JVL: Trump’s war on House conservatives

We’ll get to the Trump stuff in a minute, but first a little bragging.

I keep plugging the Substandard podcast every week. It’s a show I do with my buddies Vic Matus and Sonny Bunch where we talk about—well, the kinds of stuff that aren’t native to The Weekly Standard. Like movies and comic books and movies about comic books. Also Martin Scorsese and board games and Dungeons & Dragons. And more.

It might not sound like much, but it all kind of hangs together in ways which I promise you are quite amusing.

But now you don’t have to take my word for it. The Substandard has been slowly working its way up the iTunes charts and over the weekend it hit #10 on the TV & Film list. I don’t know exactly what that means, except that it puts us right around shows from NPR and Bill Simmons and I promise you that our show is better than at least one of those.

In the last couple weeks we’ve spent shows discussing Wolverine, Beauty and the Beast, and King Kong. This week we talk about Scarlett Johansson, who seems to have the soul of a character actor trapped inside the body of a movie star. Spoiler alert: We all think she’s pretty great.

So come on over and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes. You’ll love it.

Norma V. Cantu, head of the Clinton Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, is a left-wing litigator, a veteran of the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, who has never met a racial quota she didn't like. She is the forgotten second royal in Clint Bolick's famous "Clinton's Quota Queens" op- ed for the Wall Street Journal, the piece that helped torpedo Lani Guinier's nomination to be Cantu's counterpart at the Justice Department. Cantu is also a sexual-harassment radical who wants federal regulation of boy- girl contact from pre-school through grad school. Most strikingly, it appears that Norma Cantu is above the law. Or at least her office is. Or at least she says they are.

—Richard Starr, “Sexual Perversity in Washington,” from our April 7, 1997 issue.

Building Locol: What happens when two super-woke chefs try to build a fast-food hipster eatery in Watts.

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Elizabeth Weil: On the curse of the Bahia emerald.

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Jon Billman: What happens when people go missing on public lands.

One of the professional meetings in my research area was supposed to be held in NC but the organizers decided to move the meeting somewhere else to protest NC’s bathroom law. Where has this meeting been moved to? To China, which is famous for its devotion to human rights.

For progressives, boycotting NC is enlightened, boycotting China is racist. The terrifying thing is that my research area is not even in the humanities and social sciences, which have been destroyed by SJWs – it is a hardcore STEM field. Winter is coming.

—Janwaar Bibi in a comment to Rod Dreher on World War T, March 24, 2017

So we’re in the strange place where Paul Ryan—globalist, RINO, scourge of tru-cons everywhere—is now wholly aligned with Donald Trump—populist avenger, conqueror, and the truest of true-conservatives. They became teamed up in pursuit of a healthcare reform package that exactly no one really liked. And in the aftermath of its failure, Trump has decided to target . . . the House Freedom Caucus?

Yes. Oh yes. It is on.

There were a lot of ways to read the healthcare debacle kabuki. You could plausibly argue that it was:

(1) A sincere attempt to begin reversing Obamacare given a crippling set of political and legislative strictures.

(2) A tacit acknowledgment that Obamacare is unlikely to be reversed, but a sincere attempt to improve it, however marginally.

(3) A cynical gambit designed to appear to be an attempt to reverse Obamacare—but that was really designed to fail in such a manner as to cause the least amount of damage to congressional Republicans and President Trump.

(4) A cynical gambit designed to fail and to cause serious damage to someone within the Republican power structure.

There’s at least some evidence to support each of these views. But now that Obamacare repeal/replace/reform is at least temporarily dead, President Trump seems intent on going after conservatives in Congress. He said he wants to “fight” the Freedom Caucus (and Democrats!) in 2018. His social media director was tweeting about the need to beat Justin Amash in the primary. Mark Sanford says that Trump dispatched his former colleague Mick Mulvaney to deliver a personal message from the president to Sanford: “‘The president asked me to look you square in the eyes and to say that he hoped that you voted ‘no’ on this bill so he could run (a primary challenger) against you in 2018.’”

And meanwhile, one of Trump’s big intellectual defenders is saying that it’s time for Trump to start working with Democrats to push Canadian-style, single-payer universal healthcare.

I bring all of this up because during the campaign I often wrote that Trump would neither repeal Obamacare nor build a border wall paid for by Mexico. Accomplishing either of those tasks would require an enormous expenditure of political capital. Either would provoke extreme political opposition and ground the rest of his agenda to a stop. To pursue either of them all the way would mean paying an intense political price in exchange for a real policy gain. My suspicion was that at the end of the day, congressional Republicans would not want to bite either of these bullets and Trump would be neither willing nor able to convince them to do so.

I’ve long suspected that Trumpism isn’t an agenda or a worldview so much as a pose. After all, that’s what the “take him seriously, not literally” argument amounts to. It’s an attempt to make Trump’s success un-falsifiable and remove any means by which to measure his success or failure. The reason Trump’s supporters have done this is so that he can’t be judged by, say, whether or not he repeals Obamacare. Instead, they want him to be judged by the more elastic criteria of whether or not he looks, acts, and sounds like Donald Trump.

And for all I know, in our debased culture that might turn out to be enough.

I’ve already given you the Substandard plug, so I’ll close by reminding you one more time: There’s a new episode tomorrow. You should subscribe on iTunes or Google Play. It’s great.

Best,

JVL