You've probably had more professional contact with these people than someone like me has had (which is to say, none) but it's just so difficult for me to believe they're really this stupid. I suppose this could be genuine, but it reeks to high heaven of a deeply unconvincing and belated attempt to reposition themselves intellectually and professionally as Good or Serious People before all pretense of Trumpism being anything other than what it obviously is (and always has been) is obliterated.
I wouldn't say stupid as much as willfully blind and active in their support, mainly to be a thorn in the side of people like John and others who saw clearly from the get-go what Trump was and would do.
It is just now that they can no longer paper over the insanity with their high-rhetoric against the never Trump cohort.
"Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent."
El. Oh. Fucking. El.
I suppose better late than never that people are beginning to notice this, but it's hard not to agree that if ever I would use the r-word because of the edge of cruelty and contempt it implies for just *how* unbelievably stupid someone has been, it would be for people like this.
"It was just the plain facts of the matter that anybody with eyes in their head could see"
IMO, this is the origin of so-called Trump-derangement syndrome: the reason the libs got so agitated by Trump wasn't because of how bad he was, but because of the "are you fucking kidding? Are you really telling me you don't see this?!" aspect.
The only thing you needed to do to realize Trump would use the presidency as nothing more than an opportunity for corruption, revenge, and self-promotion; and would sell out anyone--including his supporters!--at the slightest whiff of a better opportunity was to open your eyes and look. The fact that so many people wouldn't or couldn't do that is what was (and is) so infuriating.
The only people who suffer from TDS are those who believed trump was anything more than a grifter looking to make mega-bucks off the presidency, that he was somehow a champion of the white working class or Jesus' righthand man.
Damon Linker wrote about Caldwell's essay in his substack yesterday. Out of curiosity, I read it. I'm not going to bother reading Sohrabi's piece because there's only so much pain I'm willing to inflict on myself. This sentence toward the end of Caldwell's fantastical gibberish made me want to bang my head against the wall: "Trumpism is about democracy or it’s about nothing."
Seriously? As a former academic historian, I long ago learned that the human capacity to rationalize is nearly limitless, but you have to be pretty invested in denialism to spout this kind of nonsense. If Caldwell could be this wrong about trumpism, he's likely just as wrong about its demise. The splintering off of a few whackos like Tucker Roasted Ballsack Carlson, Nick The Nazi Fuentes, and Meghan Six Degrees of Pedophilia Kelly does not a mass exodus make. Most trump voters are totally onboard with bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. trump's alleged pacifism was always make believe.
The other part of Caldwell's essay that pissed me off was his attempt to pin responsibility for starting the Iran War solely on Israel and its powerful American Jewish allies, as if they had to strong arm trump into doing something he'd clearly been itching to do since his first term. When in doubt, blame the Jews, which is also what Joe Kent did on his way out the door at DNI.
But isn't this part of what is needed? These writers "signal back" to the larger group of apparatchiks that a change has arrived. They begin the manufacture of permission in the process.
These are good signs.
Most of these voters/factionalists are victims of a long-running con. One can feel sorry for them despite themselves, their antagonism, their sadism.
(And yes, come the fff on... any New Yorker can tell you that New York real estate people, landlords, developers are the sleaziest people to walk the earth. NYC "sorted" Uncle Donnie down to a C-list of insufferable scoundrels & knaves.)
But incredible sums were spent on this con and they succeeded.
Let the victims fabricate--literally confabulate, like a person with a neurological condition-- whatever they need to make the transition.
I take the point. But these writers were not victims of the con; they were a crucial part of the grift machinery. They had to write columns and opinion pieces that projected a plausible future where an obviously stupid, venal scoundrel still magically did something good for the country.
Now that they seem to be revising the story, I don't see any reason they would do so in way that makes the coming "change" truly better in substance.
I predict they will start cranking up a narrative about why someone else––Vance, Carlson, Rand Paul––always had some secret wisdom that Trump lacked. And the con will roll on.
Aren't there some, among the duped audiences (going back even to white grievance entrepreneurs & reactionaries like O' Reilly, Limbaugh, Ailes & Murdoch, ... up to the you-know-who of today) who may have an opening to moderate. May?
Any hope for the addled boomers watching F*x 12 hours a day?
A brief opening before Palantir + Grok + Little Jimmy Vance + whomever play out the next act via social platforms they've bought?
People like Ross Douthat have supported Trump because of Roe and some deep longing that this horrible man represents a chance for a righteous revival, no matter how utterly unChristian he is. The Joe Rogan types saw him as kind of a good ole boy opposed to all that yucky female earnestness.
Unherd is supposed to be for people who aren't tribal (i.e. they are not a herd of sheep), but a glance at the comments to Sohrab's post is all you need to see they are relentlessly tribal. It's kind of like "free speech" on Twitter.
I'm starting to suspect that if one of these MAGA intellectuals ever uttered the words "the left was right about that," they would spontaneously combust on the spot.
They are who they are precisely because they "know" with their whole being that lefties are bad and weak-minded. In contrast, they themselves are moral and tough-minded. That's the foundation for a whole rotten chain of reasoning, starting with the absurdity that Trumpism had political potential because it was so clearly at odds with everything the weak-minded lefties valued.
That's why I'm betting certain hoary nonsense ideas will continue to circulate, not just in rightwing media but in a lot of liberal platforms. Even when (if) the tide turns against Trumpism, its failures will still get blamed on the left.
For instance, it will be continue to be blamed on the arrogance of "lunatic" professors and activists who "went too far." As if Black intellectuals writing about US prison histories or policing is the reason why 2025 and 2026 saw the creation of a massive archipelago of detainment centers designed to hold hundreds of thousands. It can't be because those people were right––that's just categorically impossible.
It's not human to admit that one was completely wrong. Criminals, for instance, might admit to their crime, but plead extenuating circumstances or at least that they were treated more harshly than others. Intellectuals or businessmen might admit that they were wrong in retrospect, but often insist that they were wrong for the right reasons. And let's not talk about kids! Etc. I don't see anything unusual in this regard with Sohrabi or Caldwell. They're just like the rest of us.
I can't agree. People like Sohrabi and Caldwell have name recognition and salaries because they are supposed to offer the public careful, informed insight. They get to spend all of their hours reading and reflecting. The whole job description is to offer a perspective that is more thoughtful than what the guy at the end of the bar is spouting.
So unless they are just hacks who spit out paragraphs to match talking points handed down from on high, they have an obligation to hold themselves to account for getting things wrong.
I suspect they aren't willing to do so for exactly the reason John Ganz suggests: they were being dumb to think Trump could ever have achieved anything other than rank corruption and gross incompetence. It's a massive failure and deep down they must know it.
You are leaving out a very major factor and a very major group of people—independents—who saw just as clearly that the Democrats offered us nothing, NOTHING, except "We're not Trump." Even in the looming shadow of Trump, that was not enough. And the prospect of getting them back, having learned little or nothing, is dispiriting. It would be at best a neutral respite from the speed of destruction. ... Am I exaggerating? Yes, but so are you.
Mistakes were made, to be sure, Gaza, not seeing through the prosecutions of Jan 6 and Trump 1, and the Dems are too damn old and too buried in the pocket of the donor class, but Biden and the Dems offered more than "we're not Trump," more than nothing, and this line is just another popular bs excuse for Trump voters. I say as a lifelong independent.
Here is a dispatch from the hinterlands of rural TN: the local MAGAs, the leaders of the local Republican party, are not talking about Trump so much these days. Instead it's all about the battle between Satan and Jesus! Naturally, they are on the side of Jesus, and we Democrats are on the side of Satan. This is literally what they are saying: I saw a video of one of their meetings that made its way onto the internet. They say we are the Enemy. Some young local Democrats are running for county commission and mayor, etc, and so they are a bit scared. I think they would like to distance themselves from DJT in the same way that these more intellectual types are doing.
I am alarmed by this rhetoric as it could easily survive Trump, and go on for decades, the spiritual warfare stuff. Dems are trying to talk about affordability issues locally, the practical things: Republicans keep talking about Satan undermining the moral values of the community. Since no Democrat has won any local office in a very long time, I am not terribly optimistic about our chances in the August local election. But it's worth a try.
Maybe you’re being too hard on them. When I was a college educated adult I failed to recognize the obvious signs that someone was an erratic agent of chaos of with a personality disorder.
In my defense, I was 22, so was she and she was really hot. But maybe Sohrab has a thing for overweight, orange elderly men. No judgment.
I think this is talking about the non-populist segment of the Trumpsters. They know he’s a con man, but they are in on the con. Lots of overlap with the never never Trump crowd. They are leaders in business and finance, and while they tend to be intelligent in many respects, extremely prone to self-delusion and group thing (they tend to be conformists, even when they fancy themselves otherwise.) Its why the markets haven’t crashed yet as far as I can tell (this crowd hates Iran and loves Netanyahu and sees the conflict thru the rosiest glasses imaginable.)
They were not so stupid as to never have understood Trump’s danger as far as I can tell. They were initially not on board, or took a “wait and see” approach. But since 2016, they’ve come around to Trump and Trumpism.
Trump was supposed to be this harmful figure, and he has been to those who have warned such, they reason, but his first term was highly aligned with their priorities. Which are extremely similar to Bush and the old GOP. If you just ignore Jan 6, which they are apparently willing to do. Trump is not much different, just using a different con to convince the masses to support elite interests.
Seriously, am I the only human on Earth who looks at that picture of Secret Service agents desperately trying to get that idiot to put his fucking head down and thinks not that it's an act of defiance and bravery, but a narcissistic insistence that they put themselves in the path of gunfire on behalf of a viral photo?
I mean, their contempt for expertise in well known, but standing there when the Secret Goddamn Service is trying to save your life just feels like next level stupidity. No one would laud someone who stood there with their fist in the air on a burning balcony instead of following the instructions of a firefighter, or posing for a selfie while an EMT was trying to keep you from bleeding out.
You've probably had more professional contact with these people than someone like me has had (which is to say, none) but it's just so difficult for me to believe they're really this stupid. I suppose this could be genuine, but it reeks to high heaven of a deeply unconvincing and belated attempt to reposition themselves intellectually and professionally as Good or Serious People before all pretense of Trumpism being anything other than what it obviously is (and always has been) is obliterated.
yeah there's that
I wouldn't say stupid as much as willfully blind and active in their support, mainly to be a thorn in the side of people like John and others who saw clearly from the get-go what Trump was and would do.
It is just now that they can no longer paper over the insanity with their high-rhetoric against the never Trump cohort.
I am just glad to see their discomfort.
"Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent."
El. Oh. Fucking. El.
I suppose better late than never that people are beginning to notice this, but it's hard not to agree that if ever I would use the r-word because of the edge of cruelty and contempt it implies for just *how* unbelievably stupid someone has been, it would be for people like this.
"It was just the plain facts of the matter that anybody with eyes in their head could see"
IMO, this is the origin of so-called Trump-derangement syndrome: the reason the libs got so agitated by Trump wasn't because of how bad he was, but because of the "are you fucking kidding? Are you really telling me you don't see this?!" aspect.
The only thing you needed to do to realize Trump would use the presidency as nothing more than an opportunity for corruption, revenge, and self-promotion; and would sell out anyone--including his supporters!--at the slightest whiff of a better opportunity was to open your eyes and look. The fact that so many people wouldn't or couldn't do that is what was (and is) so infuriating.
The only people who suffer from TDS are those who believed trump was anything more than a grifter looking to make mega-bucks off the presidency, that he was somehow a champion of the white working class or Jesus' righthand man.
Damon Linker wrote about Caldwell's essay in his substack yesterday. Out of curiosity, I read it. I'm not going to bother reading Sohrabi's piece because there's only so much pain I'm willing to inflict on myself. This sentence toward the end of Caldwell's fantastical gibberish made me want to bang my head against the wall: "Trumpism is about democracy or it’s about nothing."
Seriously? As a former academic historian, I long ago learned that the human capacity to rationalize is nearly limitless, but you have to be pretty invested in denialism to spout this kind of nonsense. If Caldwell could be this wrong about trumpism, he's likely just as wrong about its demise. The splintering off of a few whackos like Tucker Roasted Ballsack Carlson, Nick The Nazi Fuentes, and Meghan Six Degrees of Pedophilia Kelly does not a mass exodus make. Most trump voters are totally onboard with bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. trump's alleged pacifism was always make believe.
The other part of Caldwell's essay that pissed me off was his attempt to pin responsibility for starting the Iran War solely on Israel and its powerful American Jewish allies, as if they had to strong arm trump into doing something he'd clearly been itching to do since his first term. When in doubt, blame the Jews, which is also what Joe Kent did on his way out the door at DNI.
But isn't this part of what is needed? These writers "signal back" to the larger group of apparatchiks that a change has arrived. They begin the manufacture of permission in the process.
These are good signs.
Most of these voters/factionalists are victims of a long-running con. One can feel sorry for them despite themselves, their antagonism, their sadism.
(And yes, come the fff on... any New Yorker can tell you that New York real estate people, landlords, developers are the sleaziest people to walk the earth. NYC "sorted" Uncle Donnie down to a C-list of insufferable scoundrels & knaves.)
But incredible sums were spent on this con and they succeeded.
Let the victims fabricate--literally confabulate, like a person with a neurological condition-- whatever they need to make the transition.
Let them grow to hate the man.
I take the point. But these writers were not victims of the con; they were a crucial part of the grift machinery. They had to write columns and opinion pieces that projected a plausible future where an obviously stupid, venal scoundrel still magically did something good for the country.
Now that they seem to be revising the story, I don't see any reason they would do so in way that makes the coming "change" truly better in substance.
I predict they will start cranking up a narrative about why someone else––Vance, Carlson, Rand Paul––always had some secret wisdom that Trump lacked. And the con will roll on.
Points well taken, of course. You are right.
Aren't there some, among the duped audiences (going back even to white grievance entrepreneurs & reactionaries like O' Reilly, Limbaugh, Ailes & Murdoch, ... up to the you-know-who of today) who may have an opening to moderate. May?
Any hope for the addled boomers watching F*x 12 hours a day?
A brief opening before Palantir + Grok + Little Jimmy Vance + whomever play out the next act via social platforms they've bought?
People like Ross Douthat have supported Trump because of Roe and some deep longing that this horrible man represents a chance for a righteous revival, no matter how utterly unChristian he is. The Joe Rogan types saw him as kind of a good ole boy opposed to all that yucky female earnestness.
Unherd is supposed to be for people who aren't tribal (i.e. they are not a herd of sheep), but a glance at the comments to Sohrab's post is all you need to see they are relentlessly tribal. It's kind of like "free speech" on Twitter.
I'm starting to suspect that if one of these MAGA intellectuals ever uttered the words "the left was right about that," they would spontaneously combust on the spot.
They are who they are precisely because they "know" with their whole being that lefties are bad and weak-minded. In contrast, they themselves are moral and tough-minded. That's the foundation for a whole rotten chain of reasoning, starting with the absurdity that Trumpism had political potential because it was so clearly at odds with everything the weak-minded lefties valued.
That's why I'm betting certain hoary nonsense ideas will continue to circulate, not just in rightwing media but in a lot of liberal platforms. Even when (if) the tide turns against Trumpism, its failures will still get blamed on the left.
For instance, it will be continue to be blamed on the arrogance of "lunatic" professors and activists who "went too far." As if Black intellectuals writing about US prison histories or policing is the reason why 2025 and 2026 saw the creation of a massive archipelago of detainment centers designed to hold hundreds of thousands. It can't be because those people were right––that's just categorically impossible.
I get the sense that their hate for libs blind and embolden them.
Heck Trump is Napoleon III and Baron Hausmann rolled together in a corset.
It's not human to admit that one was completely wrong. Criminals, for instance, might admit to their crime, but plead extenuating circumstances or at least that they were treated more harshly than others. Intellectuals or businessmen might admit that they were wrong in retrospect, but often insist that they were wrong for the right reasons. And let's not talk about kids! Etc. I don't see anything unusual in this regard with Sohrabi or Caldwell. They're just like the rest of us.
I can't agree. People like Sohrabi and Caldwell have name recognition and salaries because they are supposed to offer the public careful, informed insight. They get to spend all of their hours reading and reflecting. The whole job description is to offer a perspective that is more thoughtful than what the guy at the end of the bar is spouting.
So unless they are just hacks who spit out paragraphs to match talking points handed down from on high, they have an obligation to hold themselves to account for getting things wrong.
I suspect they aren't willing to do so for exactly the reason John Ganz suggests: they were being dumb to think Trump could ever have achieved anything other than rank corruption and gross incompetence. It's a massive failure and deep down they must know it.
You are leaving out a very major factor and a very major group of people—independents—who saw just as clearly that the Democrats offered us nothing, NOTHING, except "We're not Trump." Even in the looming shadow of Trump, that was not enough. And the prospect of getting them back, having learned little or nothing, is dispiriting. It would be at best a neutral respite from the speed of destruction. ... Am I exaggerating? Yes, but so are you.
Mistakes were made, to be sure, Gaza, not seeing through the prosecutions of Jan 6 and Trump 1, and the Dems are too damn old and too buried in the pocket of the donor class, but Biden and the Dems offered more than "we're not Trump," more than nothing, and this line is just another popular bs excuse for Trump voters. I say as a lifelong independent.
Here is a dispatch from the hinterlands of rural TN: the local MAGAs, the leaders of the local Republican party, are not talking about Trump so much these days. Instead it's all about the battle between Satan and Jesus! Naturally, they are on the side of Jesus, and we Democrats are on the side of Satan. This is literally what they are saying: I saw a video of one of their meetings that made its way onto the internet. They say we are the Enemy. Some young local Democrats are running for county commission and mayor, etc, and so they are a bit scared. I think they would like to distance themselves from DJT in the same way that these more intellectual types are doing.
I am alarmed by this rhetoric as it could easily survive Trump, and go on for decades, the spiritual warfare stuff. Dems are trying to talk about affordability issues locally, the practical things: Republicans keep talking about Satan undermining the moral values of the community. Since no Democrat has won any local office in a very long time, I am not terribly optimistic about our chances in the August local election. But it's worth a try.
Maybe you’re being too hard on them. When I was a college educated adult I failed to recognize the obvious signs that someone was an erratic agent of chaos of with a personality disorder.
In my defense, I was 22, so was she and she was really hot. But maybe Sohrab has a thing for overweight, orange elderly men. No judgment.
100%
I think this is talking about the non-populist segment of the Trumpsters. They know he’s a con man, but they are in on the con. Lots of overlap with the never never Trump crowd. They are leaders in business and finance, and while they tend to be intelligent in many respects, extremely prone to self-delusion and group thing (they tend to be conformists, even when they fancy themselves otherwise.) Its why the markets haven’t crashed yet as far as I can tell (this crowd hates Iran and loves Netanyahu and sees the conflict thru the rosiest glasses imaginable.)
They were not so stupid as to never have understood Trump’s danger as far as I can tell. They were initially not on board, or took a “wait and see” approach. But since 2016, they’ve come around to Trump and Trumpism.
Trump was supposed to be this harmful figure, and he has been to those who have warned such, they reason, but his first term was highly aligned with their priorities. Which are extremely similar to Bush and the old GOP. If you just ignore Jan 6, which they are apparently willing to do. Trump is not much different, just using a different con to convince the masses to support elite interests.
Seriously, am I the only human on Earth who looks at that picture of Secret Service agents desperately trying to get that idiot to put his fucking head down and thinks not that it's an act of defiance and bravery, but a narcissistic insistence that they put themselves in the path of gunfire on behalf of a viral photo?
I mean, their contempt for expertise in well known, but standing there when the Secret Goddamn Service is trying to save your life just feels like next level stupidity. No one would laud someone who stood there with their fist in the air on a burning balcony instead of following the instructions of a firefighter, or posing for a selfie while an EMT was trying to keep you from bleeding out.
if only there was a second shooter there…
Oh delight! Let your freak flag fly ...