Who Are the ‘Right People’ to Hate?
—William Kristol
“I think our people hate the right people,” a relaxed JD Vance confided to an interviewer three years ago.
By “our people,” Vance meant the followers of Donald Trump, whose support he intended to win in the Ohio Republican senate primary.
By “the right people,” Vance meant liberal elites.
And yet, it was also clear that Vance knew one couldn’t foster hatred for liberal elites without the collateral damage of hatred for immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, cultural nonconformists, and any of the groups whom those elites were supposedly elevating at the expense of “our people.”
But these past few weeks suggest that it wasn’t merely collateral damage at all. The assault on these groups really was the point. The alleged failures of liberal elites (to, say, close the border or protect manufacturing jobs) are the excuse for the assaults on immigrants and minorities that we’ve seen throughout the Trump years. That’s where the real political payoff is.
Let’s return, for a moment, to Vance’s telling sentence. By “hate” Vance means . . . hate. Not disagreement or even dislike. Hate.
Vance’s politics are the politics of hate. Perhaps he once read The Education of Henry Adams and learned that, “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” Or perhaps he just watched Trump’s success and internalized its lessons. But in any case, for Vance it’s all about hate.
And the assault on the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, is a kind of culmination of Vance’s—and of course Trump’s—politics of hate.
It also represents a culmination of Vance’s and Trump’s politics of lying. Vance acknowledged yesterday on CNN that he had been trying to manufacture coverage of Springfield based on nothing more than a few unsubstantiated constituent phone calls. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The creation of stories. One could call that fiction. Or lies. Lies in the service of justifying and encouraging hatred for a minority group. That seems familiar. It’s familiar from the last century in Europe. It’s also familiar from periods of American history, especially with respect to race and immigrants.
Donald Trump is of course the master of deploying lies in the service of hatred. But in Trump’s case, the hatred is so mixed with his distinctive showmanship and conmanship that it’s sometimes hard to see the heart of the enterprise. With Vance, who’s not as much of a showman or con man, it’s all much clearer.
Republican political operatives profess to be unhappy that Trump and Vance have veered away from what had seemed to be a winning version of the immigration issue: the border. Vice President Harris was given the task of managing migration to it. But the border’s been a mess, and there are people who’ve come across the border illegally and committed crimes. So there’s plenty of grist for the mill here for a more conventional (if still mean-spirited and demagogic) anti-immigration candidate.
But instead, Vance and Trump have gotten “distracted” into a debate about legal Haitian migrants who’ve come to Springfield to work legally. Or is it a distraction? Might Vance and Trump know what they’re doing? Perhaps a pure play on racism and nativism is more effective politically than a somewhat complicated debate about the border—especially after Trump killed the border bill, and especially in non-border states in the Midwest?
In any case, it’s striking that Trump and Vance are willing to make this campaign so clearly a referendum on nativism and racism.
Such efforts have worked at other times in American history. And such efforts have been aided by sophisticated allies who don’t quite join in the campaign, but certainly don’t go out of their way to denounce it or repudiate it. Think of the Southern Bourbons who tolerated and benefited from the uninhibited racism of Southern populists and demagogues.
We have the equivalent of Southern Bourbons today in the ranks of the Republican establishment and conservative elites. The sounds you hear from that establishment and those elites, from corporate boardrooms and editorial offices, in the face of disgusting bigotry and dangerous incitement from the presidential ticket they support? Those are the sounds of silence.
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Republicans Don’t React Anymore
—Andrew Egger
During Donald Trump’s presidency there was a genre of press coverage known colloquially as the “Republicans react” story. Trump’s bad behavior was a constant. And after any morning outburst or wild scandal, the question was always how far his congressional allies would let him go without pushback.
Usually they’d profess to be unaware of what was happening. But now, GOP reactions don’t even hinge on ignorance: Whether it’s policy betrayals or personal lunacy, almost all of them will stick with the guy come what may. The last gasp here was really the aftermath of January 6th, when many Republicans finally realized there was nothing Trump could do that would break his popularity among their constituents. Their widespread criticisms of his violent attempt to steal the election were fully memory-holed within months.
Still, there are moments you can’t help but feel awed by this total capitulation. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric against the Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio, has dramatically ratcheted up tensions there, with schools and government buildings forced to evacuate twice last week due to bomb threats and a local university canceling activities Sunday after threats of a campus shooting targeting Haitians. A violent right-wing group, the Proud Boys, marched in Springfield on Saturday.
All this was enough to draw a rebuke from the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who called the rumors about Haitians eating pets “a piece of garbage that is simply not true” in an interview with ABC News yesterday. But vanishingly few Republicans in Congress have been willing to go even that far.
It’s not just Springfield, either. Last week, Trump brought Laura Loomer with him not only to Tuesday’s presidential debate, but also to a September 11th memorial ceremony the following day. Loomer isn’t just a revolting conspiracy theorist in general—she’s also spread September 11th conspiracies in particular, spreading a post that called the attack an “inside job” and sharing other conspiracies about it just last week.
“There are 10 Republicans in New York’s congressional delegation,” HuffPost reported on Friday:
None have said anything publicly about Loomer’s false claims about 9/11, or about Trump bringing her to Ground Zero to commemorate the lives lost on September 11, 2001. HuffPost reached out to all 10 of the on Friday for comment. Five responded. Of those, just two directly denounced Loomer.
And of course none saw fit to denounce Trump for bringing her. That part of the “Republicans react” story is so obvious by now that it goes without saying.
