In Defense of Pretexts
Paying tribute to virtue is better than the alternative...
Donald Trump has attacked foreign lands and condoned right-wing street violence routinely over his two presidencies. At times his actions have generated sustained controversy, at other times they’ve disappeared behind new outrages. But with the exception of the January 6 insurrection, we have never understood them in hindsight as inflection points in U.S. politics.
Viewed from one angle, the Saturday night assault on Caracas, followed by his valorization of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, fall neatly into the more crowded category. Gross-yet-familiar abuses dividing our capacity to respond.
But my impression is most people, even many of Trump’s own loyalists, haven’t experienced all this as just another week in Trumpville. They feel more disturbed—or, in MAGA, more titillated—as though a new threshold of wickedness has been crossed.
That’s been my feeling since Sunday morning, for reasons I at first struggled to articulate. But now I understand them a bit more clearly. Achieving clarity entailed winding the clock back to earlier, deadlier, more destructive acts of war or clandestine foreign meddling, and drawing contrasts.
What I came to is this: For my entire adult life, I've watched American leaders justify war and atrocity with lies about democracy and freedom and self-defense. Many of the architects of U.S. interventionism have been breezy cynics, cavalier about violence, happy to visit it on far off strangers to advance corrupt or bloodless ends. That overgeneralizes, but not by much. A war profiteer is more evil than a practitioner of realpolitik in some abstract sense—a distinction that may be of interest to God—but when their interests align, the result is mass destruction that they own jointly. There’s a reason their critics call them The Blob.
They’ve chosen war for reasons morally upright people would never countenance, then justified it in terms meant to assuage them: Domino theory, democracy promotion, nuclear nonproliferation, choose your window dressing.
When Donald Trump wields the same power in superficially similar ways, it’s thus tempting to take comfort in familiarity, or long-burning cynicism. We’ve been looting the third world, including in Latin America, for decades. Meet the new boss, etc. If you believed those old pretexts and false pretenses, you’re a chump.
Well, I didn’t believe the old pretexts and false pretenses. I found them despicable. Yet what’s so alarming to me about the recent dark turn in American politics is the fact that they’re gone.
You might ask: Are these things really worth missing? Aren’t they just symptoms of bad faith? Haven’t you spent the Trump years on a crusade against the scourge of bad faith in right-wing politics.
The answer to all of these questions is yes.
I would of course prefer to live in a world where policymakers and elected officials were scrupulously honest and above board. If that were our condition, we wouldn’t have pretexts, because we wouldn’t start any wars. We might finish them, but we wouldn’t go looking.
Building a world like that should be our north star. But in the world of today—of mixed and rotten motives, where wars of choice happen whether I want them to or not—I’ll take false justifications for bad acts.
If you care about America’s highest aspirations—freedom, equality, self-governance rule of law—the pretexts matter. We can be clear eyed about the people who lay false claim to these ideals, yet still take some solace in their lies, because the lies confirm that the ideals still have power.
Why pretend that a war of plunder is meant to spread democracy or fight communism or defend the homeland, unless you know that the public values certain higher principles, and may revolt if you traduce them? If your true motives are toxic, you have to conceal them, because the people—we the people—are better than you.
This is the tribute vice pays to virtue in the rawest sense, and it is revealing. These are cynical people, many of whom have no place in their hearts for principle or consistency. But if that is their nature, why would they pay tribute to anything? Vice is vice.
They do it because virtue still controls. It’s still the default. Because they haven’t won the masses over to uncut evil.
By dispensing with the pretexts, Trump suggests he thinks he’s overcome that obstacle, worn the public down, made us as malevolent as he is. He still pays some tribute to virtue. He won’t cop to having launched a war. But the theft and subjugation are right there on the surface, without any tributes to virtue.
I think this is what has people so unsettled. Why he has to be stopped preemptively and forced to reverse, or else be run out of office. If he prevails—not just in acting lawlessly, but in doing so nakedly, and without pushback—then it’s over. We become changed.
That’s why I miss the pretexts. It’s also why I take some solace in the fact that his Venezuela “policy” polls poorly. That his menacing of Greenland polls even worse. That the Senate just passed a war-powers resolution meant to foreclose further unauthorized military action. These things matter. They mean we aren’t changed. Yet.
This is a close run question, because Trump’s vulgarity and rapaciousness do have a way of clarifying things, stripping cynics of power. If Trump were attentive to niceties, he might have won elite support for real regime change in Venezuela, and we’d have another Iraq-sized quagmire on our hands.
We’d also have neocons and even some liberals on television, asking if Saturday was the day Trump finally became president.
Nine years ago, after Trump ordered airstrikes in Syria, the commentator Fareed Zakaria swallowed the pretexts whole.
“I think that what is interesting is even the way in which he justified his actions, President Trump did—for the first time, really, as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world. It was the kind of rhetoric that we have come to expect from American presidents since Harry Truman, but it was the kind of rhetoric that President Trump had pointedly never used, either on the campaign trail nor in his inaugural.”
That was not a great place to be. It was how Trump became so normalized. And I’m grateful we don’t hear so much naive nonsense anymore. But the absence of fig leaves leaves us exposed in more ways than one. The risk is that he pays no price, and thus feels free to try again in Cuba, Colombia, Panama, Greenland.
In the 48 hours since the killing of Renee Good, I’ve taken some comfort in the reassertion of older patterns.
Trump and his loyalists started by calling her a terrorist, and lying about what happened. They’ve retreated incrementally to calling the situation tragic, but blaming her for it. Trump described the incident to the New York Times as “a terrible scene.”
“I think it’s horrible to watch,” he said. “No, I hate to see it.”
The administration’s reflexive effort to perpetrate a coverup may also prove unsustainable.
One Homeland Security official leaked a concession that Good’s killing was not consistent with ICE training. Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted last year to shovel over $100 billion into ICE coffers, called for “a thorough and objective investigation into how and why this happened—which will require full cooperation from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, along with the local authorities.”
Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, promised there will be a state-level investigation, even if the Department of Justice tries to lock away the evidence—the incident was caught on camera after all.
Cold comfort, yes. We are still moving in the wrong direction. But if Trump has made you cynical about politics and the fate of democracy, I would encourage you to consider another perspective, because through this lens, you’ll see that we still hold a critical level of power.
Trump wipes his ass with the Constitution. He flouts court orders, offering up dog-ate-my-homework excuses. And when he does this, without swift repercussion, it’s tempting to despair that the last layers of protection have crumbled.
To me, the fact that he and his apparatchiks still claim to be in compliance with all court orders (and, in fact, frequently tuck tail and accede to them) is a source of hope, because it’s an indication that he knows we won’t tolerate the crossing of certain lines.
Trump is an oath-breaking insurrectionist and enemy of democracy. His lies about election theft began as a means to hold power after he lost. And they persist in part because, having staked this claim, he can’t now admit he knew the truth all along. But there is also something important about the fact that he must tell his own supporters that Democrats are the real enemies of democracy, the real election thieves. He wouldn’t do it if his supporters had fully radicalized against democracy.
It is terrible that so many of Trump’s supporters are dupes, or cultists who cling to fantasies they know to be false. They have brought the country to the brink of collapse. But we’re better off now, while Trump feels the need to lie to them, than we will be the day he admits the truth: that he tried to steal the 2020 election, because he feels entitled to rule by fiat—and now believes half the country would prefer him over Constitutional governance.
We moved closer to that day this week. We’ve reached a point where Trump thinks he can get away with laying siege to sovereign neighbors, and bragging about it. For now, the administration’s response to the Renee Good killing also rests on false justifications and lies—about what she did, and about how Jonathan Ross conducted himself. When they find they can’t sustain the lie, they’ll have a choice: retreat, or announce a standing policy that civil disobedience can and may be punished by summary killing.
We’ll definitely miss the pretexts then.
This kind of writing is the reason I subscribed to your postings
A great piece, but it neglects one key element: Trump is crazy and getting worse. To tell the NY Times that he is only constrained by his "morality" (LOL, as though he has any) is an insane act. Whether he believes it or not (and I think he does), it's nuts because it shows an obliviousness of how others will react to it. So this absence of pretexts Brian talks about probably doesn't come from confidence that he has consolidated power and no longer needs them. It stems from a rampaging narcissistic belief that he has *never* needed them.
He wasn't telling the Times "I can do whatever I want because no one can stop me." He was telling them, "I have the RIGHT to do whatever I want." That's what's new.