Roger Kimball

Tom Wolfe invented Al Sharpton in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the novel, he was called Reverend Bacon. In a splendid case of life imitating art, Sharpton took his place as a fixture in the metabolism of Democratic politics that same year when he hitched his star to the case of Tawana Brawley, then fifteen, who falsely claimed she had been abducted and raped by six white men, some of whom, she said, were police. For reasons that are part of the inscrutable workings of the universe, Sharpton’s histrionic fabrications in that case catapulted him to a position of tribal leadership among Democratic presidential candidates.

Some people are expending a lot of emotional energy on the excerpt in the Atlantic from Maggie Haberman’s new book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. It’s anti-Trump, of course, so it feeds a certain well-formed habit. But it strikes me as pretty thin gruel. The essay is based on three interviews that Haberman, White House correspondent for the New York Times, conducted over the spring and summer of 2021, the first two at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach Residence, the third at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. A tag line for the Atlantic excerpt tells readers that the former president “tried to sell his preferred version of himself, but said much more than he intended.” Did he? A lot has been made of two statements.

Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself. The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators. The speech was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to write about Liz Cheney again. After she was crushed by the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman last week in the Wyoming GOP primary, I figured the self-obsessed crusader would retreat to her boudoir to dress up in top hats once worn by Abraham Lincoln while guzzling a brand of whiskey favored by Ulysses S. Grant, both of whom she invoked in her petulent non-concession concession speech. But Cheney is not quite done making a spectacle of herself. A couple of weeks ago, the Trump-deranged congresswoman sniffed that she would find it “very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis because he had aligned himself with Donald Trump. That remark garnered some portion of the contempt it deserved, but it was nothing to her latest foray on to the public stage.

I write a day after the FBI, without warning, raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach. According to Trump, agents even broke into his safe and made off with who-knows-what documents. They also rifled through Melania Trump’s wardrobe. Maybe they were looking for classified lingerie. Who knows? As many commentators pointed out immediately, this assault on a former president of the United States by what amounts to the Democratic Party’s secret police was unprecedented. Never before in our history has a former president been subject to the mafia-busting, terrorist-crushing might of state police power directed by the opposing party. That’s just in our history, though. Elsewhere the story is not so cheery.

I think that Michael Anton is correct that “the people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.” “The people who really run the United States”: that would be denizens of the Swamp, the bureaucratic elite, their media and academic mouthpieces, worker bees in the ambient welfare jelly and the nomenklatura who win elections and circulate in and out of the corridors of power. It’s a powerful, nearly monolithic force, a monument to special privilege and two-tier justice — and the prospect of dismantling it is daunting to say the least.

Everyone knows that in January 49 BC Julius Caesar, about to lead part of his army across the Rubicon river, said “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast.” Except that, according to Plutarch, what he really said was “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,” “let the die be cast,” and he did not so much say it as quote it, since the already-proverbial line came from the Greek playwright Menander. Anyway, in bringing an army across the stream that separated cis-Alpine Gaul from Italy proper, Caesar had committed treason. In crossing the Rubicon he had crossed a line, sparking the civil war that engulfed Rome and formalized the end of the Republic that had, as Caesar himself noted, been dead in all-but-name-only for decades.

I like it when I can endorse the other side. It makes me feel like I’m part of the big happy family of man instead of just another snarling partisan. So it was with gratitude that I absorbed David Axelrod’s recent observation about Joe Biden on CNN. Pay attention now: Axelrod was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and what he doesn’t know about the emotional weather of the left is not worth knowing. “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control,” quoth Axelrod when asked about the Big Guy™, “and he’s not in command.” Right you are, Dave! My only question is: what took you so long? Of course, Axelrod’s devastating admission was not a disinterested or impartial judgment. Nothing Obama’s main men say is that.

Although the public has other things to worry about — like runaway inflation and a collapsing stock market — there has been a lot of static about the January 6 show trials that opened last Thursday on location in Washington, DC. I’ve contributed to the cacophony myself, though not without misgivings. As rumors swirl about important changes in the cast next year — Liz Cheney, for example, is said to be returning to her real constituency in Georgetown — a friend writes to remind me that the entire show may be eclipsed by a new kid on the block: the June 8 House Select Committee to investigate the plot to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home in a partially disclosed, insecure location.

By disposition, conservatives distrust government. They are for “limited government” and worry about the coercive power of the state intruding upon individual liberty. But these days, some conservatives tell us that, when they finally get their hands on the levers of power, they will be energetic in exercising them to achieve their (presumably conservative) ends. Is that a contradiction or indication of hypocrisy? Maybe. Or maybe it is just a sign of how deeply anti-conservative sentiment has burrowed into the tissues of our society. No doubt I would prefer the policies promulgated by a conservative administration to the policies we are saddled with now. But my low opinion of human nature inclines me to distrust government power no matter who is in charge.