One Foul Blotch

 The thing about Trump's first administration is that it wasn't exactly lacking in right-wing thugs. Just look at Trump's first two attorneys general! Nor would I have had anything good to say at the time about the kind of people Trump appointed to the federal bench. His judicial appointees in Term 1 were mostly Federalist Society–approved rock-ribbed conservatives—not my kind of people, in short. "How could it get any worse than this?" I would have asked. 

It turns out—it can get a lot worse. There is a lower form of humanity even than a Jeff Sessions or a Bill Barr—who at least had enough respect for the rule of law to recuse themselves from investigations where they had a political conflict of interest; or to decline to parrot the outright falsehoods Trump wanted them to say. Likewise, there is something worse in the world, it turns out, than even the Federalist Society—it's called Emil Bove. 

Who's that, you ask? Trump's henchman-in-chief—most famous for defying the federal courts in order to abduct 250 innocent people from Venezuela and confine them in a dungeon in El Salvador—and who now appears set to secure a lifetime appointment as a federal circuit judge. (Edgar Lee Masters's damning portrait in verse of another "Circuit Judge" suddenly reads in this context like an understatement—"Hod Putt, the murderer / Hanged by my sentence / Was innocent in soul compared with me"). 

Indeed—in one case after another—Trump has managed to weed out everyone from the conservative movement who has even the smallest irreducible core of integrity. He has pushed people to the limit to discover whether they retain any final, inarguable quantum of independence and self-respect. Mike Pence flunked the test—he turned out to care more about the Constitution than his immediate self-interest and political future. So he had to be expelled. 

Even Rupert Murdoch. I never thought you could get worse than him. But Trump over the years has managed to turn against Fox News and the more high-brow Murdoch offering, the Wall Street Journal. Trump repeatedly attacked the former, just for counting the votes accurately in the 2020 election; and he is currently in the process of suing the latter. It seems that even the Murdoch empire's absurd pretense of being "fair and balanced" in its news coverage was too close to the truth for Trump's comfort. 

This tone of impartiality and indifference [...] did not at all suit those who profited or existed by abuses, who breathed the very air of corruption. They know well enough that "those who are not _for_ them are _against_ them." They wanted a publication impervious alike to truth and candour; that, hood-winked itself, should lead public opinion blindfold; that should stick at nothing to serve the turn of a party; that should be the exclusive organ of prejudice, the sordid tool of power; that should go the whole length of want of principle in palliating every dishonest measure, of want of decency in defaming every honest man; that should prejudge every question, traduce every opponent; that should give no quarter to fair inquiry or liberal sentiment; that should be "ugly all over with hypocrisy", and present one foul blotch of servility, intolerance, falsehood, spite, and ill-manners. The _Quarterly Review_ was accordingly set up,

—as William Hazlitt writes in The Spirit of the Age. Substitute the Edinburgh Review for the Murdoch organs in that passage, and the Quarterly Review for—say—Newsmax or OANN—and you have a capsule history of conservative media in the Trump age. 

So Trump is with all his appointees and co-partisans. It's not enough for him merely to find right-wing hacks who serve the narrow self-interest of the Republican Party. He needs to find people who have no limit whatsoever to how low they will stoop to compromise themselves at his demand—people who would "stick at nothing to serve the turn of a party"; who would "go the whole length of want of principle in palliating every dishonest measure"... that is what Trump seeks in every member of his administration. 

And he has found them! Bondi, Bove, Vance, Rubio, Leavitt—these are indeed people who have shown that they will "stick at nothing." There is no minimum floor of self-respect beneath which they would hesitate to crawl. There is no lie they would not repeat—and do it gleefully, proudly, with a kind of hysterical giddiness—the giddiness of one who senses themselves falling over heels into a moral abyss of their own making, and who can only giggle helplessly and stupidly at the plunge. 

criminal leaders mouthing the foulest perfidies, as Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote—to the sound of loutish laughter and animal applause

It was not always thus. Not so long ago—as Tom Friedman wrote yesterday in the New York Times—"there was something called a Republican official with integrity." When Trump called up the secretary of state in Georgia in 2020, to order him to "find" the missing votes Trump would need to carry the election, Brad Raffensperger told him no. When Trump ordered Mike Pence to refuse to certify the votes of the American people in January 2021—Pence said he had a constitutional duty to perform this task that could not be evaded. 

This is the sort of irreducible minimum of honor and honesty that Trump cannot possibly accept or tolerate any longer in his goons. He must have them utterly under his command. When he says jump, they must spring forward to ask, "how high?" That is why Trump is now firing government officials merely for reporting accurate jobs data that he does not like; or intelligence officials for saying what they believe to be accurate instead of what Trump wants them to say for his own political ends. 

And he is getting what he wants. Trump has found his people—the loyalists he always longed for—an administration, in short—that should be 'ugly all over with hypocrisy', and present one foul blotch of servility, intolerance, falsehood, spite, and ill-manners. Ask for it and ye shall receive. And now the rest of us must live with the consequences.