The Dismal Priests of a Dying Church

and their stupid secular catechism

If you’ve been reading the news, which is usually a mistake, Donald Trump’s political appointments are the worst ever. Let’s sigh heavily and spend some time thinking about this.

Prior to the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, and really even well after it, the federal government was understood to operate on the spoils system: your generous friends marched a hungry crowd down to the polling place to get you elected, and then the voters got a long afternoon of beer and barbecue, and then your friends got government jobs or easy leases on public land, and then maybe a little of the money from those appointments and gifts drifted back toward your own business interests. But even by the standards of the 19th century, Simon Cameron had a reputation for shamelessness and sticky fingers, and Abraham Lincoln asked him to resign as his first Secretary of War. Responding to a query about Cameron’s honesty, a colleague once said of the man, “I don’t think he would steal a red-hot stove.” Confronted by Cameron, who heard about the statement, his colleague archly withdrew the claim.

Simon Cameron is one obvious figure from a long line of crushingly obvious scandals in American political history. If you’re an American and you went to high school at some point, you’ve heard of a few of the big ones: Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier. One of our vice-presidents killed a former Secretary of the Treasury; another resigned after his conviction for evading taxes on income that supposedly came from bribes. Sometimes politicians go to jail. Old hacks and ward heelers climb, and their pockets get heavier as they ascend, and then sometimes they get a little too obvious about it. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall has the distinction of being the first cabinet-level federal officer whose career path ended in a prison term, after the men who got those lucrative federal oil leases “loaned” him $400,000 that he didn’t exactly pay back.

When they haven’t quite ended up in scandal or prison, cabinet-level federal officials have tended to be chosen for their political connections rather than for the depth of their wisdom and experience. Newton Baker was a lawyer, a party activist, an unusually vocal pacifist, and the mayor of Cleveland before he became Woodrow Wilson’s wartime Secretary of War. His qualification for that position, with precisely no military knowledge or experience of any kind, and as an established anti-military activist, was that he played a key role in securing the Democratic Party’s nomination for Wilson during the 1912 party convention. Act like a friend, get treated like a friend.

Miraculously, though, American political history has just been rewritten, and government has been retroactively filled with statesmen of the greatest integrity and wisdom — so that Orange Hitler can be the WORST EVER.

Donald Trump drinks glass of water, glass of water the WORST GLASS OF WATER EVER. Donald Trump puts on pair of socks, pair of socks the WORST PAIR OF SOCKS IN THE HISTORY OF SOCKS.

The dismal apparatchik Susan Glasser labors mightily to produce a controversy, here, and let’s look in on the quality of her effort:

Given the resulting furor, it was easy to forget that just a day earlier Trump had announced that he would name Pete Hegseth, a weekend Fox News anchor with no government experience beyond his Army National Guard service, as his Secretary of Defense. Hegseth, who routinely inveighs against “woke generals” on television, publicly pushed for clemency toward war criminals in Trump’s first term; more recently, he has advocated that Trump should fire C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who is Black, in order to show that he would no longer support diversity-and-inclusion efforts in the military. At such a moment, it seemed like mere quibbles to point out that Trump’s decision, also announced on Tuesday, to name Kristi Noem as his Secretary of Homeland Security, in charge of America’s embattled immigration agencies, came despite the South Dakota governor’s lack of relevant experience or the revelation that she had shot and killed her family’s puppy.

See, Pete Hegseth, who has an Ivy League graduate degree in public policy, has no government experience of any kind, ever, anywhere, other than his two decades as a military officer with multiple combat deployments. Totally undistinguished and unqualified!

Similarly, Kristi Noem has no experience that would be relevant to the management of government agencies, save for her years in the state legislature and her four terms in Congress and her two terms as the governor of a state. And Trump is going to appoint her to be in charge of the immigration agencies even though she…shot a dog. What’s the relevance of the thing about the dog to the management of immigration? Shut up, they explained.

What Susan Glasser does for a living is that she starts with a conclusion and then gins up something that sort of gets her to it. Headline and narrative, then wedge in some fact-sounding something of some kind. These appointees are the WORST EVER — they have no experience of any kind, except for a few decades of experience in the military and in Congress and as a governor. If you’re not familiar with Glasser, here she is talking to Rachel Maddow, in a discussion so pathetic and inane it would embarrass a golden retriever who found himself participating in it:

Insisting on hysteria and relentless worst-evering, the scribes of the self-declared American political “mainstream” paradoxically insulate their targets against criticism.¹ Attorney General appointee Matt Gaetz has been dogged by a long string of allegations, none of which ever quite land, that his sexual tastes…run to the young side. And I probably wouldn’t deal with bad behavior in a puppy by shooting the puppy, but I sure wouldn’t tell you about it in a book if I did it. Like most people, all of these grown-ups arrive with baggage, and some of it might merit some measured discussion. The one thing that’s certain is that no discussion we have about any them will be measured, because Trump. Maybe Pete Hegseth isn’t the most qualified person in America for the role of Secretary of Defense. Is he less qualified than Newton Baker? But anyway, Governor Kristi Noem is TOTALLY UNQUALIFIED for a senior level job in government because of her…lack of government experience.

The degree to which the American political press can never quite land a punch is a product of a clinically diagnosable inability to test an established narrative premise for plausibility. If you doubt that at all, consider the existence of Susan Glasser’s editor, the formerly smart David Remnick. Hitler Hitler Hitler, Remnick explains in a new reaction piece, making fresh new arguments that you’ve totally never heard before.

Here are the third and fourth paragraphs of Remnick’s new warning that Trump is very very very bad, and try really hard to spot some of the subtle clues about the writer’s ideological priors:

Privately, Obama, the first Black man elected to the White House, allowed himself to wonder if he had “come along too soon.” A generational political talent, he had deployed the resonant language and narrative of the civil-rights movement (“the fierce urgency of now”) to promote broad-based reforms, particularly the Affordable Care Act. His residence in a house built by enslaved Black men and women seemed to suggest, if hardly an end to American racism, then surely a significant advance for the idea of a multiethnic democracy. But now he was being succeeded by a figure of unmistakable reaction—a poisonous demagogue, a bigot, who proposed a very different American story. The system was “rigged,” Trump told his followers. Foreign leaders were “laughing at us.” The country was a hellscape of ominous “illegal aliens,” “rapists,” gang members, and psychotics from faraway prisons and asylums. “American carnage” was his assessment of the country, and only he could set things right.

Shortly before the end of Obama’s second term, the President was in Lima, Peru, being driven to an event with some of his aides. Along the way, he confided that he’d just read an opinion column implying that, in electing Trump, tens of millions had rejected liberal identity politics. “What if we were wrong?” Obama said. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he went on, according to a memoir by one of his advisers, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

It’s all remarkable, but I admire most of all the use of scare quotes around the word rapists, marking it off as a crazy thing Trump said, a sign of derangement unconnected to reality. Can you believe that crazy son-of-a-bitch actually claimed there are so-called quote-unquote “rapists” in America? What is he, insane?

So the story is that Barack Obama, a generationally talented leader, arrived before America was ready for him. Loving Barack was advancing; falling away from the sight of Barack was falling back into mere tribalism, a failure of character. America was too morally and intellectually lazy for the depth of Barack the Lightbringer, who arrived before His wisdom could be understood. Our minds just hadn’t grown enough. Here, shield your eyes and try to watch the towering expression of genius that the GENERATIONAL TALENT could deliver to the people when His teleprompter wasn’t working:

Personal note to the Obama family: If you’re ever short on cash, David Remnick will pay to drink Barack’s bathwater.

1. Imagine thinking America wasn’t ready for how advanced you are, for how deep and forward-thinking your mind is;

2. Imagine finding a prominent journalist who agreed with you. Out loud!

Knowing, now, who David Remnick is, read his description of the policy stakes as he ponders a second Trump term:

Trump was equally brazen about policy. There is no longer any excuse for failing to see what a second Trump Administration may bring: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government stocked with mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader. A contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control. A weakening of NATO. An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium.

Remnick hasn’t thought about anything on this list. He’s chanting, a secular priest reciting the pieties. Trump is so dark and evil he might…deport undocumented immigrants, who are deportable under existing law. Trump is so depraved he might appoint subordinates who are loyal to him, a real break from the presidential norm of filling an administration with people who are aggressively disloyal. Trump might weaken NATO, crippling the defense of Europe, the evidence for which is that he spent his first term demanding that other NATO members double their defense spending.

How clever to cripple NATO by telling NATO members to develop much larger and more powerful militaries. NOW DO YOU SEE HOW DANGEROUS DONALD TRUMP IS!?!?!?!?

But keep going. Test the whole list.

“An assault on the press.” Name the American political reporters imprisoned by Trump during his first administration. Name the newspapers he ordered closed. Name the newsroom raids. Remember that the CNN reporter Jim Acosta described himself as a victim of repression because Trump called him an idiot, and you understand what Remnick is doing here.

“An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary.” Name the judicial decisions you intend to mark out as “reactionary,” and support your argument with evidence.

And finally: “A contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control.” The point of these themes is that they represent goals that cannot be obtained: prove that Congress can control the climate enough, or that there’s a level of human rights that’s somehow just the right setting. Or that Americans will ever be disarmed, allowing "gun control” to reach its conclusion. The point is that these policy measures aren’t policy measures; they’re lofty fake aspirations that, being unreal, can never be turned off. They’re quasi-religion, the kind of supposed ideals that might readily be embraced by the kind of mind which thinks America wasn’t ready for the profound moral and intellectual advancement personified by the existence of Barack Obama.

We arrive at this moment when the dying and invariably foolish self-declared “mainstream” warns that Trump’s appointees are unserious and not up to the expected standards of American political appointments, and the claim fails at both ends:

1. The appointments are mostly just fine;

2. What on earth do you think the expected standards of American political appointments have been?

Not one of Trump’s appointees is serious enough to steal luggage at the airport

The Biden administration lost its Secretary of Defense for a few days, but Trump is irresponsible. The argument about American political norms is agenda-driven storytelling, and much too stupid to take seriously. People who think that America wasn’t ready for Barack now also think that Trump represents a break from the High Standards of American Politics™. They’re inventing a fake past to pretend to worship so they can pretend to lament the degradation of their invented present. “I must buy some pearls so that I can clutch them.”

Apologies for a long silence and a slow effort at saying all of this. I’ve been busy not thinking about people like this, but I’m back now.

1. Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!, as you may have heard.