Opportunists

 By the end of Trump's first term, he had managed to alienate just about every last member of his own administration. Anyone with the slightest scrap of integrity or commitment to the rule of law—from Mike Pence to Bill Barr—eventually had to admit they'd had enough. Trump asked things of them that they simply weren't willing to do. 

One would think that systematically putting off the Old Guard of the Republican Party in this way would put a damper on Trump's chances for a return to power. Back in January 2021, when just about everyone in the party had turned against him in disgust, it seemed that there was no one left in Trump's camp. One assumed he had no political future. 

But what actually happened is that the departure of all the people with integrity or honor from Trump's team just cleared the way for a whole new generation of creeps to emerge. I didn't know such people existed. I'd never met them before this—or, at least, prior circumstances did not permit them to reveal their true natures to me. But now, they have come out in force. 

Apparently, this is a common feature of authoritarian systems. They allow the creeps to come out of the woodwork. It turns out that, if you eliminate all the good people, there will be an infinite supply of little shits ready to take their place. As a character observes in Tibor Fischer's Under the Frog: "They always seem to find replacements. Quislings, shits, like hope, spring eternal." 

Of course, even a stable democratic government will produce its own crop of underwhelming specimens of humanity. There will be careerists and cynics in any system of rule. But it takes a crisis of history, perhaps—an authoritarian seizure of power—to bring the real shits to light. (And you know the names of the little shits I mean by now: Musk, Vance, Hegseth, Rubio, etc.)

This accounts for the reappearance on our political scene in recent years of a type of human creature that we perhaps thought extinct: the genuine Shakespearean-level stage-villain. The Iago-style schemer and bounder. We maybe thought they were the invention of poets. We didn't know any of their kind in the '90s, say. But the Trump era has given them all a new chance to flourish. 

In his discussion of the crises of history, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt writes that these moments always provide an opening for a particular type of adventurer—someone utterly lacking in scruples or integrity. They are people who "swim with the tide"; men and women "determined simply to make a fortune out of the crisis and ready to make it with any party." (Hottinger trans.)

The second Trump administration has allowed all of these pure opportunists the chance to come to light. Everyone for whom ideals, integrity, or a sense of personal honor were a hindrance has been shed from the party at this point. Those who remain are the toads and spiders who have been lying in wait in the shadows and—now that all the worthy and brave people have been cleared out—are ready to take their place. 

"There are some situations that only benefit corrupt individuals," Émile Zola once wrote—in The Fortune of the Rougons. (Nelson trans.) This extraordinary novel—the first of the famous Rougon-Macquart series—portrays the Bonapartist coup d'état of 1851 as precisely such a situation. Zola shows in detail how this crisis enabled a species of opportunist—a certain type of little shit—to rise to the top. 

Others have sensed in the events of 1851 in France a certain parallel to our present day. Louis Napoleon's seizure of power—his invocation of a "popular mandate" and plebiscite as an excuse to overthrow the French republican constitution—bear a certain resemblance to the Trump team's current rationale for their lawless power-grabs—namely, that the 2024 election gives them carte blanche to dismantle the U.S. government. 

But I was particularly struck—in reading Zola's novel this weekend—by this theme of how authoritarian coups allow the worst types of people to flourish. In the novel, after all, everyone with the slightest courage of their convictions is eventually stamped out or superseded. Those who survive to reap the spoils are the turncoats and opportunists—the ones ready to "swim with the tide." 

The best people in the novel—the heroes—are plainly the idealistic young couple, Silvère and Miette—who join the republican insurgency against the Bonapartist coup. They represent the best of the French republic itself—and, like that republic, they are struck down by soldiers' bullets. Meanwhile, the cynics and cowards in their families—the ones with their eye on the main chance—live to prevail. 

But even the reactionaries in the novel who have any courage or honor either perish or lose their position. The ones who offer to guard the town from the republican insurgents are taken prisoner or accidentally shot. It is only the most craven variety of Bonapartists—the ones who waited until they were certain of victory to emerge from hiding—who benefit from the coup, in Zola's telling. 

The bulk of Zola's novel—one of the greatest political satires ever written—deals with the machinations of Pierre and Felicité Rougon to exploit the coup as a way to found their political fortunes. They prevail by refraining from action until the success of the coup is already a forgone conclusion. They dispose of the more courageous members of their party by inducing them to take all the genuine risks, while they stand by to inherit the spoils—and the scheme works.

There are a few "republican" members of their family as well. But they—unlike Silvère and Miette—prove themselves to have been fair-weather friends of the 1848 revolution. As soon as the prevailing winds turn against them, men like Aristide (the provincial republican journalist) suddenly change their tune. They start singing the praises of the Empire—and reap their reward for doing so.  

As Zola observes at one point: "Every political party has its grotesques and villains." It takes a change of power to reveal who they are. Those who are loudest in their promotion of a political ideology when it is in the ascendent may be the ones who are quickest to disown it, as soon as it is no longer trending. By this suddenness of change—by the tell-tale volte-face—you can spot the real "grotesques." 

Plainly, Zola was writing about men like J.D. Vance avant la lettre. The same species of opportunist that the 1851 anti-republican coup made possible is the same sort that the Trumpist slow-motion insurrection since 2021 has permitted to gain power. Like Aristide, Vance waited to see which way the winds would blow. Just a few years ago, he was still publicly criticizing Trump. And look at him now. 

Aristide, in the novel, is a blistering republican so long as the republicans are in power. No one can outdo him in his excesses of rhetoric and denunciation. But, when news of the coup reaches him, he holds his newspaper back for a day. And, once the new Emperor has cemented his power, Aristide brings out a new issue. Suddenly, he is a man reborn. In this issue, he "openly declared his support for the coup d'état." 

Vance's shift—in a period of less than a decade—from calling Trump "America's Hitler" to becoming the leading insurrectionist on behalf of Trump's movement—is highly reminiscent of Aristide's conversion. This is the sort of operatic level of treachery that one only has the privilege to witness in moments of true historical crisis. How fortunate for us, that we are getting to live through one. 

Who would have thought that, in our lifetimes, we'd get to see such a field day for all the opportunists, turncoats, and shits. If nothing else, at least such moments offer a chance for such people to reveal their true colors. We can see which CEOs, which politicians—who might have sounded "woke" four years ago, when that was the going thing—reveal themselves, when the chips are down, to have been little "Quislings," little "shits," all along.