I’ll grant that the so-called NeverTrump faction of conservatives/former conservatives is annoying. William Kristol hates Trump so much he switched parties and has proven his lack of principles by boosting several positions he can’t possibly believe, seemingly just because they’re popular among what are now his fellow Democrats. It’s embarrassing. But naturally, anti-Trump elements of the establishment now treat Kristol with more respect than ever, which means he can look forward to hanging around backstage with Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at some liberal TV show that’s hoping to prove even Trump’s natural allies can’t stand him anymore.
More psychotic and unprincipled than the NeverTrumpers, though, are the numerous minor-league podcasters and pundits—and about a quarter of American voters—who we might call the AlwaysTrump faction, the likes of X user CatTurd2, the ones who always think Trump has some grand strategy up his sleeve no matter how badly things are going. It turns out Trump was right when he said he could murder someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still count on some people’s unwavering support. CatTurd2 would smugly stride into the middle of traffic on Fifth Avenue to crap on the dead body and then bury it, no matter who it was and how much he’d praised the victim during his lifetime.
But pigheadedness isn’t the same thing as solid principle, egomaniacal grifting isn’t the same thing as free-market individualism (it really isn’t), and attacking whatever displeases Trump or gets in his way isn’t the same thing as working to undo bad leftist policies. Take Trump’s constant bashing of Rep. Thomas Massie from Kentucky. I mean, I’d prefer a full-blown anarchist, but from anything resembling a coherent, principled Trump-era-right-wing perspective, what’s not to love about Massie?
Might Trump hate Massie because Massie makes good on the promises that cynical Trump merely spouted to appease subsets of his voters? Maybe it’s Massie’s relentless opposition to socialism that bothers deficit-spending Trump. Maybe it’s Massie’s eagerness to expose those Epstein conspirators Trump briefly pretended to oppose, back before rumors started circulating that Trump might pardon Ghislaine Maxwell. Maybe it’s Massie’s opposition to getting entangled in foreign wars, even the ones that arguably shore up our alliance with Israel, like Trump’s unnecessary Iran war.
The liberal establishment—not principled leftists, mind you, but the ostensibly more-moderate mainstream liberals atop the Democratic Party and all over your TV screen—must be loving the way the right is tying itself into knots lately, in part over the complex Iran war situation. Think about the rhetorical Scylla and Charybdis right-wingers now face on the topic of war. If they favor war, that can be said to prove right-wingers are and have always been a bunch of fascist warmongers. If they oppose war, they can be said to do so out of disloyalty to Israel, proving they are fascist anti-Semites, possibly paid agents of Qatar to boot. Nazi if you do, Nazi if you don’t. Advantage: Democrats.
But hey, maybe CatTurd2 will explain how there’s still some sort of 12th-dimensional chess move Trump’s executing there and that the midterms will go smoothly to boot. The Daily Wire, less surprisingly, is onboard with Trump’s Iran attacks and not-coincidentally has lately run celebratory headlines (notes paleolibertarian Tom Woods) such as “Trump WRECKS Thomas Massie.”
The article, if you’re masochistic enough to read it, shows Trump did no such thing, though, merely issuing the juvenile, perfunctory taunt that (antiwar, anti-spending, pro-disclosure-on-Epstein, sometimes professorial-sounding) Massie is one of many dumb people who went to college. Ooh, burn! Trump’s idiot followers will love that one. Libertarians, and here I mean that in the very broad sense connoting anyone who wants a smaller and less authoritarian government, shouldn’t love that one.
And I don’t say that because of any direct personal stake in Massie’s success, by the way. In fact, I’ll never fully trust him after the day he called for everyone on X to recommend as many libertarian accounts as he could follow and still didn’t follow mine. Nonetheless, he’s nearly the only libertarian in the House of Representatives, in much the way his fellow Kentuckian Rand Paul is the only libertarian Senator, their official party affiliations notwithstanding. That makes them both valuable (and reliable) in ways that one more mindlessly loyal Trumper wouldn’t be.
Amidst Trump’s endless demands for blind loyalty, maybe the easiest way to expose his movement as hollow would be not so much to demand, as many have, that the Republicans show some independence of mind, but simply to ask the Trump loyalists what it is they want government and law to do (if anything). Then ask them if they’d still want those things if Trump whimsically changed his mind and began opposing those things.
If they say they’d change their positions to match Trump’s, that’d likely show some honesty and self-awareness on their part, but it would be disturbingly like the view of some medieval theologians that God isn’t drawn to moral positions but rather that positions are moral simply because God endorses them, even if they appear monstrous and barbaric.
Somewhere out there today is probably a right-winger who opposes that view of God, saying one can and should exercise independent moral judgment (trusting that God, if there is one, will take the right side as well) but who also vows to stick with Trump no matter what, which surely elevates Trump to an unerring position even Aquinas would find difficult to grasp. Pity the irreverent Massie, and the rest of us.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey