All the President's Men
His astonishingly, painfully dumb men
These Are Not Very Bright Guys, and Things Got Out of Hand
Former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has a certain, uh, reputation in Washington. At the risk of sounding uncharitable, he would basically have to undergo millions of years of evolution to have the spinal structural integrity of a jellyfish. And if brains were electricity, he’d be reading Where’s Waldo by candlelight. Which is to say, while he may not be the smartest man in town, he makes up for it by being utterly craven.
Well, Mark Meadows has been having a rough couple of weeks.
First, he released his book that he thought would be sufficiently reverent of Donald Trump; but it included such anecdotes as Trump participating in the debate with Joe Biden — among multiple other publics events — while knowingly infected with COVID. (It almost killed Chris Christie!) An enraged Donald Trump provided this harshest-possible denunciation of the book, calling it “fake news.” And then Meadows appeared on Newsmax agreeing with Trump that his own book is fake news. (It wasn’t, of course, fake news; as mere days later Trump was flown to Walter Reed Medical Center with COVID complications.)
Then, earlier this week, the January 6th Committee released a trove of documents provided by Meadows — including dozens of text messages he received the day of the attack — that paint quite a damning picture of Donald Trump and his acolytes’ behavior. This proverbial horse being fully and completely out of the barn, Meadows sought to close the door by declaring he is no longer cooperating with the committee. (Not realizing, apparently, that isn’t how that works.)
While we don’t yet have a full accounting of Donald Trump’s actions on and around January 6th, Meadows’s texts are quite illuminating of the various Trump remora. Several as-yet-unnamed Republican congressmen texted Meadows their support of the scheme to have Vice President Pence unilaterally declare certain states’ electoral votes invalid, thereby overturning the election. At least one congressman lamented that the scheme was unsuccessful.
But perhaps most revelatory are the texts from Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade. And also, Donald Trump Jr., for some reason.
Setting aside the weirdness of the president’s son having to pass a message through the Chief of Staff, he joined the Fox News hosts in urging Meadows to convince the president to condemn and cease the attack on the Capitol.
Continuing his unbroken streak of utterly missing the point, Ben Shapiro gave himself a hernia moving these goalposts:
Has a single person this side of Joy Reid accused Fox News of coordinating a conspiracy to overthrow the government? Of course not. But these texts do provide us with some useful information:
These Fox News hosts absolutely consider themselves part of the “Trump Team.” Chris Cuomo just lost his job at CNN for providing his brother undisclosed public relations advice. As much as their viewership bitches about it, it turns out that Fox News has lower journalistic standards than CNN.
More importantly, they knew what they were seeing was bad. They saw the same thing we all saw: A mob of unruly supporters of the president vandalizing the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the election from being certified.
Most importantly, they knew that Donald Trump had the power and ability to stop it, and he chose not to. Because he enjoyed it.
Sean Hannity, bless his heart, is trying to feign indignation that his private texts are being shared with the public. But surely not even Sean Hannity is so dumb as to believe that there’s an expectation of privacy when communicating with a public official subject to investigation. What makes all of this so galling is the fact that all of these hosts went back on television — in Ingraham’s case, she went on her show that night — and immediately started floating conspiracy theories about ANTIFA infiltrators, or government plants, or just rank excuse-making.
On a certain level, however, it’s difficult to fully blame them. They know better, sure. They’re feeding their audience things they know to be untrue. But the problem is, the audience wants it. They’re merely following the same path as craven Republicans like Lindsey Graham. Graham, you might remember, made an impassioned speech the night of January 6th saying that he was off the Trump Train. “Enough is enough,” he said. But the next day, he was accosted by a MAGA-hatted mob in an airport, and he was back on the Trump Train before his seat had even gotten cold.
It’s something of a recurring theme in this newsletter, but the basis of all of our political culture problems stem from We The People. Sure, people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are willing to be dishonest for a paycheck. And gelatinous throne-sniffers like Lindsey Graham will assume any shape required to maintain proximity to power. But all of that would be irrelevant if there wasn’t an audience — or electorate — willing to tolerate it. And not merely tolerate it, but demand it. We can curse them for merely sailing whichever way the political winds blow; but the larger problem is the source of those political winds.
Credit Where It’s Due, and Blame Where it Isn’t
Another one of my political pet peeves in the tendency of the electorate to give presidents credit for things that aren’t their doing, as well as blame them for things that aren’t their fault.
Something that always bothered me about Donald Trump (but slid farther and farther down the priority list) was how he took credit for the state of the American economy. For example, here’s the unemployment rate for the last two decades, marked when Donald Trump took office:
As you can see, Donald Trump just happened to stumble ass-first onto the tail end of a trend that started almost a decade prior.
Presidents have a fairly limited ability to affect the economy, but what power the do have is generally negative. Which is to say, presidents have much more power to hurt the economy than to help it. So when the economy is performing well, it’s usually in spite of the president; not because of him. Similarly, when the economy is doing poorly, the president is fairly limited in what he can do to counteract it.
Which brings us to our current predicament of supply chain bottlenecks and consumer price inflation. Things aren’t great at the moment, and Joe Biden’s approval numbers are taking a beating because of it. And I think that’s largely unfair. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the generous federal subsidy of unemployment benefits and COVID relief stimulus payments, the two main drags on the economy at the moment are the ongoing COVID pandemic and — somewhat surprisingly — a shortage of truck drivers.
Now, these two issues are somewhat related. First, some percentage of Americans simply don’t yet feel comfortable returning to work amid the pandemic. Add to this the various mitigation efforts still in effect in various places that stifle economic activity, and the economy hasn’t yet fully regained its pre-COVID momentum.
And people are laying this at Joe Biden’s feet, because that’s what they do. I’m willing to grant that Joe Biden’s messaging has left a bit to be desired; but Joe Biden is not responsible for the fact that some 20% of the population outright refuses to do anything that could hasten the end of the pandemic. Nor is he responsible for the overzealous (and largely unnecessary) mitigation measures in places that don’t need them.
On the supply chain side, there is apparently a shortage of some 80,000 truck drivers. When the pandemic first hit and the economy screeched to a halt, these 80,000 truckers found other employment and haven’t been lured back. As such, ports don’t get cleared as quickly, ships can’t unload on time, etc.
There’s not a whole lot the president can do; it simply takes time for the market to adjust.
In the meantime, people are just going to take their frustration out on the party and president in power. It’s not fair, sure, but fair’s got nothing to do with it. Sometimes a successful presidency comes down to simple dumb luck.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Old Politicians
Clue: This man was the oldest person to ever serve as U.S. Senator, retiring in 2003 at the age of 100.
Strom Thurmond
Today’s clue:
Category: Double Vowels
Clue: This land promised to Abraham in the book of Genesis.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My oldest (I have to specify now!) daughter had a “winter concert” at her daycare this morning, and it was…something. It was over Zoom both because of COVID considerations and because more parents can “attend” from work. But getting a bunch of toddlers to cooperate while simultaneously asking parents of varying technological savvy to tune in is a tall ask. One father briefly appeared shirtless from the bathroom before hurriedly turning off his camera, one mother was unwittingly providing audio commentary, and several parents were giving the rest of us lovely views of their nostrils. Really puts you in the holiday spirit.