The Tipping Point of Stupid
In most states, you can’t
pass yourself off as an election-denying January 6 truther and still be taken
seriously by a majority of voters.
SEPTEMBER 22, 2022, 7 AM ET
About the author: Mark Leibovich is a staff writer at The
Atlantic. He is the author of Thank You for Your Servitude and This Town.
Donald trump has
a knack for making his most committed apologists look like complete
imbeciles—even if they are not complete imbeciles, though many of them are.
This has been true for several years. But in recent weeks, Trump’s trickle-down
idiocy has become a significant midterm-election issue for Republicans, and a
drag on some of the party’s most vulnerable Senate candidates.
If you’re a candidate
seeking a GOP nomination, Trump’s blessing can be a political wonder drug. But
it comes with debilitating side effects. These go beyond the standard
debasements that Trump inflicts on his dependents (for instance, Trump boasting
at a Youngstown, Ohio, rally on Saturday that J. D. Vance, who is running for Senate there, was “in love” with him
and “kissing my ass, he wants my support so much”). Assuming an acceptable
Trumpian posture requires a determined self-lobotomy. In most states, it’s
nearly impossible to pass yourself off as an election-denying January 6 truther and still be taken
seriously by a majority of voters. Yet many candidates who clearly know better
are doing exactly this.
You might be a
media-slick, Ivy-bred brainiac like Vance or Dr. Mehmet Oz, and even admit
backstage that you don’t really believe the asininity you’re spouting. As a
general rule, though, discerning swing voters tend not to differentiate between
fools and those who just play them on TV.
Not every Trump
knockoff is faking it, of course. The former president has mainstreamed an
authentic collection of cranks, bozos, and racists. The preponderance of safe,
gerrymandered seats probably ensures continued employment in the House for the
loony tunes likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The trickier
proposition for Republicans involves statewide elections in toss-up
states—which is why someone like Greene would almost certainly never win, say,
a Senate race in her home state of Georgia. (The actual Republican nominee,
Herschel Walker, is himself bananas, but also something of a special case given
that he was a University of Georgia football legend.) While the primary
successes of Trump’s protégés have saddled Republicans with, as Mitch McConnell
put it, low “candidate quality”—people
like Walker, Oz, and Blake Masters in Arizona—the former president has imposed
a mental headwind against even the most seasoned GOP incumbents. It is to their
great disadvantage, at least with most college-educated voters, that remaining
Trump-accredited requires shaving dozens of IQ points off an otherwise sound
candidate’s brain.
Iwas contemplating this
phenomenon the other day as I watched Senator Marco Rubio of Florida beclown
himself in service to the man he used to openly loathe. As Trump’s opponent in
2016, Rubio was one of those ostentatiously saddened and troubled candidates
who kept lamenting that Trump was turning that campaign into “a freak show.”
Before Rubio became a cast member in the freak show himself, he talked a lot
about how dangerous Trump was, how he would not trust Trump with nuclear
secrets if, God forbid, he were ever to become president. Perhaps he was
worried about something like Trump stashing deeply classified documents in his
Mar-a-Lago closets.
David A. Graham: Trump can’t hide from the Mar-a-Lago photo
During a recent
interview, a Florida TV host asked Rubio, who is facing a reelection challenge
from Democratic Representative Val Demings, about the Department of Justice’s
efforts to retrieve those classified documents. Rubio dismissed the matter as
a “storage issue.” DOJ,
he argued, doesn’t “deny he should have access to those documents. What they
deny is that they were not properly stored.” Rubio’s self-correction to
Made MAGA Man apparently compelled him to downplay Trump’s frightful conduct,
even though it was something he obviously would have screamed bloody murder
about if Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton had done the same. This was not a mere
“storage issue,” at least not primarily. It was a “Why is the former president
refusing to relinquish scores of classified and highly sensitive documents that
don’t belong to him?” issue.
As the top Republican
on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Rubio is clearly aware of this. But he’s
been playing this game for a while, and he knew what was required of him. He
spoke in his usual rat-a-tat of righteously rehearsed lines, and he did not
appear to be having much fun. In fact, Rubio sounded miserable, as he often
does when called upon to defend Trump’s indefensibles. He seemed to fully
anticipate scorn and ridicule raining down.
It did, but mostly
from people who don’t like Rubio anyway. In Florida, a state the former
president carried twice, Rubio is probably right that it’s more important to
avoid angering Trump or his supporters. But the overriding hassle was that
Rubio had to be talking about this topic at all two months before his election.
I might have felt a twinge of sympathy, except no one was forcing Rubio to do
this.
From the get-go, Republican
officials have had to contort themselves in ridiculous ways to navigate Trump’s
reality-distortion field. Sean Spicer became the paradigmatic example when the
ill-fated White House press secretary spent his second day on the job vomiting
his credibility into thin air by insisting—on orders from the new boss—that
Trump had drawn a bigger inauguration crowd than Barack Obama had,
despite clear visual evidence to the contrary.
We’ve gotten so used
to the Trickle-Down-Idiocy Effect that it no longer engenders surprise, let
alone outrage. It goes well beyond candidates having to perpetrate lies or
offer preposterous explanations such as “storage issue,” “alternative facts,” “normal tourist visit,” and
whatnot. Trump’s reckless claims and behaviors have led his dependents into a
minefield of topics that, in previous campaign cycles, would likely never have
come up, let alone be so fraught.
Absent Trump,
Republican candidates in 2022 would be able to focus on subjects that would be
more favorable to them and their party, such as inflation, crime, and Biden’s
unpopularity. Trump continuously muddles their efforts and requires them to
dwell in the bizarre realm of his narcissistic delusions. From Trump’s
perspective—and therefore, much of the GOP’s perspective—that world never
advanced beyond November 2020. He has done his best to ensure that the
stolen-election myth has remained the most important issue in America.
Candidates are well
accustomed to playing to the base for the primary and then pivoting to the
center for the midterms. Savvy voters understand and tolerate this to a degree.
But Trump has made finessing the gap far more complicated.
Dr. Oz, for instance,
was recently asked whether he would have voted to certify Biden’s election if
he had been in the Senate on January 6. He was never a full-on “it was rigged”
guy, but he was always careful to be vague about it. “We cannot leave 2020
behind,” he said more than once
during his primary campaign. He was much more definitive this month, however,
in response to the question about Biden’s certification. “I would not have
objected to it,” Oz said. “By the time the
delegates and those reports were sent to the U.S. Senate, our job was to
approve it, which is what I would have done.”
By opting for the
sky-is-blue answer, Oz took the risk of antagonizing Trump and his
election-denying supporters. Was he smart to answer this way, or reckless? Did
Trump—being Trump—place Oz in a no-win position where he would come off as
either a kook or a traitor?
Oz received this
question during a press conference in which he was endorsed by the Republican
senator he was vying to replace, Pat Toomey. Again, in any rational political
world, the backing of the retiring incumbent would be a straightforward plus.
But Toomey’s name has become pure sewage in Trump World over his vote to
convict the former president in his second impeachment trial. Trump was
reportedly not pleased by Oz’s certification blasphemy or by his willingness to
appear with Treasonous Toomey. But props to Oz for doing the bare minimum.
J.d. vance was
no Trump fan at first; the Yale Law grad and Silicon Valley venture capitalist
once likened the future president to “cultural heroin.” But since converting to
MAGAism, Vance has proved a righteous acolyte. On the holy-grail issue of 2020,
he has maintained that the election was stolen, sparing himself, at the very
least, the embarrassment of whiplash.
David A. Graham: The art of the dealer
Vance can be cavalier
at times, taking stupid much too far. Back in February, he appeared on Steve
Bannon’s War Room podcast and declared, “I don’t really
care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” I have no idea whether
Vance really felt this way or was just engaging in performative indifference
and isolationism in an effort to mimic the couch-potato parochialism of his
patron (Trump) or the “flood the zone with shit” nihilism
of his host (Bannon).
But Vance paid a
price. His “I don’t care about Ukraine” grenade detonated in his own face when
Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked invasion a few days later. People in
both parties rallied behind Ukraine, most notably in northeastern Ohio, home to
one of the largest concentrations of
Ukrainian Americans in the country. Vance later issued a cleanup statement in
which described the Russian invasion as “unquestionably a tragedy.”
Like Rubio in
Florida, Vance is vying to represent a GOP-trending state that Trump won twice,
so he probably has a bigger cushion to absorb whatever pain his election lies
cause him. He remains a slight favorite in his
race against Democratic Representative Tim Ryan.
In a less
Trump-hospitable state, Vance would have a much harder time. New Hampshire’s
Don Bolduc became the latest toadying Trump endorsee to see his apparent faith
rewarded, having won the state’s Republican nomination for Senate this month.
He spent more than a year as a loud and unrelenting election denier, but just
36 hours after winning the primary, he made a screeching 180. Bolduc, a retired
Army general, said he had “come to
the conclusion” that the vote “was not stolen” after all. “I’ve done a lot of
research on this,” he claimed. (They always do a lot of research!)
Presumably, Bolduc
was trying to make himself look like a reasonable general-election candidate,
and not a total idiot.
Mark Leibovich is a staff writer at The
Atlantic. He is the author of Thank You for Your Servitude and This
Town.