Il ne regrette rien
Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator who’s been brawling with Trump lately, chatted with the Times yesterday. He apparently gets what a disaster Trump is yet he thinks it will all be ok somehow.
Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”
In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”
“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”
So then it’s a pity that Corker endorsed Trump during the election, isn’t it. It’s not as if Trump seemed ok until after the inauguration – he never seemed ok.
Trump was of course lying when he tweeted that Corker had begged for his support.
Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business.
Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview.
Yes, but again, none of this is surprising. It was always clear what Trump is.
The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”
How can a reasonable person (and Corker seems reasonable) possibly like him? If you have a friend or acquaintance who has been friendly and charming to you but is also a noisy emphatic misogynist and racist and xenophobe and bully…doesn’t that curdle the liking? That’s not some wild hypothetical, I’m sure we’ve all had that experience in miniature and felt the tension. Trump makes it easy by skipping over any tension and just making it impossible to “like” him.
In a 25-minute conversation, Mr. Corker, speaking carefully and purposefully, seemed to almost find cathartic satisfaction by portraying Mr. Trump in terms that most senior Republicans use only in private.
The senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the president made on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations with North Korea.
“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.
Without offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined diplomacy with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said.
Make America Great Again, yeah?
All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.
“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”
Then they should invoke Article 25 without delay. The man is wholly unfit, he’s deranged, he’s reckless – why are they not removing him from office?
One of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a relationship with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing with him during the campaign last year.
“I would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize things that were inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same all the way through.”
Well he should regret it. The Trump of now is the Trump of then. He should regret it.
In August, after Mr. Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Corker told reporters that the president “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”
He said on Sunday that he had made all those comments deliberately, aiming them at “an audience of one, plus those people who are closely working around with him, what I would call the good guys.” He was referring to Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly.
“As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.
That’s just incomprehensible to me.
Republican Congressional officials figure that they can keep Trump and use him so long as (1) the damage is not drastic beyond some certain point, and (2) his handlers manage to contain and control him within some bounds. Clearly being on the verge of nuclear war with North Korea and relentlessly pushing toward it; mainstreaming Nazism; withdrawing every form of environmental concern from federal government action; withdrawing all support for minority rights; flouting the rule of law with Arpaio pardoning; and green-lighting police brutality – are all well within the acceptable damage, and letting all that happen represents adequate human-bomb-juggling on the part of the Trump handlers.
Corker and McCain get to be free and honest now precisely because they do not have to worry about satisfying Republican primary voters again. Representatives and Senators who do, on the other hand, need the approval of Trump supporters to keep their jobs. They do have to balance that against not being so repugnant as to alienate too powerfully too many other voters in the general elections, and they may have to conform still to some withered vestige of conscience, but both of those are very mild influences against the fundamental need to be One of Us to the Fox News/Tea Party crowd.
Well, they “have to” in the sense that their jobs depend on it. Their jobs of course are not more important than the wellbeing of the country and the world. Just to underline the point.
It’s the “he never done nuthin’ to me” phenomenon. You’d be surprised (well, maybe you wouldn’t) how many people view friendship as a purely transactional relationship: as long as you’re nice to me, I’ll be your friend even if I find out you’re a horrible person.
This is a discussion I’ve had with many, many of my friends, especially my liberal friends living in red state America. The consensus among them seems to be that there is a divide between whether they are nice to you personally and their nasty politics. They seem to assume that the politics are something separate from the person, just sort of a cloud that follows them around but isn’t who they are.
Lots of head desk in that discussion. If a person supports nasty policies and procedures, it doesn’t matter how sweet and pleasant they are to you (and it’s difficult for me to square being nice and pleasant with what we’ve all seen of Trump); if a person wishes other persons harm as a general policy, and hates people for no good reason except they look different, than that is not a good person. I know a number of people who fall in the category of pleasant to talk to (one of the sweetest, nicest people I’ve ever known) and support the most regressive, most exclusive, most heinous policies. I have to conclude that, at core, they are heinous people.
Jeff Engel @1, most of that list is not a problem of acceptable borders. Several of those things are high on the Republican wish list, so they don’t see it as a need to contain Trump, but let him loose – such as environmental destruction, getting rid of civil rights for minorities and women, etc. They are so down with that, they are willing to accept all the other nastiness because they can get what they want finally. No matter that even many of the people voting for them don’t want some of the things they want, they are the deciders, and they get to decide who lives and dies based on their policies. They love power, they love money, and that is the breadth of their world.
@Iknklast – I was in a somewhat similar discussion with some co-workers a few weeks ago, discussing a fellow acquaintance, who I think is a horrible human being. The co-workers acknowledged the awful behaviour of this person, but said that they were “nice” because of some civil conversations they’d had.
I tried to make the distinction to my co-workers that while this person could be pleasant and even charming to talk to, this did not make them a “nice person”. They were in fact a horrible person, desipte their ability to appear reasonable when it occured to them to do so. But they were not “nice”.
“Pleasant” was definitely one of the best words I found at the time to describe the person, as being distinct from “nice”.
I *think* I started to get through to them, but didn’t want to keep pressing the point too much, for fear of coming across as obsessive and undoing the small progress I’d already made…
I’d take ‘nice’ and ‘pleasant’ to be darn near synonymous, and would put the distinction between nice/pleasant for the socially competent individual and kind or good for people who are far better than horrible.
It can be complicated though. That’s why I asked if it doesn’t curdle the liking – curdle, as opposed to obliterate. And I was talking specifically about the liking as opposed to whether the misogynist racist X is nice or not. It can be complicated. I’ve mentioned before that I had an aunt who had a habit of anti-Semitic outbursts, which I hated. But it didn’t translate to entirely disliking her. I disapproved, but I did still like her. She was wickedly funny, and sharp, and kind of charismatic. I doubt I ever called her or thought of her as “nice” – she wasn’t very affectionate or compassionate. I was a bit wary of her…but also susceptible to her charisma.
But of course that doesn’t apply to Trump. I’ve seldom seen anyone so drastically counter-charismatic.
My father is prone to saying things that are cringe-inducing, while denying that he is racist, sexist, or whatever. He’s just a “realist”. I love my father, but I often do not like talking to him for any extended period of time. My husband was in a car with him for two and a half hours one time and came out looking shell shocked. I don’t think he believed me when I told him about my family (or at least my dad, who is usually very pleasant to be around) until that moment.
Heh. ;-)
I know a blogger like that.
(Except the “anti” wasn’t Semitic but a different persecuted minority.)
@Ophelia
This. I do weary of this rush to label individuals “horrible people.” It is complicated.
People can genuinely believe that their worldview is right. They can believe that theirs leads to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And they can be spectacularly wrong.
It’s scary easy to be spectacularly wrong, and we’re all vulnerable to rationalization and confirmation bias and all the rest of the cognitive biases.
For example: most of the regulars here know how critical I am of trans activists. Some of them no doubt consider me a horrible person. Certainly some think that of Ophelia.
From my pov, these are people who, in supporting the Gender Affirmative model, are supporting a doctrine that is causing untold harm to unknown numbers of young people who will wind up sterilized with their healthy bodies irreversably altered, and their unhappiness unmitigated or worsened, who otherwise would grow up to accept their bodies and themselves.
They are supporting the reification of gender and the denial of biological sex, are harming women and children and making class-based analysis of sexism impossible.
They support a movement that attacks science. A movement full of people who attack dissenters, spread disinformation, and try to silence women.
But–“horrible people”? Some are, no doubt. But most are just mistaken. They’re doing what they think best.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Not Trump though. Trump is horrible.
I don’t think my aunt thought her knee-jerk hatred of Jews would lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people though; I don’t think she thought about it in those terms. She thought it was just obvious, or something…this despite the fact that it was 15 years or so after the fucking Holocaust. I tried to ask her once or twice what her actual reasons were, but of course never got anywhere. Nobody wants a smartass niece.
On the horrible people v mistaken people question…Part of why I so dislike the Twitter version of “trans activism” is because its relentless venom and vituperation attracts people who like venom and vituperation, with the results that we see. That doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s gotten even worse since Maria was assaulted, because now it’s all “TERFs SHOULD be beaten up and kicked.”