of deaths per
million from the virus (currently 2,361 per million New York residents,
second to next-door New Jersey). He may have shut down his state, drove
out millions to seek refuge elsewhere, ruined New York’s economy, and
yet suffered more deaths and inflicted more damage on his own than a
similarly sized, open, and economically rebounding Florida and Texas.
Still, Cuomo had one advantage those red-state governors lacked: a large
left-wing media platform to blast the hated Trump.
Now, again mysteriously, after the
inauguration of Joe Biden, we learn the sordid details about Cuomo, in
the fashion revelations appear daily and simultaneously about the
Lincoln Project. It was known long ago
that Cuomo, in a panic about the epidemic, had shuttled infected
patients into the state’s extended care homes—and by executive
fiat—where they proved mobile Petri dishes, infecting vulnerable
residents, who began dying en masse.
Cuomo might have stopped the awful
practice. He might have announced the accurate number of the dead to
highlight the need to end immediately the lunatic diversions. Instead,
we now learn he ordered his aides to hide the lethality figures. If he
was blasted for 8,000 rest home deaths, then what, he feared, would be
the public reaction at the true figure of 15,000 dead?
Would the president whom he demagogued now demagogue him? So Cuomo lied. He hid the grim data
from a media all too eager before November 3 to comply. He lied to the
New York state legislature. He lied to the U.S. Department of Justice.
He lied to the public. And he assumed these were all “noble
lies”—necessary for the good cause of ending Donald Trump.
Clipping His Twitter Wings
Before November 3, Silicon
Valley—especially the $4 trillion quartet of Apple, Facebook, Google,
and Twitter—had become unhinged by Donald Trump. They had no idea what
to do with his 70 million Twitter followers, the legions of his Facebook
fans, and the Gmail millions who adored him.
The Left became irate at Big Tech.
What good did it do for the obsequious traditional media to slant the
news, to offer 90 percent negative television and print coverage of
Trump, to smother the achievements of his presidency, when he
circumvented the putdowns through Twitter and Facebook?
Who cared whether they check marked,
or temporarily deplatformed or for a while canceled or shut down Trump
and thousands of his Trumper followers—when he still stirred up millions
through the technological gadgetry and hard-won capital of Silicon
Valley’s progressive anointed? After all, when the Obamas go public in
their demand to expel Trump from social media, who can resist their
speaking truth to power?
The January 6 Capitol riot at last
gave Big Tech the long-awaited and long-planned opportunity. And they
seized it in night-of-the-long-knives fashion. Twitter, YouTube, and
Facebook, again mysteriously in concert, banned the president from its
collective platforms of communication—for life.
For the first time in his own
political life, Donald Trump went silent, inert, mute. The media
continued its nonstop invective, but now Trump had no detours around
them.
Trump, they alleged, had used their
product to incite violence, perhaps in the very manner Antifa and Black
Lives Matter had used their platforms to plan demonstrations that
characteristically ended in rioting, arson, and looting.
But could not Trump reroute to the conservative alternative, the upstart non-Silicon Valley Parler?
Big Tech had considered that, too. So
on January 11, 2021, in the same manner of the collisional nocturnal
action of Twitter and Facebook, so too Apple, Amazon, and Google, again
mysteriously, in the wee hours eliminated everyone’s access to Parler, a
sort of neutron bombing of a rising competitor.
In hours, it was clear that they had
effectively strangled Parler in its crib to preempt a Trump and MAGA
mass exodus from Twitter and Facebook, and thus inadvertently
transmogrify the ban into a Parler bonanza.
In the old days, these leftists of
the Stanford-Silicon Valley corridor might have called such collusion
market “rigging,” “fixing,” and “scheming.” Their lopsided market shares
might have earned the muckraking ire of independent journalists aghast
at such open monopolies, boastful cartels, and unapologetic trusts.
But the masters of the universe now
owned the news media and the means of most Americans both to access
information and to communicate over email and social media. Besides,
Trump was widely hated by Big Tech, Wall Street, the media, academia,
entertainment, professional sports, foundations, and the corporate
boardrooms. So who would object to their roles as our 21st-century versions of Jay Gould and Diamond Jim Fiske?
Hatred of Donald Trump became the
wealthy agnostic’s version of medieval indulgence. One’s collective sins
can be washed away and a once marred soul can still make its way to
tech heaven—if the offender can purchase a contracted exemption.
Hating Donald Trump and doing
something about that venom are just those indulgences. And they can
excuse past, present, and future sin. Bar, cancel, and end a
social-media Trump, and all the wrongs of monopoly, market fixing,
cartelizing, and trust creation are washed away, in the eyes of the
progressive supreme deity Reason.
So our cartels are beloved for
colluding and fixing their markets to ban not just Trump but any future
access to their competitors.
Trump is free to tweet and post
whenever and wherever he wants, but there will be nowhere else to tweet
and post. So spoke the liberal descendants of the old Jim Crow racists
who insisted they were free to deny service to anyone they wished, even
when there were no alternative motels or lunch counters to be found.
Hating Donald Trump in the hater’s
eyes makes one moral. But in the real world, such pathological fixations
usually result in abject immorality and moral decline, as the hater
becomes far worse than what he hates.
About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the
Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior
Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American
military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar
of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale
College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in
2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing
raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of
social trends related to farming and agrarianism.
He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.
Sarah Cowgill
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