Everyone has their reasons

In the run-up to Trump 2.0, the speed with which former opponents of the once and future president are adapting to his re-election and displaying anticipatory obedience has been greater than anyone could have, well, anticipated. Prominent examples include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and congressional Democrats who seem to think that performing bipartisanship by loudly declaring their willingness to work with Trump might somehow be rewarded. But nobody likes to think of themselves as an opportunist; everyone wants to tell themselves (and the world) a story to justify their change of tune. As a character remarks in Jean Renoir’s movie La Règle du jeu – among other things, a profound study of the moral collapse of the French Third Republic – ‘there is something appalling on this earth, which is that everyone has their reasons.’

There are different types of reason for capitulating to Trump, and an excellent guide to the typology is the historian Niall Ferguson. As Pankaj Mishra pointed out many years ago, anyone who wants to understand which way the wind is blowing will find Ferguson’s output, both quick and enormous, very instructive. In 2021, Ferguson described Trump as a ‘demagogue and would-be tyrant’. Last month he was dancing to ‘YMCA’ at Mar-a-Lago. A recent interview with the Times gives some insight into how Ferguson and others have learned to stop worrying and love the Donald.

The storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 is the biggest obstacle to any conversion to a pro-Trump position. Consequently, 6 January cannot have been what it seemed to be at the time (and was later confirmed to have been by Jack Smith’s report for the Justice Department). It was apparently not an insurrection aimed at keeping Trump in power; rather, according to Ferguson, ‘we were all treated to a theatrical event with an amateur cast that really one would be stretching the English language to call a coup or even an attempted coup.’ The relatives of those who died as a result of 6 January might take exception to the word ‘theatrical’; and history shows that amateur action can have serious consequences. The main argument, however, is a well-known GOP talking point: because, in the end, there was a transfer of power, all the efforts to steal the election, even the most violent, can be forgotten or trivialised.

‘With the passage of time,’ Ferguson says, ‘one realises that the episode really belongs, along with the George Floyd riots, in a chapter called the Madness of the Pandemic. The lockdowns created an atmosphere of near collective madness. Things were pretty crazy on both sides.’ Ah, ‘both sides’. In one stroke, the insurrection is explained by an irrational Zeitgeist – everyone was doing it! – and the millions who went out on Black Lives Matter demonstrations are treated as pathological cases: you see, everyone – far left, far right – was stir-crazy after such long confinement.

At the time, Ferguson called 6 January a ‘coup, putsch, autogolpe’. But now he looks back on it as a ‘combination of a genuine belief on [Trump’s] part that the election was stolen and a catastrophic failure of policing that doesn’t look entirely accidental’. Never mind that Trump’s own people – from his attorney general, Bill Barr, downwards – were telling him there was no evidence of voter fraud. What matters is that his belief to the contrary, however baseless, was ‘genuine’. Only the police, not the Trumpists, had agency. And there may have been something else going on ‘that doesn’t look entirely accidental’ (a deniable wink to those who suspect the ‘theatrical event’ might have had directors behind the scenes).

Pleading the genius exception in modern democracies is at least as old as Napoleon. Ferguson isn’t economical in his praise for Trump (‘What doesn’t kill him, makes him stronger’), but the greatest garlands are bestowed on Elon Musk, ‘the great colossal figure of our times … Elon’s ability to see not just around corners, but around galaxies, is truly dumbfounding.’ If someone can see around galaxies, it’s only fair that they should also see into all institutions of the state, in the name of achieving more ‘government efficiency’ – without petty concerns about conflicts of interest or old-fashioned worries about the accountability of unelected actors (‘unelected bureaucrats’ are a problem; unelected entrepreneurs are genius).

As Musk well knows, ‘free speech’ justifies everything, including taking free speech away from other people. Zuckerberg, in his genuflection speech, said he’s going to ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’. He described the election as a ‘cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech’. Ferguson agrees, saying that ‘peak woke’ is ‘in the rear-view mirror generally’. Never mind that the margin was close, or that Trump didn’t win more than 50 per cent of the popular vote, or that many of those who voted for him were most concerned about inflation (which has not only come down without Trump’s help, but mysteriously dropped out of ‘mainstream discourse’ too).

Referring back to the presidential election – whose meaning is not objective beyond giving us one winner and one loser – does extra work in quelling any remaining worries about the assault on the US Capitol. ‘The American electorate was collectively smarter than I was,’ Ferguson says, ‘in seeing that 6 January was not quite the earth-shattering event that was presented.’ Vox populi vox justitiae. But citizens, for better or for worse, take cues from elites. And right-wing elites, from senators to Supreme Court justices (not to mention propaganda channels), told people that 6 January hadn’t been a big deal. Voters can be forgiven for thinking that if he really were a would-be tyrant, surely someone would have done something to keep him off the ballot.

‘I’m convinced that whatever impulses he has or has had in the past,’ Ferguson says, ‘the system can contain them as it was designed to.’ Maybe. But it’s a fact that aspiring autocrats are much more dangerous the second time they come to power. They certainly don’t like that the system ‘contained their impulses’ the first time. They will have new people, new ideas – about destroying the ‘deep state’, for instance – and perhaps also new impulses. And, as many historians and social scientists have been saying, the norms and institutions of ‘the system’ are not self-reinforcing. It takes people to do the inconvenient, unpleasant, perhaps outright dangerous work of containment.

Simple folks may think that Trump is ignorant, prejudiced, an agent of chaos etc. Smart observers see method in the madness. The ‘madman theory’, a term supposedly coined by Richard Nixon, really is a thing in the study of international relations: if you come across as unpredictable, or outright irrational, your foreign adversaries will treat you with caution or make concessions (whereas people on the inside also know that, if matters get out of hand, ‘the system’ will contain you). Scholars disagree as to whether simulating madness truly works. As Daniel Drezner has pointed out, there is little evidence that Trump’s different threats concerning North and South Korea yielded much. But the madman theory comes in handy for anyone wanting to make excuses for a strongman: even the most outlandish behaviour might be a move in a game of six-dimensional chess. In any case, Trump’s willing chessmen are lined up and ready for his opening gambit next week.