Barely half a year ago, I wrote a column addressed to my friend and colleague (and boss) Jonah Goldberg, headlined “Against Exhaustion.” It was a buck-up-little-camper homily for Jonah, who had written that he was losing his passion for the work he has been doing for most of his adult life because in the Age of Trump—which is the Age of Bulls—t—addressing all the lies and imbecilic innuendo and stupidity and goalpost-moving and bad faith arguments and such is just too much. I cited the unfortunate truth of Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bulls—t is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
I must confess that I am suffering from a little of that exhaustion myself, which I know—and wrote in my earlier column—is not an accident.
If I may quote myself: “Exhaustion is a strategy.”
And trying to meet Trump’s daily barrage of high crimes and misdemeanors with rational analysis is exhausting. For example, how weird is it that the administration has dispatched thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minnesota in response to a welfare-fraud scandal that seems to have been carried out almost entirely by people legally present in the United States, including citizens and those on temporary protected status? It surely is not because the state has an unusually large population of illegal immigrants: The illegal-immigrant share of the labor force in Texas is more than three times what it is in Minnesota; 1 of every 11 households in Texas includes an illegal immigrant, while the figure for Minnesota is 1 in 32. If you wanted to investigate welfare fraud being carried out in Minneapolis and environs—and even if you wanted to concentrate on welfare fraud being carried out specifically by Somali Americans and/or Somali immigrants—yanking Renee Nicole Good out of her car (as that ICE agent apparently intended to do before shooting her in the head) would be a very, very weird way to go about that. But if you try explaining the non-sequiturity of that non sequitur to a 65-year-old golfer who has Fox News on 16 hours a day, he’s going to start rambling about George Soros or your testosterone level.
Once a week, the Trump administration does something that would get an ordinary president impeached in sane times: cooking up a ridiculously pretextual criminal investigation to try to bully the Fed chairman into cutting interest rates leaps to mind, as does murdering scores of seafaring South Americans on similarly thin pretexts. Consider the fact—which would be unbelievable in normal times—that NATO countries are sending troops to Greenland because NATO—a U.S.-led alliance—is worried that the United States is about to carry out an act of war against Denmark.
Trump—and the sort of low character he attracts—courts violence where the force is overwhelmingly on his side, as it tends to be when you are the president of the United States. He’s a punk where Russia and China are concerned, but he doesn’t mind a little gunplay when the party on the other side doesn’t have a gun—or doesn’t have enough of them. Venezuela is not going to fight the U.S. military, and unarmed fishing boats sure as hell aren’t going to. The Danes are tough and courageous people, but there are only about 6 million of them and around 21,000 under arms to defend Greenland, and the Danish military probably would have a hard time of it in a pitched battle with the gangsters from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Renee Good wasn’t carrying a gun, and the role-playing Antifa types who so often act like they are spoiling for a fight will be back to their therapeutic-journaling seminars posthaste if—when—things turn ugly.
Trump’s amorality and ruthlessness, and those of his underlings, are constrained by one thing and one thing alone, and it is not the noodly spines of such specimens as Mike Pence: It is their incompetence—their horrifying, hilarious incompetence.
Trump now wants to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens in U.S. cities. That power is daunting and dangerous even in the hands of such wise and patriotic men as George H.W. Bush, who is the last U.S. president to have invoked its powers, doing so at the request of California’s governor in the anarchy of the 1992 riots. President Bush back then had the advice of such men as James Baker, one of the ablest and steadiest hands in American statecraft. Trump has a whole Falangist Island of Misfit Toys packed with nitwits who think that the United States is losing its geopolitical position because Americans get flu shots and have too much skim milk in their diets.
One might be tempted to respond to all of their nonsense point-by-point—as noted, exhaustion is their strategy.
