With Friends Like These

Moments of levity are a mercy in dark hours. Both vice-presidential candidates have provided them this week.

Tim Walz hasn’t added a thing to the Democratic ticket as far as I can tell, especially in Pennsylvania, but he did make me laugh when he described Elon Musk as “jumping around, skipping like a dipsh—” at one of Donald Trump’s recent rallies. When he said it, I felt a twinge of writerly jealousy at a phrase well-turned. It was funny, vivid, and apt, as you know if you’ve seen the clip of Musk at that event.

One of the important things we’ve learned about America from this campaign is that its richest citizen is in fact a colossal dipsh–, and a far more malevolent one than anyone knew. 

J.D. Vance isn’t known for humor, but he too got off a howler at a town hall on Thursday night. I quote:

One of the things I’ve seen, especially from, you know, some of my wife’s friends and some of my friends is that they disagree with us on politics sometimes—they’ll get very personal about it. And if you’re discarding a lifelong friendship because somebody votes for the other team, then you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake and you should do something different. Like, don’t, don’t cast aside—like, most of my family obviously is going to vote for, you know, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, and if they’re not, actually, I need to talk to them. But, but I’ve got friends who like me personally—acquaintances—who aren’t necessarily going to vote for me, [and] that doesn’t make them bad people. And you can’t—this is my most important advice, whether you vote for me, whether you vote for Donald Trump, whether you vote for Kamala Harris, don’t cast aside family members and lifelong friendships. Politics is not worth it. And I think, if we follow that principle, we heal the divide in this country.

Had that speech been delivered on a sitcom, it would have been soundtracked with the sort of collective awwwwww reserved for whenever the youngest child in the cast says something adorable. But I cracked up, and kept chuckling when Republicans solemnly began promoting the clip on Musk’s propaganda platform. Some who did so were ardent Trump cultists who betray no sign of prioritizing personal friendships—or anything else—above devotion to their leader. Others were partisan conservatives I used to respect, clinging to Vance’s words like a life raft in the ocean of indecency they’ve chosen to swim in.

If there’s anything memorable about Vance’s spiel, it’s that it functions as a sort of bookend on the Republican Party’s lifespan as a respectable political outfit. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” the first Republican president said in his first inaugural, futilely. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln then, Vance now: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce—to quote another influential figure of the 19th century. Today, we’re going to talk about the “better angels” inside the sort of person who’d vote for a malicious halfwit miscreant after watching him attempt a coup, and for a party that now equates honor with weakness.

How much friendship do J.D. Vance’s friends owe him? How much do we owe the Trump enthusiasts in our social circles?

The enemy from within.

The thing to understand about Vance’s comments is that, unlike Lincoln’s version, they’re insincere.

They sounded sincere, certainly, but J.D.’s great talent is being whatever he needs to be politically at a given moment to get ahead. We saw that earlier this month: Onstage with Walz at the vice-presidential debate, before an audience of millions, he was every inch the reasonable, soft-spoken Republican that swing voters could feel reassured about.

He was that man again when he did his song and dance about friendship at Thursday night’s televised NewsNation town hall. In the closing days of a national campaign, with the race a coin-flip, he knew that the last remaining handfuls of undecideds need to believe they’re not doing something irresponsible by reelecting a man whose own former advisers suspect of being a fascist. So “nice J.D.” returned, babbling about friends ‘n stuff and how there are more important things in life than politics. Call him what you like, but don’t ever call him stupid.

But “Nice J.D.” is a fraud. He’s the same guy who spearheaded the smear about Haitian immigrants capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio—the most demagogic episode of the most demagogic presidential campaign in modern American history. He’s the guy who told an interviewer in 2021 that Trump should ignore adverse Supreme Court rulings in a second term and who, to this day, continues to second-guess Mike Pence for not midwifing Trump’s coup on January 6.

When he’s away from the cameras and crowds of swing voters, he’s prone to saying things like, “I think our people hate the right people.” If you were a friend of Vance’s, what would be the proper response upon discovering that that’s the sort of politics he practices? One would assume that, by definition, J.D. believes those who are worthy of hatred are unworthy of friendship. How does he square “hating the right people” with “healing the divide in this country”?

David Frum was once friendly with Vance, publishing some of his essays online and even encouraging him to write his bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy. He’s since become a critic and scolded him last month for the Springfield debacle. The mystic chords of memory a-quiver, J.D. replied by accusing Frum of being on the same “team” as the two men who tried to assassinate Trump earlier this year. The bonds of affection between him and Frum are, I dare say, broken, Vance’s burbling about not letting politics trump friendship notwithstanding.

Demagoguery of the sort aggressively practiced by Trump and Vance is the literal antithesis of Lincoln’s call to our “better angels.” It’s no exaggeration to say that Trumpism appeals to its most rabid followers precisely because of the moral license it grants them to indulge their greater demons. Immigrants are “vermin” and “garbage,” towns are being “infected” by their presence, Democrats are “the enemy from within”—upwards of 100 million Americans are prepared to support all of that.

They’ll go to the polls next month knowing with certainty that, if Trump falls short, he’ll burn the country to the ground to try to overturn the result, and they’ll vote for him anyway. It’ll be a reprise of the judgment of Solomon, except this time the baby will be awarded to the woman who’s willing to see it cut in half, not to the one who isn’t.

Vance is urging the rest of us to shrug all of that off and carry on as usual with those in our social circles who have chosen to be party to this.

I have a proposition for him.

Red lines.

Trump’s victory, if it comes to pass, would force millions of us to figure out how to coexist with friends and neighbors who had every reason to know they were electing a fascist and did so regardless. We’ll each find our own way on that, but many of us will choose to withdraw from them.

My way is this: Family alone gets an exemption. 

Trump’s influence on the culture has been so toxic that even families have been broken by it, in some cases with children feeling obliged to turn in their parents for trying to overthrow the government. If it bothers Vance to see intimate relationships dissolving under the political heat of this era—and it should—he might profit from reflecting on who’s generating that heat.

But except in the most extreme cases, I think family gets a pass. It’s a moral calculus: The greater your moral debt to another person, the more willing you should be to extend them credit when they do something terrible. The closer a relative is, the greater the debt you likely owe. J.D. is right that some relationships are so precious that heroic efforts should be made to save them—although if your dad heads off to the Capitol with rope in hand next January 6 hoping to hang Kamala Harris, then yes, by all means, dial 911.

The problem with Vance’s disingenuous “better angels” appeal is that there has to be a moral red line somewhere that overrides personal affection. Where does that line lie with friends, to whom we don’t owe the same enormous moral debt as family, assuming we owe any at all?

Make the hypothetical as outlandish as you need to in order to illustrate the point. Certain beliefs and behaviors are so repulsive that we wouldn’t tolerate them in friends, or even in family. They would offend us so gravely that we couldn’t look at the other person the same way going forward. The relationship would break; ignoring their moral failing would be too difficult.

Trumpism has always primarily been a moral failing, not a political failing, because it encourages cruelty in its supporters. But I’m willing to entertain Vance’s argument that knowingly reelecting a coup-plotting criminal obsessed with purging “the enemy from within” doesn’t quite cross the red line requiring a friendship to end.

Here’s my proposition for him, then: Tell me where that red line is. If being a good American requires me to overlook my friends’ enthusiasm for a fascist, at what point would being a good American require me to not overlook it?

A few days ago, I imagined what a second Lafayette Square incident might look like in Trump’s next term. If it happens and my friends gleefully insist that the protesters had it coming, is that the red line?

If Harris squeaks out a win next month and Trump connives to throw the election to the House, where Republicans promptly elect him president, does it cross the red line if my friends cheer his coup the whole way?

Or what if, hypothetically, I have a friend who’s not content to oppose U.S. military aid to Ukraine and instead insists that it’s unclear whether Russia is the “good guy” or “bad guy” in that war. Should there be a red line in friendships for that sort of grotesque moral perversion?

It’s important to set the red line in advance because, I promise, most Trump supporters will cross it eventually if he asks them to. Read Jonathan Last today or scroll through Christian Vanderbrouk’s Twitter feed this week and you’ll find numerous examples of modern-day Trump apologists on the American right sounding perfectly sober in 2016 and after January 6 about who he was and what he represented. Since then, they’ve gotten sucked in and crossed one red line after another. They’re not going to stop in a second term. They’re pot-committed.

And that’s the real red line, of course. It’s not that they’re voting for Trump next month, it’s that for many that vote means they’re prepared to excuse him for anything, starting—but not ending—with a coup attempt. If that’s so, if they’re willing to rationalize all of his worst impulses in a second term, then why not treat them as if they’ve crossed the red line already? They’re voting for a truly terrible human, and they know it. They know that he’ll treat their support as a mandate to behave even more terribly as president. They just don’t care.

Why should I overlook that in a “friend”? How much of my own moral revulsion should I swallow in the interest of not hurting their feelings?

Forgive me for suspecting that J.D. Vance’s “can’t we all just get along?” nonsense isn’t about healing the country but rather about further destigmatizing Trump’s fascist politics. Asking Americans to overlook their friends’ Trump support isn’t about maintaining “our bonds of affection,” it’s about normalizing authoritarianism such that differences of opinion about it are deemed no more consequential than differences over, say, tax policy. You wouldn’t cut off a friend for disagreeing with you about the optimal income tax rate, would you? Well, then, why would you cut them off for disagreeing with you about the virtues of being ruled by a caudillo?

Don’t you value friendship? Don’t you want to heal the country?

The fading stigma.

If and when millions of Harris voters begin withdrawing from Trump supporters in their social orbits next month, it’ll be their small way of maintaining the stigma that Vance is trying to erase. They couldn’t deter authoritarianism at the polls so they’ll do what they can to deter it at a granular level, by penalizing its supporters with lost friendship. It’s the only avenue left to drive home that this is not okay.

And it’ll probably backfire. Trump’s politics thrives on disunion and loss of community; the weaker friendships get, the more acceptable cults become as substitutes. Cutting off Trump voters is likely to make them Trumpier. If you can choke down the bile and paint on a smile around them after they squandered America’s civic birthright, you’re probably doing some good at the margins. I can’t, personally.

But here’s a happy note on which to end: It’s possible, maybe likely, that I’m wrong about all of this.

Exhaustion is an authoritarian’s greatest weapon. Try as we might not to normalize Trump—it’s the entire purpose of this newsletter, really—we all get tired. Morally, we should continue to stigmatize him and his politics however we can. But politically, if he’s reelected, that will feel ridiculous. Americans will have decided what’s “normal,” and it ain’t Dispatch conservatism.

I confess, I feel myself growing exhausted by having to care. Every day, alarming new stories appear about what America will look like in a second Trump presidency and I let them pass because I lack the energy to address them. Enemies lists of federal bureaucrats; threats against companies who cause political trouble; loyalty tests for judicial candidates; political patronage for federal judges overseeing Trump’s prosecutions; power grabs galore. In the last few days, the Los Angeles Times revealed it won’t endorse a presidential candidate this year, as did the Washington Post. Why? It’s not clear, but probably because endorsing Harris will invite political and financial retribution against their publishers by Trump’s retribution-minded government.

I didn’t write about any of that. It’s too much. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Elon Musk, the biggest dipsh— in Trump’s dipsh— kakistocracy, has been in “regular contact” with Vladimir Putin for the past two years and at one point discussed doing a “favor” for Xi Jinping by depriving Taiwan of access to the Starlink satellite internet system. It was a bombshell—but I couldn’t force myself to care. How much can you care knowing that most of the country doesn’t?

So maybe I’m wrong about Harris voters withdrawing from their Trumpist friends. Probably we’ll all just get used to America operating this way and go back to normal. Or, instead of withdrawing from friends, many of us will withdraw from following the news and check out of politics entirely. That’s what I would do if my profession didn’t require me to stare into the abyss every day. Nothing sounds nicer right now than turning on Netflix next week and not turning it off until 2029.

The less you know about what’s going on, the more comfortably you’ll be able to live with those around you.

We can heal the divide in this country, as Vance encouraged us to do, by just not caring anymore about the greater demons of our nature. Maybe we will. It’s getting easier every day.