Contra Frum’s position, it is achievable — and often necessary — to dislike more than one person at the same time.
It is achievable — and often necessary — to dislike more than one person at the same time.
T he Atlantic’s David Frum wants you to decide: Are you pro-Trump, or are you anti-Trump?
If your answer happens to be that you’re anti-Trump . . . well, then it’s high time you got with the program and agreed to pretend that the “Russiagate” conspiracy that soaked up so much attention during the first half of Trump’s presidency is worthy of your continued consideration.
And if you won’t? Then you must be one of those cynical, anti-anti-anti-anti-, whataboutist types who, though ostensibly “respectable,” is functionally complicit in Trump’s “attack on American democracy.” Trump’s lies, Frum explains, have “often relied heavily on people who are not pro-him, but anti-anti-him.” And if you don’t wish to be cast as one of them, you’d better drop that skepticism at the door, lest your selective defenses of the man give aid and comfort to the enemy.
That Frum has resorted to this type of derogation-by-association is perhaps unsurprising given that the material case that he is making against Russiagate’s skeptics — whom he calls “denialists,” naturally — is so profoundly embarrassing. In an inchoate 13-point list, Frum notes that Trump did business in Russia while he was an entrepreneur; records that Russia likes to meddle in American politics; confirms that the Trump campaign looked for dirt on its opponents, including from sources linked to Russia; complains that Trump “publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy,” such as endorsing Brexit; and then indignantly writes the word “facts” a few times, as if the objection on offer were to the constituent parts of his peculiar theory rather than to its total incoherence.
The to-be-sures that accompany the list are absolutely devastating. Frum writes that “the confirmed record may not add up to a criminal conspiracy”; that “Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team stated that they could not prove any such conspiracy”; that there is an “impressive record of cooperation toward a common aim — even if the terms of the cooperation were not directly communicated by one party to the other”; and that “the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question” — all of which amount to a blunt admission that the much-promised “walls are closing in” evidence has never come close to materializing out of the smoke.
In a particularly hilarious passage, Frum clucks that “the secret to successful anti-anti-Trumping has always been to fasten onto side issues and ‘whatabouts,’” before engaging in precisely this behavior himself. “Anti-anti-Trump journalists want to use the Steele controversy to score points off politicians and media institutions that they dislike,” he writes. “But as media malpractice goes, credulous reliance upon the Steele dossier is just a speck compared with — for example — the willingness of the top-rated shows on Fox News to promote the fantasy that the Democratic Party hacked itself, then murdered a staffer named Seth Rich to cover up the self-hack.” Got that? If you are irritated by the mainstream media’s having wasted two breathless years on a phantom, you’re a whataboutist! And, by the way, enough about Russiagate, whatabout that Seth Rich story, amirite?
Frum’s is a cramped, totalitarian, anti-intellectual way of looking at the world, in which evidence is subordinate to consequence, one’s loyalty to one’s team is absolute, and each and every observer of the scene is encouraged to plot himself on a graph that features our 45th president at its center, and nothing else besides. There is one circumstance — and one circumstance only — in which it makes sense for a person to define himself as uniformly “anti-” or “pro-” a political candidate, and that within the context of elections. Outside of that, it’s creepy as hell. When Donald Trump was president, his most fervent supporters would ask me, “Are you on the Trump train yet?” And I would wonder, “What does that even mean?” My job is to say what I think; it is not to take adamantine loyalty oaths to whomever my political “side” presently considers strategically useful. There is a word for people who commit to praising or criticizing certain public figures, irrespective of the topic, context, or detail, but it sure as hell is not “writer.”
Well, committing to being anti– a given politician in all circumstances is no different. Contra David Frum, it is in fact entirely possible for a person to simultaneously believe that Donald Trump is a dangerous narcissist who must never again hold office and that the press was an abject disaster during his presidency. I have a pretty negative view of our last president, but I have precisely no interest whatsoever in allowing that fact to uniformly cloud my judgment or lead to me into taking positions that I abhor. Insofar as I am “anti-anti-Trump” as charged, it is because I believe that some of the other people who have negative views of Trump — David Frum, for example — have thrown their brains out of the window while covering him.
It is achievable — and often necessary — to dislike more than one person at the same time.