Sympathy for the Devil
It’s okay not to feel bad that the Worst President Ever got sick.
With Drew Miller
Following the news that Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19, grief-stricken liberals decided to take a break from their usual routine of calling him a fascist autocrat and threat to our democracy to send some thoughts and prayers to him and his family.
But this is a remarkable display of doublethink. Only in the minds of liberals is the president apparently a would-be dictator who warrants comparison to figures like Kim Jong-Un, puts children in concentration camps, enables paramilitary white supremacists, is himself a foreign agent imposed upon us by a Russian demagogue, etc.; and able to elicit all of this politics-aside, get-well-soon sentiment. It reveals a nihilistic streak among liberals that has become more and more noticeable as the Trump era lurches on.
This nihilism can take many forms: plain hypocrisy (e.g., upholding Joe fucking Biden as a progressive icon), pure false consciousness (e.g., drawing artificial distinctions between “economic” and “social” issues), or contradictions in liberals’ thinking of which they’re simply unaware. This recent case of wishing Donald Trump a speedy recovery falls into that latter category.
Now, people of all political stripes hold hypocritical and contradictory positions and that alone doesn’t make them nihilists. In the case of these liberals, however, the disjuncture between their recent well-wishing and everything they’ve said about Trump up until this point is too extreme to ignore. To the outside observer, this glaring contradiction cries out for explanation, and one such explanation is nihilism — a full rejection of principle and meaning.
This recent episode suggests that when liberals speak of Trump in hyper-concerned tones about the existential threat he poses, they do not really believe what they’re saying. Or, at the very least, they would regard his sudden death (by wholly natural causes) as an unacceptable solution to that threat. Indeed, they seem to believe in nothing beyond their own essential goodness.
That they feel they absolutely must be seen as occupying some imagined moral high ground is key to understanding liberals’ response to Trump’s diagnosis. Many have staked their identity — and even their livelihood — on developing a public persona as someone who can be counted on to sound the alarm about anything Donald Trump says or does. And, if these people genuinely believe everything they say about Trump, then the implications are…startling, to put it mildly.
In a recent interview, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the upcoming election. She called on him to honor his oath to the Constitution and the people of the United States, trotted out the usual fare about how this isn’t North Korea, yada yada. But then, a reporter asked her about what she and congressional Democrats would do — if anything — to block the confirmation of nominee Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
Clearly, Trump understands that irregularities in this election may require the outcome to be settled by the Supreme Court. This is no doubt on his mind, and the minds of his fellow Republicans, as they scramble to fill the vacancy left by the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg before the election. He has implied as much, at the very least, and regular, rank-and-file liberals have been practically apoplectic at the prospect of yet another Trump SCOTUS pick.¹
Pelosi’s response to this possibility is not quite what one would expect (or hope) of the opposition party leadership. Rather than accede to demands from the left that the Democrats do anything and everything they can to obstruct the confirmation of Trump’s nominee, Pelosi stated outright that they would not use a government shutdown — a powerful political weapon — to achieve that end.
This rebuke of the left would be stunning if we didn’t already know exactly who Nancy Pelosi is. It’s not enough that she and other party leaders have resolved not to use every weapon in their arsenal to stop the man they ostensibly consider the greatest political villain in living memory from getting his way. That alone puts the lie to the last four years of Democratic rhetoric. And, obstructing the confirmation process would be a simple matter of fair play, given how Republicans obstructed President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for purely political reasons, simply because they could.
Rather, we know Pelosi’s reasoning because she has been up-front about it: She specifically cited calls from “the left” to shut down the government, if necessary, to keep Trump from filling another Supreme Court seat. And her response was a simple No, were not doing that. The federal workers need their paychecks, after all — now more than ever.
The hypocrisy on display is shocking, even for a seasoned politician. The sitting president is alleged to be an existential threat to the nation…but we dare not disrupt The Process to stop him. He’s destroying our democratic institutions and upending the normal functions of government…but if we have to halt those functions temporarily in order to preserve them in the long term, then it’s just not worth the effort.
For example, on the very day of the impeachment vote, Pelosi allowed a vote on Trump’s trade deal to proceed. (Incidentally, House Democrats overwhelmingly voted to approve the deal just a few weeks later.) Pelosi and the Democrats seemingly wanted to demonstrate their willingness to work with Trump and the GOP despite their differences — and despite, apparently, the fact that they consider Trump impeachable and his presidency illegitimate.
Democrats regard process as sacrosanct. And, because they see themselves as fundamentally good, as The Reasonable Party, anything that interrupts the process is necessarily bad, including the sudden death of The Worst President Ever. It also means that their urge to display bipartisanship is overriding, even if it means cooperating with the enemy and shaking hands with the devil.
It does not matter, nor even occur, to them that this very same drive toward cooperation helped give us Trump in the first place. Being a “principled” liberal is about following the established rules because that is what the Good People do, even when that means giving the worst person they can imagine everything he wants. It means holding themselves to that standard even when the other party laughs off the notion of playing by those same rules. For Democrats, it is preferable to follow some defunct rules and lose than to try a new strategy and risk winning.
Of course, they don’t actually believe in any of that lofty-sounding nonsense — but they do find it politically helpful to maintain the appearance that that they do. It helps them keep up the illusion that they are a separate party from the Republicans, with distinct goals. Democrats have no interest in opposing Trump or his party in any meaningful way, because they also represent the same wealthy elites and corporations.
All of this supposed hypocrisy and ineffectiveness on the Democrats’ part, then, is really nothing of the sort, and to interpret it as such is to misread their true intentions. At its core, the function of the Democratic Party is to smooth the rightward shift of what is considered the political mainstream. All those aforementioned acts of supposed hypocrisy — refusing to try to stop Barrett’s confirmation, pushing Trump’s trade deal through — are ways for the party to thumb its nose at the left.
And in that way, the Democrats are not really being hypocritical at all. They’re operating in a manner consistent with their principles — it’s just that those principles are not apparent to most people. The left correctly identifies the principles and function of the Democratic Party, which directly challenges their self-image as the Not-Evil People. So, all their supposed love of bipartisanship and devotion to process really emerges from contempt for socialists.²
Not coincidentally, this antagonism toward the left benefits the bourgeoisie by perpetually relegating socialists to “the fringe” by definition. After all, what better way is there to safeguard the power and profits of rich ghouls than by characterizing their opposition as a bunch of fringe weirdos with crazy ideas by default? Meanwhile, the Democratic Party easily co-opts socialist slogans and aesthetics to give the appearance of resisting the powerful, undercutting any skepticism earnest progressives may have regarding the party’s actual goals and practices.
To that end, the use of hyperbole is a useful tool, especially in the Trump era, because it gets people amped up and panicked about how we need to stop those Republicans RIGHT. NOW. It serves to stop people from fully thinking through their own politics. And it’s highly effective, despite experience showing us that the general trend toward shittiness is not one party making grand, bombastic moves toward autocracy, but both major parties collaborating to ensure the gradual decay of our collective rights and well-being in more subtle ways. Nothing ever changes, but things keep getting worse.
The doublethink around Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis is just the most recent example of this longstanding trend. Think about how Democrats have pretty uniformly supported military budget increases under Trump, even as they decry him as an authoritarian buffoon with no relevant experience and no business leading the most powerful (and destructive) military force in history. This same trend can be observed in virtually every domain of U.S. politics.
But, hyperbole applies in other ways as well. If we take seriously (as we should) Democrats’ statements condemning Trump’s immigration policy — the pointless border wall, the inhumane deportations, the concentration camps, the forced hysterectomies³ — then we have to extend them to criticism of the Obama administration as well. This is not to equate the two, but rather to point out that Obama was no ally of the left, despite Democratic rhetoric implying otherwise.
One of the fastest ways to radicalize is to simply follow these criticisms to their logical conclusions, applying them consistently. Or, perhaps the greatest radicalizing force is the application of logical consistency when partisan hypocrisy is the norm.
For liberals, even before the Obama era, politics has become something of a fanfiction, largely divorced from reality. This helps explain the vastly different responses to Trump by liberals and leftists, including his bout with the coronavirus. Ken Klippenstein may have put it best when he said, “Everyone who said they’d riot if Trump replaced RBG is now wishing him a speedy recovery.”
Still, the liberal urge to wish Trump well is not necessarily ideological. Certainly, in the case of powerful establishment figures in politics and the media, there is an ideological element at play. Leaders want to feed the narrative that they have some sort of moral authority and thereby maintain their ratings or their base of support among voters.
But in many cases — perhaps most cases — publicly offering goodwill to the president and denouncing those who wouldn’t be terribly bothered by his death is more of a reflex than anything else. It is a learned behavior, a sort of partisan conditioning, strengthened in the age of social media. It’s how we get recurring themes such as “Bernie Bros were mean to me on Twitter, so now I think poor people should die in medical debt!” and “Welcome to the #Resistance, [Republican war criminal]!” The same process allows Republicans to attack Joe Biden for his authorship of the 1994 Crime Bill while cheering on the most vile, racist, and destructive “tough on crime” rhetoric they see on Fox News, while failing to recognize any contradiction.
There are myriad political behaviors, once useful in some past context, that are reinforced through repetition such that we just sort of…do them without thought as to why we do them or whether they still have any utility. For example, it made sense to sound the alarm and hyperbolize over every single thing Trump did and said in 2016, and perhaps even leading up to the 2018 midterms. But, partisans and pundits have continued to do so for four years with nothing to show for it.
All this moralizing has failed to effect any real change in how Trump governs, and has probably not had a favorable effect on Joe Biden’s election chances. This election is going to boil down to how people view Trump’s handling of the parallel crises of COVID-19 and the rash of protests and uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Whatever Rachel Maddow or Chuck Todd or Alyssa Milano have to say is not going to change the minds of those who were always going to vote for the Democrat or the Republican anyway.
Not only does the white noise of “TRUMP BAD” or “TRUMP GOOD” (depending on which media you consume) cause less devoted (read: normal) people to tune out The Discourse and unplug from politics, but it has also led us to this current state in which loyal partisans on both sides treat every Trump act, statement, and tweet like a Pavlovian tone. Everything Trump does instantly elicits anger and outrage, either directed at him or back at his detractors on his behalf. This is not a healthy way to engage with politics. And, while many understandably blame Trump for being an uncaring, oafish piece of shit, the fault still ultimately lies with the system of incentives created by and for wealthy political and media elites.
Similarly, in 2016 it was a perfectly reasonable assumption that Bernie Sanders would get maybe two percent of the vote in Iowa and drop out of the primary, and then the rest of the party could go about supporting Hillary Clinton while pretending they’d agreed with Bernie’s platform all along. But, because he won enough votes to actually present a threat to Clinton’s campaign, establishment Democrats had to invent a whole new discourse to explain why the candidate promoting all those universally laudable goals is Bad, Actually.
Suddenly, they were thrust into the unfortunate position of having to explain why universal programs are “unrealistic” and the Reasonable Adult thing to do is to support policies that are so bogged down in wonky details no one cares about that they have no chance of picking up any grassroots momentum, and so thoroughly means-tested that they’d help virtually no one even if they passed. This is why Bernie outshone his more milquetoast opponents in the 2020 primary. Kamala Harris was basically laughed out of the race after unveiling her plan to enact student debt forgiveness…for Pell Grant recipients. Who start businesses. That operate for three years. In disadvantaged communities.⁴ Pete Buttigieg similarly failed to gain traction after adopting the same model for his “Douglass Plan.” And Elizabeth Warren lost significant support after it turned out that by “Medicare for All,” she really meant, “an overly complicated plan that I have no hope of implementing.”
So, with Bernie ascendant, the Democrats were forced to make excuses as to why his decades-long support of once-marginal causes that are now mainstream was actually the result of his cynicism, privilege, and/or identity, and not any real convictions. Hillary Clinton’s significantly less progressive record on civil rights for LGBTQ+ and black Americans was instead portrayed as pragmatic, a product of a different time.
There are countless other examples, and it’s hard to ascribe them entirely to ideology. They really do seem to be knee-jerk reactions that developed in particular moments as responses to various challenges to the Democratic liberal hegemony. And, many of them remain as vestigial organs of partisan discourse.
That said, there is still ideology at work here. Though responding to Trump’s bout with the coronavirus with thoughts and prayers may be somewhat involuntary among regular, rank-and-file liberals, there is a certain strain of liberal for whom this response is more calculated. Savvy, ideological liberals may level all manner of criticism and vitriol at Donald Trump — and rightly so — but no matter what they might think about him in particular, their core beliefs remain. And one of those core beliefs is that institutional power commands some intrinsic respect; the Office of the President of the United States must be respected no matter who occupies it, and even if they happen to be completely loathsome. It’s another self-serving truism they have adopted to position themselves on the moral high ground. And, it is why they can deride Trump as an authoritarian and a Russian puppet for years and then stand up and applaud his State of the Union address (and with particular enthusiasm when he says that socialism will never take root in the United States).
This feigned sympathy and moral shaming of lefty naysayers is not new to the Trump era, but it’s still a relatively recent development in liberal thought. Recall the passing of Republican figures like Ronald Reagan in 2004 or John McCain and George H.W. Bush in 2018. News coverage of their respective deaths was laudatory and hagiographic across the board, and even those who didn’t particularly like these men operated on the assumption that it would be somewhat uncouth not to uncritically praise their accomplishments in life — even though they were each criminals who visited mass suffering on countless people at home and abroad. Even their so-called achievements were, in many cases, outright war crimes. But, it is considered gauche to notice such things at all, let alone immediately after their deaths.
People see this not as ideological, but simply the way it is. It’s considered a matter of common decency, the way we ought to behave. But, that is frequently how liberal ideology presents itself. Few dared to point out that “he was a good, decent man” is plainly a narrative propelled by the media and political classes. This narrative is doubly effective at protecting their image: First, they get the benefit of appearing caring and sympathetic to those in mourning (with varying degrees of sincerity), which shores up their position on the moral high ground. Second, they get to whitewash the record of whichever public figure has died by chastising those who dare to mention their crimes. Attention is taken away from those crimes, and the crimes of the political elite as a whole, and they are eventually lost down the memory hole.
Contrast all of this with the response from Trump-haters who don’t happen to be entwined in that liberal ideology: Memes, tweets, and all manner of irreverent social media posts abound, expressing the plain and simple attitude, ‘That’s neat. Hope he dies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯’
Pearl-clutching liberals — particularly of the blue checkmark variety — may insist that defeating Trump and what he represents requires us to claim the moral high ground by making public gestures of goodwill, namely, wishing him a smooth recovery and hoping that the courts have their way with him later. But, at least those of us who aren’t restrained by that liberal pretense of mutual respect are able to correctly identify our enemies. Not to beat a dead donkey, but what does it say about whom the Democrats consider their real enemies that they go out of their way to wish Trump well but demonize figures like Bernie Sanders? And what does that say about their attitudes toward the ordinary working people in this country and our political interests?
Besides that, wishing Trump a recovery from his illness actually isn’t a morally superior position.⁵ Trump’s unabashed haters are not appealing to some sense of karmic justice. Indeed, the implication that illness — especially chronic illness — reflects some sort of moral stain or personal character flaw is wrongheaded and ableist. But that is not the source of schadenfreude in Trump’s case. We need not suggest that his contracting the virus is some form of cosmic punishment for his shitty behavior. Rather, it’s the plain, predictable outcome of his mishandling of the pandemic, requiring no preternatural explanation. Had he done more to combat the spread of the coronavirus, rather than sitting on his hands for weeks and pretending the problem would go away on its own, he likely would not have been infected.
In the same way, you may or may not have sympathy for your Trump-supporting friends and relatives. And, indeed, it may be going too far to say that they deserve to contract the coronavirus. But, if they go out to crowded public areas without masks in the midst of a pandemic and then get sick, it’s not unfair to say that their own actions caused that outcome, because that’s how viral infections spread. Whether you want to blame them or berate them for their irresponsibility is a separate matter.
And, if you’re uneasy about saying Trump deserves to get sick, fuck off, and die, that’s your prerogative. By all means, have some sympathy for The Donald if it makes you feel better. But, it’s still his own damn fault.
And, yeah, I kind of hope he just fuckin’ dies.
[1] During the span of writing, Barrett’s confirmation hearing came and went, with little more than a depressed shrug from the liberal-left. To the writers’ great shock, the promised riots never materialized.
[2] Just gonna leave a reminder here that socialism is what any progressive or liberal would be striving for if they applied their stated values consistently.
[3] Everyone seems to have forgotten about those forced hysterectomies in less than a month. Again, a few thousand people demonstrating outside every ICE facility would bring the practice to a stop, but apparently the situation isn’t so dire that we can’t wait a few more months for President Biden to clean up for us.
[4] Surely, this is the kind of exciting stuff that gets the attention of apathetic non-voters.
[5] It’s not really a moral position at all. Wishing Trump well or wishing death upon him is an amoral act, because merely wishing for something has not real-world impact.
