The Grifters

On Wednesday Liz Cheney announced that she’s voting for Kamala Harris. I’d have a lot to say about it today if I hadn’t said all of it already.

More interesting than the announcement itself was J.D. Vance’s reaction to it. One might think that watching Cheney complete her journey from rock-ribbed Republican to Democratic voter would move Donald Trump’s running mate to rant about the ideological corruption of Never Trump “human scum.” But he didn’t.

Vance accused Cheney of being a grifter. And not just any ol’ grifter but one eager to cash in on the blood of American soldiers. 

She’s a staunch hawk like her father. It’s fair to accuse her of having let those instincts blind her to the challenges of war, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Vance didn’t call her stupid or fanatical. He alleged that Cheney, who sacrificed her career to do the right thing after January 6, is so amoral and mercenary that she forms her opinions about foreign interventions based on whether she can personally line her pockets from them. It’s a Chomskyite critique, nothing less.

And somehow he roped Kamala Harris, who’s spent most of her career as a prosecutor, into it. I can’t make sense of that unless Vance means to imply that every politician who supports U.S. meddling in foreign conflicts like Ukraine’s has ulterior motives—except when J.D. himself supports the meddling, of course.

At around the same time on Wednesday that he was accusing Cheney of selling out the national interest for money, a federal indictment of two Russian nationals alleged that the founders of a popular MAGA media outlet have been … selling out the national interest for money.

According to the indictment, two Russian employees of the Kremlin propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) bankrolled U.S.-based Tenet Media to the tune of nearly $10 million. Tenet was founded in 2022 by populist broadcaster Lauren Chen and her husband and features commentary from well-known MAGA vaudeville stars Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin.

In CNN’s words, “The goal of the operation, according to prosecutors, was to fuel pro-Russian narratives, in part, by pushing content and news articles favoring Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others who the Kremlin deemed to be friendlier to its interests.”

Chen and her husband supposedly understood that they were dealing with Russians. But here’s the rub: Although exorbitant sums were paid to the talent ($400,000 per month for four videos, in one case), Johnson, Pool, and Rubin apparently didn’t know where the money was coming from. They were told that a wealthy European banker was funding the project. Each was indignant after the indictment was published at any inference that they were knowingly on the take from Vladimir Putin.

How seriously should we take that indignation?

A question of motive.

Not very seriously, I think.

Certainly, I can believe that no one showed up at Tenet HQ in an ushanka carrying a briefcase full of money and introducing himself as “European” in a thick Russian accent. But $100,000 per video for paint-by-numbers MAGA dreck is a lot of borscht, even by the heady standards of populist “influencers.” Suspiciously so.

Michael Brendan Dougherty asked the right question: “How can you take that amount of money and not ask more questions?”

I can think of two answers. One is extreme idiocy, which can’t be ruled out in this case. The other is willful blindness. If you’re getting a giant check of dubious origin each month, you might reason that ignorance as to that origin is bliss. It’s in your financial interest not to ask questions whose answers might create ethical or legal dilemmas.

Given the sort of paranoid politics favored by Tenet’s commentators, it’s hard to find an innocent explanation for how they’d miss a foreign influence operation happening right under their noses. “These guys see made-up ‘psyops’ everywhere until a mysterious foreigner offers them fantastic amounts of money for practically nothing, then they turn into Mr. Magoo,” Christian Vanderbrouk observed.

They may not have “known” who was funding them in the sense that they were never formally informed as to the truth, but if you’re cranking out rhetorical sputum like this …

… and a man from overseas with a thin paper trail shows up to make you rich, you’ll have some theories about which part of “Europe” he’s getting his money from.

Having said all that, I’m reluctant to believe that the MAGA commentariat is chiefly motivated by graft.

Fame, audience capture, and the perverse appetite for populist agitprop here in the U.S. would have incentivized Tim Pool to make videos like the one above even if Putin had never reached for his checkbook. I’m averse to any suggestion that this sort of content is being pushed on populist Republicans rather than eagerly demanded and lapped up.

I’m also reluctant to treat graft as an important motive because doing so provides an excuse for partisan conservatives to stick with the GOP. If the illiberalism favored by the party’s most influential figures is merely a facade paid for by foreign fascists then there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the American right. It’s still the same old Republican Party at heart, just with an unfortunate nucleus of grifters at the top.

And, frankly, I’m reluctant because ascribing financial motives to the likes of the Tenet Media crew affords them a degree of grace they don’t deserve. A man seduced by money to serve sinister interests is contemptible but relatable; one can understand that temptation while refusing to succumb to it. A man who volunteers to serve sinister interests because he’s morally bankrupt deserves no such allowance. One is weak, the other malevolent.

We shouldn’t inadvertently rehabilitate these people by attributing their failures to something as pedestrian as venality.

In fact, I wonder if Pool and the rest rationalized away any misgivings they may have felt about their foreign payday by assuring themselves that, in the end, they were only giving their honest opinions. It’s unethical to take a check from someone to say something you don’t believe, but is it unethical to take a check to say something you were going to say anyway?

The first is a bribe, the second is … encouragement, let’s call it. You’re not selling out to Russia by taking Putin’s money if you earnestly hoped to see Ukraine burn all along.

It’s probably foolish for us to try to parse their motives, though, as propagandists approach these moral calculations differently from how others do. The average person concerns himself with what’s true, the propagandist concerns himself with what’s useful. Russia’s money certainly was useful to the staff of Tenet Media; perhaps it honestly never occurred to them to care about the truth of where it was coming from.

Needless to say, it’s unlikely that they’ll disgorge the funds now that they know their provenance. Or that they’ll reconsider their political opinions upon discovering that those opinions are indistinguishable from a fascist regime’s paid propaganda.

A case of projection.

Never Trumpers in my circle spent most of the afternoon yesterday snickering at the revelations in the indictment but a few questions were raised amid the laughter.

First, do these MAGA chuds realize how guilty they are of projection?

In populist lore, the only explanation for figures like Liz Cheney (or anyone who works for The Dispatch) is that they’re desperate to get rich and are willing to serve a malicious political enemy to do so. The siren song of a contributor’s gig on CNN is simply too powerful; the cost of flushing friendships and career opportunities down the toilet by alienating longtime allies on the right supposedly pales by comparison.

Meanwhile, back in reality, lowbrow populist shock jock Steven Crowder allegedly got a $50 million offer from The Daily Wire last year, and Pool and the gang are making $100,000 in rubles per video at Tenet Media.

The real money for right-wingers in media since 2016 has always—always—lain in bowing to Trump and telling populist rubes what they want to hear. In Never Trump circles, the Lincoln Project’s ambitions for “generational wealth” are a rare exception to this rule: Once you oppose the tribe, you will be despised, ostracized, and deemed unemployable by practically every conservative who once gave you the time of day.

And so long as you retain your conservative principles, you shouldn’t expect anyone on the left to pick up their slack. There are only so many analyst jobs at MSNBC to go around.

The examples of Cheney and Vance vividly illustrate the trajectories of the two sides of the right’s MAGA divide. While the former was forfeiting her future in politics to hold Trump accountable for January 6, the latter was transforming himself from a Never Trumper into a colleague and crony of mega-rich postliberal Peter Thiel. He parlayed that into a friendship with anti-anti-Nazi Tucker Carlson, then parlayed that into a spot on the Republican presidential ticket by sucking up incessantly to Donald Trump.

So when Vance sneers at Cheney for having allegedly placed her vulgar personal interests over the interests of her country, one wonders: Does this guy even hear himself?

Now the second question, inevitably: How common is Russian payola within populist right-wing media?

It cannot be that Tenet Media was Moscow’s only target for an influence operation. Johnson, Pool, and Rubin have large audiences online, with millions of social media followers, but they’re hardly unique. Many MAGA “personalities” attract that number of eyeballs, especially those with a presence on multiple platforms. Some have managed to do so without a radio program, television show, or even a website.

If the Kremlin is willing to spend $100,000 a week on a replacement-level propagandist like Benny Johnson, how much is it willing to offer someone with real clout? And, among that group, how likely is it that everyone who’s been approached has said no except Tenet Media?

I can believe that some have received an offer and refused on principle to be tainted by blood money, but there’s no reason to assume that all have. Nationalists are predisposed ideologically not to have strong moral objections to Russian influence; some even consider themselves allies of Putin in a mutual war on Western liberalism. If the Kremlin offered to bankroll them in that war, why would a sense of atavistic patriotism toward a decadent pluralist country like America cause them to say no?

As I said earlier, I’m reluctant to believe that the MAGA commentariat is motivated by graft. But we’re kidding ourselves if we believe yesterday’s indictment was the extent of it. 

The nature of populism.

The final question: Is populism unusually prone to the sort of graft alleged in the indictment?

Maybe not. Only a fool would vouch for the rectitude of establishment politicians, even comparatively.

But only a fool would also fail to notice that MAGA’s leader has a long history of cashing in on his influence. Before he entered politics, the Trump brand landed on everything from lamps to eyeglasses to, uh, steaks. He briefly interrupted his primary campaign earlier this year to launch a sneaker line, then interrupted his general election campaign a few weeks ago to hawk digital trading cards. Fans were enticed with a promise that anyone who purchased 15 cards (at a cost of nearly $1,500) would be rewarded with a piece of the suit Trump wore at his June debate with Joe Biden.

He’s also been accused of selling access to wealthy interests that were keen to exploit his once and possibly future influence as president. Foreign officials figured out early on in his term that spending money on Trump properties might improve their diplomatic leverage and behaved accordingly. The basis for his first impeachment was an incident of graft, in fact, albeit for political rather than financial favors.

Eric Hoffer wrote that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket, but Trump’s movement has blurred the lines between the three from the jump. Hucksterism and racketeering is in MAGA’s political DNA.

The logic of populism also points toward a higher tolerance for graft. In theory it’s about good government, draining the swamp of an entrenched elite and replacing it with more virtuous citizen legislators. But in practice it’s less about improving government than about the envious representatives of the “forgotten man” getting a cut of the action that the political establishment has been monopolizing.

Right-wing media is the supreme example. It grew up posturing as a truth-telling alternative to “elite” liberal media; in time it became a loudspeaker for conspiratorial insanity and a cash grab more lucrative than most of the targets of its wrath. (No one at the New York Times is signing $50 million contracts, I assure you.) Obsessed with gatekeeping and nakedly propagandistic, it’s less an alternative to the so-called MSM than a mirror of the right’s most grotesque stereotypes of the MSM. It’s not a corrective to a corrupt industry. It just wants its cut.

All populist revolutions end with no one being able to tell the difference between pigs and men, and MAGA is no different. Eight years after Trump’s smirking promises to “drain the swamp,” the right is foursquare behind a convicted criminal who’s under multiple indictments and whose last act as president was a coup attempt followed by an insurrection. Trumpism’s good-government pretenses are long gone. So why wouldn’t Tenet Media go for the easy money when a mysterious “European” started offering them six figures a pop for basically nothing?

The only thing that might have made Chen and company think twice was the prospect of serious reputational damage among their audience if and when the Russian payola scheme was exposed, but that was always unlikely. Yes, Lauren Chen lost her job at The Blaze, but she’ll be welcomed back by the wider right soon enough; a faction willing to tolerate Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens in their current “just asking questions about World War II” phase will tolerate bribe-taking too. And Johnson, Pool, and Rubin will suffer no backlash at all, I suspect, no matter how preposterous their claims of having been deceived by the origin of this scam might seem.

A party addicted to propaganda will always find excuses for those who make themselves useful. And whatever else one might say about useful idiots, they’re useful.