The Faustian Bargain of the MAGA Vanguard - The Dispatch

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Hey,

I can’t deny it: I’m enjoying the tumult on the right.

Let’s start with poor J.D. Vance. He has spent the last few years grounding his support for Donald Trump in Trump’s wise rejection of “forever wars,” “stupid wars,” “regime change wars,” etc. Now, he’s stuck trying to explain why this war on Iran is not—and cannot possibly be—any of the above without looking exactly like what he is: a guy who reinvented himself as a Trump vassal for political power.

Back in 2023, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Trump “has my support because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight wars overseas.” The op-ed title: “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

Now, I will cut Vance a tiny bit of slack. Presidents often say that the first requirement of a vice president is to be ready to be president on Day 1 if necessary. Maybe. But that’s not sufficient criteria. Another non-negotiable attribute required, to one extent or another, of every vice president is a willing appetite for coprophagia. If you aren’t up for eating a healthy portion of crap 365 days a year, presidents don’t want you. Vance has been fairly quiet on social media, for obvious reasons. . And on TV he’s spinning so hard he might risk scrotal torsion. But the net effect is that he spends his days taking huge bites of the “that’s not-Shinola!” sandwich Trump is serving.

The problem for Vance is that unlike other presidents, Trump has no guiding principles or intellectual restraints that can restrict the fecal flow. What I mean is that normal presidents have somewhat coherent worldviews and ideological commitments, and they pick vice presidents who either share those commitments or are reasonably willing to bend to them. But Trump has none of those restraints. The result for Vance is that if you offer any criteria for why Trump is awesome other than the petitio principii formulation “Trump is awesome because he’s awesome,” you’ll end up holding the bag.

I’ve been making the point that Trump offers no intellectually and ideologically coherent safe harbor for the intellectuals and politicians who attach themselves to him for a decade now. Love him because he’ll lower taxes? Great, now explain how tariffs aren’t taxes. Support him because he’ll end lawfare, fight corruption, revere the Constitution, resist foreign adventures? Bahahaha. Look at you now.

Last summer, Vance took respite from his scatological repast by landing on the argument that Trump can go to war because, unlike all the previous presidents, he’s not dumb. The best you can say for this defense is that it sounds like a defense. It has no more merit, rigor, or grounding in reality than saying that the difference between Trump and previous presidents who launched wars is that Trump is bipedal.

Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly informs us: “I’ve got serious doubts about what we’re doing. I support the president. I voted for the president. I campaigned for the president, as you know. But that doesn’t mean—and being a conservative or being a Trump supporter or being part of MAGA does not mean you have to accept another Middle East war without questions. And anybody who tells you that can suck it.”

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It’s schadenfreudetastic to hear this from Kelly, who has been perfectly happy to denounce as “RINOs” conservatives who didn’t need a war with Iran to realize that Trump is not the measure of all things. She was fine with pretty much everything else he did, and perfectly comfortable ridiculing critics who objected—until now.

I’m also enjoying the effort to claim that this is not a war.

Now, I understand that this can get a little muddled because Congress doesn’t want to call this a war. If they do, it would call attention to the fact that presidents aren’t allowed to declare war, only Congress can. And congressional Republicans want to hide in the basement playing Call of Duty rather than do their job. So, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma is out there insisting ,“This isn’t a war. We haven’t declared war.” He adds, “We’re not at war with Iran. We’re making sure that they do not have the capability to harm us anymore.”

Oh, is that all?

I’m no military scholar or legal expert, but if blowing up another country’s supreme leader, sinking its navy, and bombing the stuffing out of every military asset it has isn’t a war, then the word “war” pretty much has no meaning. Imagine if Iran bombed Trump and the whole Cabinet at Camp David and then saying, “Iran’s not really at war with us.”

By Mullin’s Möbius strip “reasoning,” the president can go to war and call it a war, but it won’t actually be a war until and unless Congress declares one. This is, of course, pure nonsense wrapped in legalistic nonsense, seasoned with craven sycophancy. I long ago got exhausted with the phrase “gaslighting,” but for fornication’s sake, “lying” is too paltry a word for this Orwellian assault on the truth.

But perhaps the most delicious thing about the Trump-loyalist jackasses braying that this isn’t what they voted for is how they are revealing their irrelevance. The self-styled MAGA vanguard typically claims to speak for his most devoted supporters, but among Republicans, approval for Operation Epic Fury is around 90 percent in one survey of likely voters. A CNN poll says that 77 percent of Republicans generally are supportive and 83 percent think—bizarrely—that Trump has a “clear plan” for Iran. That can change, of course. But it won’t change because of anything Kelly or Tucker Carlson say. After all, Tucker, an apologist for Russia’s wanton slaughter in Ukraine, doesn’t have a lot of credibility when he calls the Iran attack—which doesn’t deliberately target civilians the way Russia does—“absolutely disgusting and evil.” Kelly insists that “no one should have to die for a foreign country,” a standard hard to square with both world wars, the Vietnam War, the first Iraq war, and the NATO charter. “I don’t think those service members died for the United States,” Kelly said. “I think they died for Iran or Israel.” I’d have more respect for her—a low bar —if she just said they died for Donald Trump. That’s not how I see it, but it’s closer to the truth than her demagogic tirades.

Meanwhile Trump has no patience for his fake-MAGA detractors. “I think that MAGA is Trump—MAGA’s not [Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson],” Trump told Rachael Bade. “MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe. And MAGA loves what I’m doing—every aspect of it.”

Now, I’ve been clear on my views on the desirability of regime change in Iran. I also think, as I wrote in my Los Angeles Times column this week, “This is no way for a

constitutional republic to go to war.” So, I have some sympathy for some of the complaints from the bitter MAGA exiles. But I relish their anguish as they listen to Trump spew nonsense about how he prevented a “

nuclear war.” “[I]f we didn’t do what we’re doing right now, you would have had a nuclear war, and they would have taken out many countries,” Trump

saidTuesday.

Trump has been making up stuff like this forever, as president and as a private citizen (remember when he claimed to have “de-nuclearized” North Korea?). Until now, his praetorians have been fine with these lies because the lies served both their purposes. Indeed, they were happy to denounce those who pointed out his lies as cucks, RINOs, wimps, losers, and victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Who are the RINOs now?

Now, it’s revealing that Kelly, Carlson, Steve Bannon, et al. were more or less fine with all of the lies, but they draw a line at anything that might be in Israel’s interest.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is a war for Israel, certainly not in the way Carlson and Kelly suggest. But given how horribly this administration has messaged the issue, it’s understandable that people looking to blame this on the Israelis would blame this on the Israelis.

Let me finish by picking up a point I made in my column.

“Be careful what you wish for” is not a warning that only applies to American or Western policymakers. It’s a universal admonition. A few thousand years before the term “blowback” gained currency in national security circles, the Greeks had the term “hubris.” The Greeks also had the story of Eos, the goddess of the dawn (and a bit of a trollop). She asked Zeus to do her a solid by making her lover Tithonus immortal. But she forgot to ask that he be made eternally young, too. So, he kept aging until he made Joe Biden look like Achilles. The Hebrew Bible is also full of careful-what-you-wish-(or ask)-for stories. In the Book of Samuel, the Israelites ask for a king like other nations. They get one good and hard.

In literature and pop culture, this caution about the way the world works runs like a cold, bracing, current from antiquity to like half the episodes of The Twilight Zone. King Midas, The Monkey’s Paw, Frankenstein, Faust, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man—the chorus of cautionary tales is massive.

“Careful what you wish for” is as close to the essence of the conservative temperament as any idea I can think of. It captures the fundamental wisdom that planning is really hard and what seems like a slam-dunk idea can bite you in the keister because of all those unknown unknowns as well as the very known-known of human nature. Man plans, God laughs, and all that. It enlists the idea that you should be content, even grateful, for the bird in your hand, rather than bet everything on the two in the bush. It’s adjacent to “measure twice and cut once.” If you fully grasp the idea, you can skip whole chapters in Edmund Burke’s Reflections, huge slices of Friedrich Hayek’s oeuvre, and the writings of a whole generation of neoconservative intellectuals.

Anyway, my point in my LA Times column was that we should be mindful of unintended consequences or “blowback” when launching a war. Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t when he launched what was supposed to be a weeklong war on Ukraine. Russia has now suffered more casualties than the United States did in all of World War II, and it’s literally losing ground to Ukraine. Hamas wasn’t heedful of “careful what you wish for” when it launched the October 7 attacks, which resulted in plans to turn Gaza into a resort town run by Jared Kushner, the gutting of Iran itself, the death of Hezbollah’s longtime leaders and the gelding of Hezbollah’s best thugs in Operation Grim Beeper.

But there’s a domestic analogue that comes to mind. Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and countless others made a Faustian bargain with Trump and Trumpism, thinking they could manage the golem, teach Frankenstein’s monster to dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” or foresee all the possible permutations of their monkey-paw wishes. The orange Stay Puft Marshmallow MAGA Man would never hurt us. We can use him for good things.

It speaks to something deep about their characters and their judgment that everything up until this week counted as good things. The election denial, the cruelty, the lies, the China Syndrome-level spill of toxic egoism: that all counted as good. But a “war for Israel,” that is where they get off the Trump train and get offended at being told to eat off J.D. Vance’s plate (again, I don’t think it’s a war for Israel, but when even Marco Rubio suggests it is one, the Israel haters are going to run with it).

The only sad part is that I don’t think any of them are actually offended for reasons of principle. Not really. They used the Trump era to carve out high-profile niches in swamps festering with antisemitism, racism, conspiracy, and illiberalism. They might have convinced themselves they believe everything they say and do in their effort to pander to their audience, but they’ve already demonstrated they don’t care about the truth or even decency. Or, they might tell themselves that they can play footsie with bigots and jabroneys without that abyss looking into them. It doesn’t really matter. Because the truth is, they’re just pissed that the monster they helped to create has turned on their corner of the village in his latest rampage.