Leonard Leo Says He's Shifting Grant Money From Ideas to Action
Federalist Society leader says he wants to "crush liberal dominance" in American culture.
Ron Filipkowski
Federalist Society Chairman Leonard Leo says that he is shifting his strategy of bankrolling people and organizations largely focused on developing conservative policy and ideas to those who are “operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies."
The man who is best known as the gatekeeper for Republican judicial appointments also shells out hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money to fund right-wing think tanks and organizations. But he says that it is now time for him to shift his priorities from funding ideas to action. He says one of the the best ways to accomplish some of this is by "infiltrating the press, infiltrating entertainment" with right-wing culture warriors, financed by Leo.
In an extensive new interview to right-wing Daily Caller, Leo said that it is now time to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power” by “operationalizing and weaponizing" the policy ideas he helped cultivate in the past. Leo sent a letter to grant applicants this past September to emphasize that he will be looking for different criteria this year them:
“Vastly insufficient funds are going toward operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies. When you get to a certain point in a movement’s history, while you always have to continue to develop ideas and to educate, what becomes even more important is operationalizing those ideas, taking the principles and philosophy that you’ve developed, and finding ways to make those a reality in our culture. The Left has been very effective at this over the past couple of decades, and it’s time for the conservative movement to be much more leveraged in the way it tries to implement its beliefs.”
Leo told Daily Caller that what the Left has done tactically is something he wants right-wingers to emulate:
“They’ve mobilized people. They’ve created infrastructure to get the word out, to train people to be leaders, and for those leaders then to have the resources they need to create communities of people who will go out and do everything from protesting and demonstrating, to writing in the popular press, influencing the entertainment industry, putting pressure on academic institutions, sometimes even litigating, and sometimes working in various international organizations like the UN to effect change.”
Leo said from this point forward what he is looking for is to back people "who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society, it’s really important to find those people, to identify them, to recruit them ..." He then gave some examples of the kinds of things he wants them to do:
“It could be challenging government actions so that you can reinvigorate things like the separation of powers and checks and balances and federalism ... It could be challenges to government policies that relate to DEI or other parts of the woke cultural agenda ... it’s time to take what you already know, and to operationalize it, and that means being at the tip of the spear, filing those lawsuits, building those talent pipelines, placing personnel in positions of influence in culture, society, and government, launching campaign-style tactics to beat back things like ESG and DEI. That’s the kind of thing that needs to be done.”
Leo concluded his interview by saying that although this presidential election is important to him, it is not the most important thing to accomplish his long-term objectives:
"Yes, very important what happens in November, I don’t want to undercut that, but in the medium term, what’s perhaps even more important than elections is the conservative movement building beachheads in areas like news, entertainment, business and finance, corporate C-suites, educational institutions."
People like Leo prefer to operate in the shadows behind the scenes, but are more effective at moving the needle on policy and culture than elected politicians. They are awash in dark money and know how to target it to greatest effect. Leo has been the single most influential voice behind the reshaping of the Supreme Court into an instrument of power to undo decades of progress in civil rights, liberties, and government regulations across a wide spectrum of issues.
Now he has his sights set on other institutions, and Democrats need to pay attention.
On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.
When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and some of them are dead.”
Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the U.S.”
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”
operationalize? Should I trust anyone who uses words like that?
oh the irony from the party that claims to "love babies"!
Infants died at higher rates after abortion bans in the US, research shows
(cnn)
Re: blatham (Post 7381908)
operationalize? Should I trust anyone who uses words like that?
Former president Trump’s closing economic argument for the American people is that putting a high tariff wall around the country will bring in so much foreign money that it will fund domestic programs and bring down the deficit, enabling massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing economic argument is that the government should invest in the middle class by permitting Medicare to pay for in-home health aides for the elderly, cutting taxes for small businesses and families, and passing a federal law against price gouging for groceries during emergencies.
The two candidates are presenting quite stark differences in the futures they propose for the American people.
Trump has indicated his determination to take the nation’s economy back to that of the 1890s, back to a time when capital was concentrated among a few industrialists and financiers. This world fits the idea of modern Republicans that the government should work to protect the economic power of those on the “supply side” of the economy with the expectation that they will be able to invest more efficiently in the market than if they were regulated by business or their money taken by taxation.
Trump has said he thinks the word “tariff” is as beautiful as “love” or “faith” and has frequently praised President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, for leading the U.S. to become, he says, the wealthiest it ever was. Trump attributes that wealth to tariffs, but unlike leaders in the 1890s, Trump refuses to acknowledge that tariffs do not bring in money from other countries. The cost of tariffs is borne by American consumers.
The industrialists and Republican lawmakers who pushed high tariffs in the 1890s were quite open that tariffs are a tax on ordinary Americans. In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World complained about the McKinley Tariff that raised average tariffs to 49.5%. “Under the McKinley Act the people are paying taxes of nearly $20,000,000 and a much larger sum in bounties to Carnetic, Phipps & Co., and their fellows, for the alleged purpose of benefiting the wage-earners,” it wrote, even as the powerful companies slashed wages.
Today, on CNBC’s Squawk Box, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman noted that the conservative American Enterprise Institute has called out Trump’s proposed tariffs as a tax hike on American consumers of as much as $3.9 trillion.
Together with Trump’s promise to make deep cuts or even to end income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, his economic plan will dramatically shift the burden of supporting the country from the very wealthy to average Americans, precisely the way the U.S. economy worked until 1913, when the revenue act of that year lowered tariffs and replaced the lost income with an income tax.
That shifting of the economic burden of the country downward showed in another way yesterday, as well, when the Committee for a Responsible Budget noted that Trump’s economic plans would hasten the insolvency of Social Security trust funds by three years, from 2034 to 2031, and would lead to dramatic cuts.
Harris’s plan explicitly rejects the supply-side economics of the past and moves forward the policies of the Biden administration that work to make sure the “demand side” of the economy, or consumers, has access to money and opportunity. Those policies, discredited by the ideologues of the Reagan revolution, had proven their success between 1933 and 1981 and have again delivered, achieving the nation’s extraordinary post-pandemic economic growth.
The International Monetary Fund underlined that growth again today when it outlined that the nation’s surge of investment under the Biden administration has attracted private investment, all of which is paying off in higher productivity, higher wages, and higher stock prices, enabling the U.S. to pull ahead of the world’s other advanced economies.
And it is continuing to deliver. Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission’s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials that mislead consumers and hurt real businesses went into effect. Today the Department of Health and Human Services reported that in the first half of 2024, nearly 1.5 million people with Medicare Part D saved almost $1 billion in out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs thanks to the drug negotiations authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Harris has expanded that plan to focus on small businesses and families. In addition to her plan to permit start-ups to deduct $50,000 in costs rather than the current $5,000 and to cut taxes for families by extending the Child Tax Credit, she has called for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, lower than it was before the Trump tax cuts and lower than the rate President Joe Biden proposed in his 2024 budget. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.
Her recent proposal to enable Medicare to pay for home health aides has flown largely under the radar, although it would be a major benefit to many Americans. She proposes to pay for that benefit with additional savings from drug price negotiations. By keeping seniors in their homes longer, it would save families from having to meet the high cost of residential care.
Yesterday the White House proposed an expansion of the Affordable Care Act to make over-the-counter contraceptives free under health plans. Currently, only prescription contraceptives are covered. If the rule is finalized, it would expand contraceptive coverage to the 52 million women of reproductive age covered by private health plans.
As the campaigns enter the last two weeks before the election, the difference between their economic vision is stark.
So, it seems, is the difference between the candidates.
Today, Trump canceled another event, this one a roundtable with Robert Kennedy Jr. and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard, both members of Trump’s transition team, that was supposed to highlight Kennedy’s vision for America’s health and their contributions to the campaign. He later held a rally in North Carolina.
Harris, meanwhile, sat down with Hallie Jackson of NBC News and participated in an interview with Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Tonight, rapper Eminem introduced former president Barack Obama at a rally for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Harris’s campaign announced today that on Friday she will campaign in Houston, Texas, where she will emphasize the dangers of abortion bans in the heart of Trump country.
The biggest news about the candidates today, though, appears to be an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic exploring Trump’s disparagement of the U.S. military. Noting that it is an odd thing for a president to remain popular when he is openly dismissive of soldiers and their decorated officers, Goldberg explores Trump’s inability to understand any relationship that is not transactional. He noted Trump’s dismissal of soldiers as “losers,“ his astonishment at how little pay they make, and his dislike of wounded personnel who, he thinks, made him look bad.
Unable to understand the principles of honor or patriotism, Trump could not comprehend that Army generals were loyal to the U.S. Constitution rather than him. He yearned for generals, he said, like those of autocratic rulers. He said he wanted generals like Hitler’s, a leader he sometimes praised. “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Trump asked then–chief of staff General John Kelly. Kelly was clear: “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.”
That was not an answer Trump liked. When the generals refused to shoot protesters or deploy U.S. troops against American citizens, Trump screamed: “You are all f*cking losers!”
Finally, General Kelly spoke up himself. In an interview with Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times published tonight, Kelly noted that he had decided not to speak out about Trump unless Trump said something deeply troubling or something that involved Kelly and was wildly inaccurate. For Kelly, Trump’s recent talk about the “enemy within” was dangerous enough that he felt obliged to make a public comment.
The retired U.S. Marine Corps general confirmed that Trump is “certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government—he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.”
Kelly added that “in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
Thanks for putting me right, but the Confederate flag is still synonymous with the far right.
The struggle over whether the U.S. government should work for everyone or for the very wealthy and corporations was on display today. Cable and internet providers and home security companies sued to stop the newly finalized Federal Trade Commission “click-to-cancel” rule that says it must be as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.
Also today, the Department of Transportation reached a record settlement of $50 million with American Airlines, whose damage to wheelchairs and dangerous physical assistance to disabled passengers has broken laws. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who lost both legs in combat in the Iraq War, praised the fine and commented: “When an airline damages or breaks someone’s wheelchair, it’s like breaking their legs.”
"The era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. "With this penalty, we are setting a new standard of accountability for airlines that violate the civil rights of passengers with disabilities. By setting penalties at levels beyond the mere cost of doing business for airlines, we're aiming to change how the industry behaves and prevent these kinds of abuses from happening in the first place.”
A reader called to my attention that the recent Federal Election Commission filings showed one significant difference in the expenditures of the two presidential campaigns. The Harris campaign spent $34,550.02 on sign language interpreting services. The Trump campaign spent $0.00.
These details of governance are fragments of a larger picture of how we see our country. Are we all created equal and entitled to be treated equally before the law? Or are some people better than others?
CNN was supposed to host another presidential debate tonight, but while Vice President Kamala Harris accepted, Trump declined to attend. In place of a debate, CNN invited each candidate to hold a town hall. Harris accepted; Trump declined.
In her discussion with host Anderson Cooper, Harris focused on the reiteration yesterday by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, that Trump had spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler and expressed a desire to have generals like Hitler’s. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said Trump “met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
The ideology of fascism is associated with Italian journalist and politician Benito Mussolini, who articulated a new political ideology in the 1920s. Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter what socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince their neighbors that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production. The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini to give up on socialism and develop a new political theory.
Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that some men were better than others. Those few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They must organize the people as they had during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
This hierarchical system of government was called “fascism” after the bundle of rods tied around an axe that was the ancient Roman symbol of authority and power. Italy adopted it, and Mussolini’s ideas inspired others, notably Germany’s Adolf Hitler. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim a glorious past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
But while today we associate fascism with this European movement, its foundational principle—that some men are better than others and have the right and even the duty to rule over the majority—runs parallel to that same strand in United States history. Indeed, Nazi lawyers and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws for inspiration, and Hitler looked to America’s Indigenous reservations as a way to rid a country of “unwanted” people.
For retired Marine general John Kelly to have spoken out against Trump before the 2024 election was a huge deal. As Secretary Buttigieg put it: “It’s one thing for some leftist group to call you a fascist. Quite another when it’s a fellow Republican. And absolutely astonishing when it’s your own chief of staff.” But Kelly was not alone. Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told veteran journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
In tonight’s CNN town hall, Vice President Harris told Cooper that she agreed that Trump is a fascist. She noted that when a four-star Marine general comes out two weeks before an election to warn Americans that one of the candidates is a fascist, we should see this as “a 911 call to the American people.”
Trump is “increasingly unstable,” Harris said, “and unfit to serve…. [T]he people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans by the way, who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, his national security advisor, former secretaries of defense, and his vice president have all called him unfit and dangerous. They have said explicitly he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said he should never again serve as President of the United States,” she said.
When Trump talks about “the enemy within,” Harris said, “ [h]e's talking about the American people. He's talking about journalists, judges, nonpartisan election officials…. And he's going to sit there unstable, unhinged, plotting his revenge, plotting his retribution. Creating an enemies list.” In contrast, she said, she would have a “to-do list” to work on the things that matter to the American people.
When Trump responded to Kelly’s claims, he appeared to confuse Kelly, who was retired when Trump chose him to serve as White House chief of staff, and Mark Milley, the active-duty chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump referred to four-star general Kelly, whose son died in Afghanistan, as “tough and dumb,” a “LOWLIFE, and a bad General,” but then went on to talk of him as active duty and to say he stopped seeking his advice in the White House.
Forced to comment on Kelly’s comment about Trump’s embracing fascism, Republican leaders are either ducking the question or acting as if it is not a big deal. On CNN this morning, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu said the news that Trump has praised Hitler will not affect Sununu’s support. “If we can get a Republican mindset out of Washington,” he said, “we need that culture change.”
At a rally tonight in Macon, Georgia, Trump agreed with the audience as it chanted: “Lock him up.” “You should lock them up,” Trump said. “Lock up the Bidens. Lock up Hillary. Lock ‘em up.”
Tonight, Shawn Reilly, the mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin—a key Republican stronghold—announced he’s voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Yesterday, The Atlantic published another astonishing story by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about Trump’s hatred of the military. The reporting included, among other things, the retired general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly confirming on the record that “Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country,” a fact that Goldberg had first reported in September 2020. (Team Trump, unsurprisingly, continues to deny the story.) Not long after the publication of yesterday’s article, The New York Times published excerpts from interviews with Kelly in which Kelly said—on tape, no less—that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.
Like many of Trump’s critics, I’ve repeatedly asked one question over the years: What’s it going to take? When will Republican leaders and millions of Trump voters finally see the immorality of supporting such a man? Surely, with these latest revelations, we’ve reached the Moment, the Turning Point, the Line in the Sand, right?
Wrong. As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu—one of the many former Trump critics now back on the Trump train—said today on CNN in response to a question about Kelly’s comments: “With a guy like [Trump], it’s kinda baked into the vote.”
The belief that at some point Trump voters will have finally had enough is an ordinary human response to seeing people you care about—in this case fellow citizens—associate with someone you know to be awful. Much like watching a friend in an unhealthy relationship, you think that each new outrage is going to be the one that provokes the final split, and yet it never does: Your friend, instead of breaking off the relationship, makes excuses. He didn’t mean it. You don’t understand him like I do.
But this analogy is wrong, because it’s based on the faulty assumption that one of the people in the relationship is unhappy. Maybe the better analogy is the friend you didn’t know very well in high school, someone who perhaps was quiet and not very popular, who shows up at your 20th reunion on the arm of a loudmouthed boor—think a cross between Herb Tarlek and David Duke—who tells offensive stories and racist jokes. She thinks he’s wonderful and laughs at everything he says.
But what she really enjoys, all these years after high school, is how uncomfortable he’s making you.
And this, in brief, is the problem for Kamala Harris in this election. She and others have likely hoped that, at some point, Trump will reveal himself as such an obvious, existential threat that even many Republican voters will walk away from him. (She delivered a short statement today emphasizing Kelly’s comments.) For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting. (Just ask Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who each in their own way tried to run as a Trump alternative.)
Some Trump voters may believe his lies. But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling.
Exactly why so many Americans feel this way is a complicated story—I wrote an entire book about it—but a toxic combination of social resentment, entitlement, and racial insecurity drives many Trump voters to believe not only that other Americans are looking down on them but that they are doing so while living an undeservedly good life. These others must be punished or at least brought down to a common level of misery to balance the scales, and Trump is the guy to do it.
This unfocused rage is an addiction fed by Trump and conservative media, and the MAGA base wants it stoked continuously. If Trump were suddenly to become a sensible person who started talking coherently about trade policy and defense budgets, they would feel betrayed, like hard drinkers in a tavern who suspect that the bartender is watering down the high-proof stuff. My friend Jonathan Last—the editor of The Bulwark—has been wondering about this same problem, and says that some Trump supporters “are not (yet) comfortable with admitting this truth to themselves.”
He believes that most of them are either caught in a comforting blanket of denial or the fog of detached nihilism. I’m not so sure. I am struck by how often Trump voters—and I am speaking here of rank-and-file voters, not crass opportunists such as Sununu or wealthy wingmen such as Elon Musk—are almost incapable of articulating support for Trump without reference to what Trump will do to other people or without descending into “whataboutism” about Harris. (Yes, Trump said bad things, but what about Harris’s position on gender-affirming medical care for federal prisoners, as if liberal policies are no different from, say, threats to use the military against American citizens.)
Where all of this leaves us is that Harris could lose the election, not because she didn’t offer the right policies, or give enough interviews, or inspire enough people. She could lose because just enough people in four or five states flatly don’t care about any of that.
Some voters, to be sure, have bought into the mindless tropes that Democrats are communists or Marxists or some other term they don’t understand. But the truly loyal Trump voters are people who are burning with humiliation. They can’t get over the trauma of losing in 2020, the shame of buying Trump’s lie about rigged elections, and the shock of seeing each of their champions—Tucker Carlson, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and others—turn out to be liars and charlatans who have been fired, financially imperiled, or even imprisoned.
Rather than reckoning with the greatest mistake they’ve ever made at the ballot box, they have decided that their only recourse is to put Trump back in the Oval Office. For them, restoring Trump would be both vindication and vengeance. It would prove that 2016 was not a fluke, and horrify people both they and Trump hate.
I am not hopeful that Democrats will rally in large enough numbers to prevent this outcome. Harris’s campaign has wisely avoided a slew of traps and pitfalls, but too many Democrats are reverting to form, complaining about wonky intraparty policy differences while Trump fulminates against democracy itself. (Some of the nation’s media outlets have contributed to this sense of complacency by “sanewashing” Trump’s most unhinged moments.) I am also not sure that swing voters will really swing against Trump, but one ray of hope is that revelations from people like Kelly do seem to matter: A new analysis indicates that voters trust criticism from Trump’s former colleagues and allies more than standard political zingers from the opposition.
I genuinely want to be wrong about all this. I hope that many of the people now supporting Trump will have an attack of conscience on their way to their polling station. But as Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, once wrote for The Atlantic, Trump is “cultural heroin,” and the hard choice of civic virtue will never match the rush of racism, hatred, and revenge that Trump offers in its place.
