Tales of the Resistance

There's this telling moment in the Ross Douthat interview of Senator J.D. Vance ("What J.D. Vance Believes"), where Vance is asked when he decided he "liked" Donald Trump, and he cites his first personal meeting with Trump, in 2021, and Trump telling him the story of how the generals tried to fool him into thinking they were obeying his orders to draw down US troops in northern Syria, in 2018-19, by shuffling them around instead:

The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.” And I was like, OK, this guy’s deeper than I’d given him credit for. And also I was deeply offended by this. Talk about a threat to democracy — the generals not listening to the president of the United States about matters like troop redeployment.

Actually, it was probably not a general but a civilian, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in the first place and then Mark Esper. It was a matter of maybe 200 troops out of a total of 2500 US troops in the region, with an extremely specific function: protecting our Kurdish allies (guarding the detained remnants of the Islamic State so it couldn't reestablish itself in the region) from our Turkish allies, who didn't care about the Islamic State, but were eager to get all the Kurds, who President Recep Tayyib Erdoğan regarded as anti-Turkish terrorists, away from the Turkish border; he'd been calling Trump all year, demanding the removal of the US troops so he could conquer all the Kurd-held territory without crossing any Americans, and Trump obediently tried to make it happen, but then the troops didn't actually go away.

Why was Trump so determined to obey Erdoğan's orders and throw the Kurds under the Turkish bus, against the urgent advice of every single member of the national security and foreign policy staff? Perhaps because he so valued his "very good relationships" with authoritarians like Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS, and Erdoğan too? He'd rather have the secretary of defense get mad at him than the president of Turkey. He could fire the secretary of defense (and eventually did, of course, over Esper's refusal to contemplate putting down American protestors with American troops).

But then there's another aspect to Trump-Turkish relations, the "conflict of interest" he mentioned to Stephen Bannon in a 2015 interview:

What part of anti-fascist didn't you understand?

Image via New York Times.

Not long after retweeting (and then untweetting) an image of the Trump train evidently emulating the automobile of that murdering Nazi in Charlottesville to mow down the CNN mascot, Emperor Trump showed up at Trump Tower to inform the press of a new executive order:

“I’ve just signed a new executive order to reform the nation’s badly broken infrastructure permitting process,” Trump announced, suggesting that his directive would streamline the process of approving constructions on highways.

But according to my source (the Mic Network), it was actually just rear-ending an order of 2015 from the Obama White House, revising the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard

It's not the same

Washington, September 12 2009. via Fox News.

I'm seeing a lot of traffic on the Twitter, including from some distinguished journalists, drawing an equivalence between these town hall meetings where Republican legislators are getting screamed at and the Tea Party agitation of 2009-10, much of it with the optimistic view that this could augur one of those big waves in the 2018 elections:

Like Tea Party protests, Chaffetz town hall could be harbinger of midterm trouble - Washington Examiner https://t.co/x59yVfVdJ7

— Gregory McCray (@g_mccray) February 11, 2017

Or even pessimistic, worrying that protesters are making themselves obnoxious, and nobody likes that:

No, I'm saying that history teaches us that #resistance movements are also disruptive and often disliked. Some ppl like to look over that... https://t.co/WYZvZX8SFl

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) February 23, 2017

And for counterpoint the breezy Cillizza dismizza:

Why chaotic town halls mean less than you think https://t.co/JIRGfoQvnZ pic.twitter.com/Lj6T2JdnjD

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) February 22, 2017

And then there's this:

Woman at Tom Cotton town hall: “We’re going Medicare MY way. Not your way. My way. I’ve got a husband DYING.” pic.twitter.com/fHF9nbyqiB

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 22, 2017

It struck me there's an enormous difference between these protests and those of seven or eight years ago, in that these are about reality.

The Tea Party was complaining about taxes going through the roof and masses of Mexicans invading our country when taxes had in fact been going down for years and Mexicans had started migrating in the opposite direction. Not that most of them were lying, I think they really didn't know. They hadn't gone to the trouble of putting two payslips together and figuring it out, and they didn't live in places where there were any Mexicans, and they didn't know what they were talking about, just what Rush and Sean were telling them, and our beloved mainstream media didn't seem to know either—the Chris Cillizzas and Adam Nagourneys who don't feel they're being paid to know anything about real life since how does that impact the horse race anyway?

This week's town hall protesters, in contrast, are talking about access to lifesaving medical care and Donald Trump's tax returns, and it carries a certain conviction. Anyway it feels a lot different to me.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

David Brooks joins the #Resistance

Alongside that hero of insurrection, Gerald R. Ford. I'm not even kidding.

John Banner as Sergeant Schulz.

Shorter ("How Should One Resist the Trump Administration?"):

There are three models for resistance to the tyranny of Trumpery: anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, monastery organizer Benedict of Nursia, and President Gerald R. Ford. We're in a Ford moment.

It's so weird, but so deeply Brooksian, how he moves more or less unconsciously from the "one" of his title, which you'd think would refer to you and me, the footsoldiers in whatever it's going to take to deal with the present emergency, to the "One" Great Man, the leader who will show us the way. (But not in an ill-mannered way like Donald "I Alone Can Fix It" Trump.) He promised to tell us what to do but slid immediately into looking for somebody else to tell us. His first instinct, in asking how to cope with the threat of authoritarianism, is to call the authorities.

Thus we might need a Bonhoeffer to resist the threat of incipient fascism. Or St. Benedict? Wait, what? In fact, his first instinct is to argue that authoritarianism isn't the problem:

Dear women, Ur doing it wrong. Yours affectionately, David Brooks

Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely in One Week (1920), via.

Shorter David Brooks, "After the Women's March", January 24 2017:

The Women's Marches on Saturday in protest against the incoming Trump administration were a phenomenal success that left their participants feeling energized and hopeful, but unfortunately they failed to aim at uneducated white men, so they weren't successful after all. Too bad!

In the first place, they shouldn't have been focused on issues such as reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, and action on climate change, because while these are all important issues, this is 2017, and ethnic populism is rising around the world:

Don't call him a populist

Yas we can. pic.twitter.com/DAn37Vq5gY

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 21, 2017

Apparently they knew I was coming.

This is the Women's March in New York, to which some accommodating women (daughter and friend) brought me. Somebody said 200,000, together with 500,000 in Washington and some really humongous number in LA. The helpmeet had to go to work, but one of my sisters was at the Washington one, and another in a larger party in New York but much further uptown from where we were, so that we never managed to connect.

In fact there were tons of men, of course, some (not me!) managing to look very cool in pink pussy hats. We dutifully chanted, "Her body, her choice" in the responsory. For a while we marched behind a bit of an activist brass band, a wonderful phenomenon I remember from the leadup to the Iraq war, not necessarily very sophisticated from a musical point of view—only the sousaphone player had a clear sense of harmonic improvisation, and there was some weird repertoire choice, in which "Bei mir bist du shein" was the oddest. But in "You are my sunshine", heedless of its origin as a composition by Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis (1944-48, 1960-64), the crowd sang "You'll never know, dear/How much I love you/Please don't take/My health care away."