| Getting worked up over hypocrisy is for babies. I write this as someone who loves to get worked up over hypocrisy—that heated sense of righteousness is incredibly seductive—but has come to understand that those feelings are better suited for group texts with your friends or indignant conversations with your Trump-hating mother. As a political strategy, it doesn’t get you very far.
Earlier this week, The New York Times picked up the story of how Regeneron—the antibody cocktail that the president celebrated, infomercial-style, on the White House lawn, as a “cure” for Covid-19—was developed using cells from fetal tissue. Problem is, Trump is supposed to be morally opposed to precisely this kind of medical breakthrough. In fact, his administration, in 2019, banned most new research using fetal tissue. (Regeneron was, according to the Times, developed through “a cell line derived from the kidney tissue of an aborted fetus in the 1970s.” Lucky timing, I guess.)
The responses to the story, at least among a certain style of political journalist, went like this: “Wondering how conservatives feel about Donald Trump being saved by a therapy developed with stem cells from aborted fetuses.”
I can answer that question: They don’t give a shit. Unspoken in any position like this, and really all conservative policy, is the fact that it is meant for other people. (It may seem like apocrypha, but nearly every clinic worker I’ve ever interviewed has told me they’ve provided abortion care—or know someone who has provided abortion care—to people who have picketed outside their office or who voted for bills restricting the procedure in their state.) The way things work is that bootstrapping individualism is for poor people—not the rich maniacs who routinely get handouts. Universal health care is a dangerous flirtation with socialism—except when it’s members of Congress or the president laid up in Walter Reed. Deficits are anathema to Republicans—except when the debts are run up to flame endless wars or concentrate wealth in even fewer hands. It’s hypocrisy, but who cares when you’re getting what you want?
I thought about this again the other week while listening to Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the anti-abortion group the Susan B. Anthony List, on The Daily. The episode was pegged to the Supreme Court, but she was also asked about how she came around to Trump after denouncing his campaign in the 2016 primary. Her answers were artful—I was disgusted but thrilled. When asked to square her support for the president with his base misogyny and general obscenity, she responded, plainly: “He’s done everything—and beyond—that he ever promised to do.”
It was clarifying. She deflected when asked if this newfound respect for the president was purely transactional, but it’s clear that it is. The idea of banning abortion, for groups like hers, is not to ban it for everyone—just most of everyone who can’t afford to go to great lengths to have one. On the road to eliminating essential health care for millions of people, they’ll take what they can get from wherever they can get it. Pointing out that this is hypocritical—try as Democrats might, year after year—is not persuasive. No one is chastened. Nothing is changed. So the president can still have his Regeneron, his free health care, his free housing. It’s just that you can’t. And that’s enough for them.
Happy Friday.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor | 