To keep it respectable
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American conservatism has produced essentially three (sue me I’m an academic) responses to Donald Trump and Trumpism:
(1) Enthusiastic, cult-like embrace. This has been and remains the overwhelmingly dominant reaction on the right.
(2) Total unambiguous rejection. This represents the position of the tiny cohort of consistent never Trumpers (Frum, Kristol, Rubin etc. Why are all these Jews so paranoid about a little light fascism I wonder?).
(3). Paris is worth a mass types. These are the classic big business Greenwich country club GOP movers and shakers — the people who read the Wall Street Journal religiously. Now some of these people have absolutely gone over to the cult, but a lot of them are doing the German conservatives in 1933 bit — yes this Austrian interloper is a horrible vulgarian and his supporters are disgusting, but consider the alternative! (Standard disclaimer: Trump is not Hitler — he’s too lazy and stupid for one thing — and Trumpism isn’t Nazism or even full-blown fascism . . . yet. You know what else is never full-blown fascism? Full-blown fascism, before it’s full-blown).
The WSJ editorial page is the ethnographic home of the #3 people, and it was fascinating to see how that page pulled the following stunts over the last few days:
(1) First it published an editorial that among other things stated that Biden won the Pennsylvania presidential election.
(2) Then it published a 600-word letter to the editor written by one of Trump’s semi-literate monkeys and signed by him, full of the usual firehose of bullshit about how the election was stolen from Dear Leader.
(3) Then, after the inevitable backlash, it published a response to that backlash that perfectly captures the ethos of the Reluctant Supporters of Donald Trump ™.
“[Trump’s] 2020 monomania is news, and it reflects on his fitness for 2024,” the editorial read.
“We trust our readers to make up their own minds about his statement,” it continues. “And we think it’s news when an ex-President who may run in 2024 wrote what he did, even if (or perhaps especially if) his claims are bananas.”
It went on to debunk many of Trump’s claims, saying “it’s difficult to respond to everything” due to the rate at which Trumpworld produces falsehoods.
Bill Grueskin, a journalism professor and former WSJ managing editor, told the Washington Post that opinion editors do not normally just publish letters containing known falsehoods without intervention.
“If someone is going to spout a bunch of falsehoods, the editor usually feels an obligation to trim those out, or to publish a contemporaneous response,” Grueskin said. In this case, the Wall Street Journal waited until after considerable backlash.
Ultimately, the paper concluded, there is no evidence backing up Trump’s claims of having won the election.
The response includes the standard right wing bothsiding about the “Russia Hoax,” i.e., the crazy theory that Russia vigorously intervened in the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, Trump and his people knew about it, and some of them cooperated in the effort. This crazy theory is exactly like the Big Lie about how the 2020 election was stolen from Trump except for a tiny little detail, which that the former theory happens to be true.
Note also the classic right wing anti-cancel culture frame (“we trust our readers to make up their own minds!”), as if platforming wildly irresponsible lies is some sort of neutral open to all viewpoints obligation on the part of the largest circulation newspaper in America.
But the key thing here is that the WSJ op-ed page and its many rich and powerful readers is playing the “I don’t approve of Trump’s claims/behavior/interior design choices etc. but . . .” game. These people support Trump every bit as much as Cletus in the Ohio diner and Mr. Small Business Owner in Dallas who is a big QAnon enthusiast.
Their tongue-clucking about Trump’s lying is just all part of the con — they’re going to do everything they can to get him re-elected if (when) he gets the 2024 GOP nomination, and for the present are playing the “I don’t support Trump but” game just as disingenuously as any fash-curious expat strolling along a picturesque Rio beach.