Gallows Humor

 The New York Times was reporting yesterday on the conversations inside the Trump team in the days leading up to Democrats' blowout electoral success in the midterm elections. Reportedly, one of Trump's top pollsters—someone who also worked on his various presidential campaigns—was joking that they could all be on trial soon, and that they might have to flee the country. 

Someone pointed out that at least Netanyahu had (sort of) won his recent election. Perhaps he would take them in.  "Maybe we could get asylum in Israel," Trump's pollster apparently said. 

A couple things stand out about this reported interchange. 

First: apparently everyone inside Trump's team knew from their own polling that they were headed for a wipeout. J.D. Vance admitted as much after the fact in the 600-word post-mortem he posted on ex-Twitter after the election. Nonetheless, Vance just days before the vote was claiming that "illegal communities of illegal Somali immigrants" were about to steal the election. 

So apparently these people simply don't mind lying brazenly, and being caught in a lie. They forget that they are even supposed to be embarrassed when they are caught in a lie. How can anyone reason with that? What are we supposed to do with "one / Who were it proved he lies / Were neither shamed in his own / Nor in his neighbors' eyes;" to quote Yeats?

Second: these people will almost certainly not end up in prison on bogus political charges, despite their fears to the contrary. But this is no thanks to them. This is thanks to the independence of the federal courts, which their own administration has done all in its power to undermine. 

What they fear—that some politicized branch of government will take away their freedom arbitrarily—is exactly what their own favorite president has been trying to do for the past two years to people like James Comey, Letitia James, David Hearn, Mahmoud Khalil, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, etc. Apparently, Trump's goons now have a bit of a guilty conscience about that. 

Third: it is bitterly ironic to hear these people talk now about needing to find "asylum" somewhere. The president they helped elect has not only dismantled our own country's asylum system, he has even disappeared people to torture prisons in Latin America and Africa just for daring to request asylum. 

(Many of the Venezeulans sent to CECOT, for example, had pending asylum claims before they were summarily plucked from the streets and disappeared to four months of beatings and imprisonment and agony.)

Now, the same people who helped bring these policies about—the same people who effectively helped expel countless other asylum seekers and refugees to these ungodly fates—find themselves wishing we still had a functioning global asylum system that might allow them to seek refuge somewhere else if their own government turned against them. 

They remind one of the concentration camp paymaster in an anecdote told by Dwight Macdonald, in his essay on "The Responsibility of Peoples"—the one who, upon learning that the Russians will put him on trial for his life for his role in the Nazi atrocities, asks with apparent sincerity: "Why, what have I done?" 

They are like the speaker of that haunting poem of the 1950s, "The Hangman," who doesn't protest at all when the "alien," the "man who came from another land," is placed on the gallows, but who then is shocked and appalled when the hangman comes for him in turn. 

One thinks too of the commandant in one of Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories, who can't understand why the prisoners would try to attack him in self-defense on their way into the gas chambers. He sees this as an unjust and inexplicable cruelty. "What have I done to deserve such suffering?" the commandant demands to know. 

Perhaps people who now fear a politicized and weaponized use of prosecutorial powers should not have tried repeatedly to undermine the independence of courts and the Justice Department when they had the whip-hand. 

Perhaps people who now find themselves thinking it's good to have protections for asylum-seekers in case they suffer persecution from their governments should not have done all in their power to undermine international systems of refugee protection that aim to do just that. 

"That man didn't understand even to the very end," as Borowski writes of the befuddled commandant; "What strange irony of fate." (Vedder trans.)