The Hypocrisy Is The Point
One of the most common ways liberals have tried to own a certain type of conservative politician over the past few years has been to point out that they were once a vocal critic of Donald Trump and are now another one of his sycophantic supporters. This particular insult waned once we were a few years out from the 2016 primaries, but as Republicans bend over backwards to defend Donald Trump’s theft of classified documents recently, it’s made a roaring comeback to cable news.
A good example is this Seth Myers bit about Marco Rubio calling Hillary Clinton’s email server a grave threat to national security but then dismissing Trump’s alleged violation of the espionage act as a “fight over storage of documents.” Or J.D. Vance’s past criticisms of Trump coming back as he joined his fellow Ohio Republican Senate candidates in competing for Trump’s affection and endorsement.1
This always seemed like a weird way to insult these Republicans, mostly because the intended audience for these jabs - Trump supporters - never seems that receptive to them. The supposed message here is that these candidates are spineless politicians, sticking their finger in the wind and adjusting accordingly. They are not committed to Trump or his agenda, and should be rejected by those who are for their inauthenticity.
Pointing out that your opponent said one thing in the past and is now saying the opposite is probably the oldest attack in politics. But in an era when so few Americans trust the government to do the right thing, it’s hardly effective. Anyone who’s watched a focus group can tell you that voters mostly expect politicians to be corrupt flip-floppers who will say anything to get reelected. Pointing this out to them doesn’t change their minds much. But there’s a particular perversity to this attempt to paint certain Republicans as hypocrites for coming around to Trumpism: it’s exactly what Trump and his supporters want to hear.
The promise of Donald Trump’s candidacy was that he could take over the Republican Party, purge it of the losers who couldn’t even defeat Obama, and remake it in his image. That so many Republican politicians were forced to stop calling him a con man and start joining him on stage at rallies is proof that he delivered on this promise of an insurgency that would either defeat or convert the infidels. After all, the Tea Party movement, the beating heart of conservative ideology during the Obama years, didn’t disappear in 2015. It morphed into MAGA.
During the 2016 GOP primary, I was a big lurker on Cruz Crew, Ted Cruz’s campaign app that had an unmoderated news feed where his supporters would post all day about how much they loved Ted Cruz. As the primaries waned, I watched dozens of fervent Cruz supporters turn to Trump. It wasn’t taboo or even that uncommon at the time for voters to tell reporters they supported someone else in primaries but were now fully backing Trump. His rivals certainly did. Unlike the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is a vehicle for an ideological movement, which means the intra-party debate about who constitutes a committed Republican and who is a RINO has some real stakes. Republican politicians, unlike their Democratic counterparts, have to be closely attuned to the base’s conception of party loyalty, lest they risk a primary challenge from a more ideologically pure opponent. Republican primaries from 2010-2014 were a clear sign of what would happen if you didn’t tack to the right.
Today the stakes are no different. That J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio were once critics of Trump and are now firmly on his side is not something that turns off Trump’s supporters, it’s something they celebrate. They won. Turning those who dared to speak up against Trump into human footstools is what they set out to do in the first place. If they can’t fully drain the swamp, turning swamp creatures into useful allies is the next best thing.
The particular strain of fascism inherent in the MAGA movement thrives on an obsession with power and Donald Trump’s role as a strongman. As John Ganz wrote recently, “Trumpism at its core is a movement fixated on restoring national greatness through the charismatic leadership of a single providential individual who ‘alone can fix it.’” Trump’s power to humiliate his former political opponents, turning vocal critics into obsequious supporters reifies his position, affirming “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.”2
With this lens, the hypocrisy of Trump’s former critics is not a fault, it’s an affirmation (in the eyes of his supporters) that they too believe Trump is the providential individual who will restore them to their rightful place atop the social hierarchy. Trump’s legitimacy is both derived from and reinforced by these public reversals. The role masculinity plays in the MAGA movement is key here as well. For a movement obsessed with manhood, “cucking” your political opponents by forcing them to support you is extremely powerful.3
The far better attack on these Republicans is to point out why they decided to become Trump loyalists instead of dissenters. For most Republican politicians, supporting Trump and becoming leaders in his movement’s attacks on democracy are a means to an end. These are noncommittal authoritarians: movement conservatives willing to empower the antidemocratic forces within their coalition and double down on the structures of American government that exaggerate their political power in order to enact the most unpopular parts of their agenda. If defending Trump every time he breaks the law or shatters a norm means the conservative movement has a better chance of making law out of Heritage Foundation white papers, they’ll do it. It doesn’t matter that these Republicans seemingly abandoned their prior commitments to get there. The only true commitment they ever really had was to, as Grover Norquist once put it, cut government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Viewing things this way, a few embarrassing news cycles have been a minuscule price to pay.
The funniest part about this particular episode was that Trump didn’t give a shit about the Ohio Senate primary (and apparently feels the same about the general election), telling an audience days before election day, “we’ve endorsed JP, right? JD Mandel,” confusing Vance, who he had endorsed, with his top rival Josh Mandel.