If you're going to condemn something, do it properly!
Donald Trump had dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes last week and I have to say it isn’t all that surprising to write those words. Trump’s greatest handicap has always been his personnel decisions; he very often associates with loathsome, creepy, unsavory people—weirdos, creeps, demented ideologues. He was real buddy-buddy early in his term with Steve Bannon, a noted creep. He let Rudy Giuliani and Lin Wood and Sidney Powell do his lawyering, extreme weirdos all three, very creepy people. He was a longtime friend of Roger Stone, a deeply bizarre and unsettling person who—and I’m being serious here—has never convincingly demonstrated how he earns enough money to buy food. Having dinner with Nick Fuentes is kind of par for the course here.
Trump later claimed to have been unaware of who Fuentes was. Uh huh, like they don’t have some guy to vet the guest list at Mar-a-Lago? Like this famously paranoid megalomaniac didn’t know who he was sitting down at a table with? It’s just embarrassing.
Anyway in the wake of all of this controversy there’s been the usual calls for conservatives to condemn Nick Fuentes and condemn white supremacy and bla bla bla. I mostly agree with Jesse Kelly that the endless demands of conservatives-must-condemn-this are simply a political tactic the Left uses to steer the conversation in a favorable direction, and that for conservatives “the only way to win that game is not to play.” No need to let your opponents define the terms of the debate, particularly when they themselves won’t abide by those rules (ask progressives to “condemn,” say, the practice of bringing children to highly sexualized drag queen shows and you’ll get it).
But if you’re going to play the game, you should do it in a way that—pardon me—doesn’t make you look like kind of a little bitch, a la Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy:
Mr. McCarthy had been silent for days on Mr. Trump’s decision to have dinner with Nick Fuentes, the racist Holocaust denier who leads the white nationalist movement America First, and Kanye West, the artist and provocateur who has also made antisemitic comments.
Pressed about the dinner by reporters on Tuesday as he left a meeting at the White House, Mr. McCarthy criticized Mr. Fuentes and comments made by Mr. West, but stopped short of condemning Mr. Trump for meeting with them.
“I condemn his ideology; it has no place in society at all,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Fuentes.
“The president can have meetings with who he wants; I don’t think anybody, though, should have a meeting with Nick Fuentes,” Mr. McCarthy said later. “And his views shouldn’t — are nowhere within the Republican Party or within this country itself.”
Ha ha, this is pretty pathetic stuff. Look, the proper response for Republicans when “pressed by reporters” on this stuff is something along the lines of: “Huh? You want me to condemn an ideology to which I’ve never ascribed, held by a man I’ve never met, who ate at a dinner at which I wasn’t present? Can we move on to a serious question from an actual journalist?” But since McCarthy took the bait he should have been in it to win it, and what he should have said was: “Yeah, the president shouldn’t have sat down at a table with a Holocaust-denying white supremacist creeper. That was a bad decision and it makes him look weak and stupid. If he wants to win in 2024 he’s going to have to handle his schedule better than that.” Because that’s the truth: It was a bad decision and it most assuredly did make Trump look weak, stupid and out of control of his own personal life. Associating with psychopaths is bad form and you justifiably deserve to lose the respect and the votes of the electorate if you’re going to be that dumb.
And I mean, I know Kevin McCarthy has bills to pay; he’s got mortgage payments and grocery bills and college tuition and he lives in California so none of that stuff is cheap. And Donald Trump demands a very slavish and toadyish kind of subservience from his people so to criticize him is to risk a good bit politically. But honestly—and this is where politics really kind of hangs me up—I cannot at all imagine so comprehensively sacrificing my own dignity as McCarthy does here. At the very least I would never want to set that kind of example for my children. I would easily and willingly work six different disgusting jobs to ensure my family was fed and well, but you can do even the most nominally degrading jobs while still maintaining a level of dignity and grace. Yet whatever else it is, “the president can have meetings with who he wants, I don’t think anybody, though, should have a meeting with Nick Fuentes” is neither dignified nor graceful; it’s rather a transparently desperate attempt to balance two intractable and mutually exclusive demands, in this case Trump’s voracious ego on the one hand and the media’s weaponized bias on the other.
You can’t reconcile two things like this; the smarter move for a conservative in this position is to make your own decent standards, to follow them, and to not be anyone’s simpering little monkey. The media will surely roast you for it, but they will always do that, nothing will ever change that, so no need to worry about it. And it may also mean you lose the political alliance of a man like Trump, but really, how much utility is to be found in the support of a man who doesn’t even know when a Holocaust denier is eating at his own dinner table?