The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Hey, 

I just participated in a panel at the University of Pennsylvania on conservatism and the future of the GOP. Nothing got settled, but I made some friendships on my journey. Anyway, I bring this up because I am now parked at the Biden Welcome Center in Delaware. This is the one named after Joe. The one dedicated to Hunter is a glass coffee table in a hotel suite, with rolled-up $100 bills and a pharmacopeia of intoxicants and antibiotics. “Put down your purses and check out the Biden Welcome Center.”

The real point being, I only have so much time to write this. There’s a staff at the office I can’t keep waiting, and there are quadrupeds at home that have very high expectations for me. (And speaking of which, I have been told by my editors to remind you all that the first round of Dispawtch bracket voting—official voting, not the pick ’em bracket—kicked off today at 5 p.m. ET.) 

I’m often told that I never have anything good to say about Trump. That’s often true. The point of this observation is almost always to dismiss or diminish the negative things I say about Trump. I mean, it’s not like the people who say it are starving for fawning or friendly coverage of Trump. There’s plenty of that out there. Indeed, there are several TV networks and countless websites and podcasts dedicated to exactly that. No, what they want to do is argue that my valid criticisms are invalidated by the fact that I have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

As a matter of logic, this is basically a shoot-the-messenger fallacy. I have numerous problems with this argument, starting with the fact that I don’t think I have it. I certainly haven’t gone full Jen Rubin. But beyond that, a lot of the people who use the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” have a very narrow definition of the term. 

It’s definitely true that Trump makes people crazy. But the quality of that craziness is not distributed entirely on the anti-Trump side. Sure, I listen to a lot of self-styled “resistance” types and can understand why people think those types have lost their minds. But if (some of) the “resistance” folks are nuts, so are many members of the “counter-resistance.” I mean, knock yourself out mocking the MSNBC crowd, but if you can’t acknowledge that, say, Peter Navarro or Rudy Giuliani is bonkers, then you have the pro-Trump version of TDS. “Orange Man bad” thinking can be deranged (though there are plenty of solid arguments that the Orange Man is, in fact, bad). But “Orange Man Good” is often just as delusional. 

Still, I will throw you a bone. I’ll do it Spaghetti Western Style—i.e. I’ll give you the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I’ll do it while squinting against the dramatic lighting. 

The good.

It is unambiguously good that Donald Trump is bombing the stuffing out of the Houthis. Smashing pirates, brigands, and terrorists is, at a very fundamental level, what the government is there for. Indeed, were it not for the need to crush the Barbary Pirates, we wouldn’t have a constitution in the first place. The Articles of Confederation were inadequate to the task of building and funding a competent navy. That was one of the main reasons the Founders convened to set up a new form of government. 

Regardless, it was outrageous that Joe Biden tolerated Houthi aggression throughout his presidency. And it is good and necessary that Trump is opening a can of whup-ass on them. 

The bad.

Last night Donald Trump sat down for an interview with Laura Ingraham, one of his appointees to the Kennedy Center Board and a Fox host. Here’s an excerpt:

“You’re tougher with Canada than you are with our biggest adversaries. Why?” asked Ingraham.

“Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state, and I mean that,” Trump said.

“Okay, but we need their territory. They have territorial advantage. We’re not going to let them get close to China, right?” pressed the Fox host.

“Look, I deal with every country—directly or indirectly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”

This is very bad. I take a backseat to very few people in having fun at Canada’s expense. But Canada is an ally. The longest unarmed border in the world is our border with Canada. They are military and strategic allies. Starting with FDR and ending with Trump’s revised trade agreement in his first term, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, Canada has organized its economy to be harmonized with the United States. 

The Trump administration has been pretending that Canada has been “ripping us off.” But it has been abiding by the very trade agreement Trump bragged about replacing NAFTA with. The logical upshot of this is that Trump wrote a trade treaty that screwed America. 

(In case it matters to you, we have a very beneficial and preferential relationship with Canada when it comes to oil. We get more oil from Canada—at a discounted price, without fear of disruption—than the next five foreign sources combined. We get 15 times more oil from them than from Saudi Arabia. Now Canadians, in response to Trump’s tariff threats, are trying to figure out how to muck up that arrangement and sell more oil elsewhere, which would be bad for us.)

The administration has floated all sorts of arguments—some with a little merit, I guess—and some totally contrived to justify our bullying of our peaceful neighbor and ally. 

Should Canada spend more on defense? Sure. Should it do more to stop the negligible amount of fentanyl coming across the border? Maybe, sure. Reform its banking laws for more favorable treatment of American banks? I guess. But who really cares? I mean, it’s a weird form of populism that says it should be a huge priority for another nation to boost the profits of our banks. 

But the point is that all of this stuff was pretextual garbage. Trump in his own words says that the real reason he’s making these arguments (the better word would be “claims”) is that he wants to annex the whole of the country. 

Now, I’m actually all in favor of annexing Canada (and Greenland), if Canada wants to be annexed (ditto Greenland). But they don’t, and will never, ever, want that. 

And what really bothers me about the way Trump talks about Canada is that it is remarkably similar to the way Putin talks about Ukraine. It’s not a real country. It shouldn’t exist. Canadians are really just Americans who, through an accident of history, got a country that doesn’t really work and shouldn’t really be a country. 

No, I don’t think Trump is going to authorize the creation of “little green men” as a military pretext to launch an invasion. But the main reason I don’t think he’ll do that is because he won’t be able to pull it off. That’s why this talk is merely bad.

The ugly.

Now, let’s talk, briefly, about the ugly. I’ll stick with that word instead of “evil,” but evil might turn out to be the better word. 

The Trump administration has objectively sided with Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war. The list of preemptive concessions to Russia is so staggeringly long I can’t even cut-and-paste Jim Geraghty’s excellent compilation without making this a 3,000-word “news”letter.  

The significance of these concessions is multifaceted. But the relevant point here is just that the concessions prove Trump is not an honest broker between the two sides. He is coming to Russia’s aid despite the fact the United States staked its honor and its word in support of Ukraine. That is dishonorable. It is unwise. You can argue that Biden and Congress—with ample Republican support—should not have put our credibility on Ukraine’s side. You can argue that we shouldn’t have rallied our allies to do likewise. I disagree profoundly. But the fact is we did. But Trump feels no obligation to maintain our honor or integrity on the world stage. 

But I’ve said all this before. The new ugliness, and perhaps the new profound evil if reports turn out to be true, is that we’ve decided to become accomplices to Russia’s tactic of stealing and brainwashing Ukrainian children. The U.S. State Department, ostensibly under the leadership of Marco Rubio, has ceased funding a project that tracks these abducted children. I think that’s appalling. But, again, that’s not the really ugly thing.

Members of Congress have “reason to believe” that the DOGE crew that halted the funding didn’t stop there. They’re worried that the administration actually deleted the files relating to the approximately 30,000 abducted children. 

Think about that. Imagine if the U.S. were helping track Hamas’ Israeli hostages, and then just decided to delete the files. Imagine how you would feel if you were the parents of one of those children. You’re free to make the argument that spending money tracking stolen children was a waste of taxpayer resources. I’d disagree. But what on earth is the argument for effectively burning the records? 

Maybe some cold-hearted, stoney-eyed realist could make the case that we should have dangled this “card” to Putin as an inducement to make concessions. I think that would be a moral horror. But okay. We screwed a lot of people at Yalta in the name of realism, too. But why do it for free?

Now, we don’t know yet whether the files have been deleted. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were deleted by accident (which would be quite the indictment of the administration’s competence). But if they were deleted on purpose, that would be an ugliness so vile and so profoundly ugly that one would need a better command of language to fully capture its evil.