The Donald Is at the Door

Among the many legends about vampires is the belief that one cannot enter a home unless invited. “He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come,” Bram Stoker tells us in Dracula. The same legend has been associated with sundry demons (Mephistopheles in Faust requires an invitation to enter: “Thrice must the words be spoken”), ghosts, evil spirits, even the devil himself. Thresholds have had magical associations reaching way back into the prehistoric darkness: Liminal spaces are naturally mystical, because they give us a sense of being in two places at once. (There is a reason mirrors also figure prominently in the lore of vampires and the like.) Janus, the god for whom this month is named, comes from an ancient pantheon even older than the familiar Roman one, and he was invoked at times of transition: from peace to war and back, at the beginning of some new enterprise, etc. His symbol, a key, was put into the hand of a woman giving birth to encourage an easy delivery through that first and most important gate. January magic, doorway magic, is old magic. Transitions are a delicate time. 

Today being January 6, it is worth thinking a little bit about whom we—77 million of us—have invited in. 

On January 6, 2021, there was a riot at the U.S. Capitol. It was led by people who intended to interrupt the certification of the presidential vote in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in office. Donald Trump himself egged them on in various ways, and he was, at that time, engaged in a multifaceted attempt to illegally hold on to the office he had lost in a free and fair election to Joe Biden, a senescent near-nonentity who, though a figure of fun, unseated an incumbent president while barely even bothering to campaign against him. We use “January 6” as a shorthand to talk about what Trump did after losing the 2020 election, but it is important to understand—and I think historians will agree about this—that the imbecilic clown show at the Capitol was the least important and least dangerous part of that episode. Trump’s attempt to suborn election fraud—which is what he was up to on that telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021—was the more serious part of the attempted coup d’état. Some coup-plotters are generalissimos who just march their troops into the capital and seize power, but many of them—many of the worst of them—take pains to come up with some legal or constitutional pretext for their actions. Often, the pretext is an emergency, as it was with Indira Gandhi, Augusto Pinochet, the coup that brought Francisco Franco to power, etc. You’ll remember that Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution as an emergency measure: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in his trademark kindergartner’s prose. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!” 

John Adams knew the secret in the heart of democracy: a death wish. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote. And so the American people, in their belligerent stupidity, have again given the awesome power of the presidency to the man who attempted to overthrow the government the last time he was entrusted with that power. Trump has, of course, promised to pardon those who carried out the violence and chaos of January 6, which is no surprise: The riot was conducted on his behalf, and that is the kind of riot he likes. His contempt for the law is utter and complete, and the only law that he honors is the one inscribed on his heart: “I should get whatever I want.” Those who participated in January 6 should of course be convicted of the crimes of which they are guilty and punished as harshly as the law will allow. But even that would be the equivalent of giving a parking ticket to the wheelman who left a getaway car in a no-parking zone while his crew of bank robbers attempted the heist—then making the leader of the crew mayor and asking him to appoint the new chief of police. 

There is no “set it and forget it” version of self-rule. We have a very fine Constitution, fine statutes, fine courts, fine institutions. That is not enough. We say that we live under a government of laws, not men, but that isn’t quite right: It is the government of men standing behind the government of laws that keeps that government of laws standing upright. The laws are not self-executing. The courts are not self-managing. The institutions are not self-reinforcing. 

Everything we have relies on people, on men and women practicing civic virtue, which is not the same thing as personal morality, but they are related. Cato the Younger, to take a famous example, made a point of living out his philosophical stoicism, practicing severe modesty and economy in most things (he declined to wear shoes and traveled only on foot) but was reported to have become a habitual drunk later in life: “At first, also, he would drink once after supper and then leave the table; but as time went on he would allow himself to drink very generously, so that he often tarried at his wine till early morning,” Plutarch reports. His drinking was (if we credit the stories) a personal failing, to be sure, one that his political enemies tried to use against him, painting him as a hypocrite, a Stoic for show. (His famous ancestor, Cato the Elder, had what we might call a stoic temperament but railed against Stoicism itself as an imported Greek cult and a corruption of true Roman religion.) But, as a public man, Cato the Younger was without blemish, at least that was his reputation, and his name was long a byword for propriety in public affairs. (In A Man for All Seasons, Norfolk describes Thomas More as “the only judge since Cato who didn’t accept bribes,” and the intended audience didn’t need the reference explained to them. But at least we Americans now have a Department of Education!) He practiced simplicity and generosity, did his duty tirelessly, and, when it became clear that Julius Caesar and Caesarism would prevail, he killed himself (gruesomely because he did so incompetently) rather than live one day under tyranny. Cato was a republican, while our so-called Republicans greet the Caesarism of our time either with cheers or crocodile tears. 

There is a tension between private morality and civic virtue in many important figures in American history: Thomas Jefferson was a very ordinary slaveowner, whatever scruples he had about that “hideous blot,” and Dwight Eisenhower does not seem to have been a very good husband during his time at war. Donald Trump’s defenders would have us believe that he is, at the worst, an exemplar of that tradition, a man whose personal failures (the chiseling, the endless adultery, the hush-money payments to the pornographic performer, etc.) are a distraction, useful only to enemies who actually oppose him not for his personal vices but for his political virtues, meaning his desire to “Make America Great Again.” That is, of course, baloney. Trump’s personal moral failings are secondary—and it is a distant second—to his public failings, from his corruption of our political discourse to his programmatic lying and grifting to his attacks on the legitimacy of the courts and other institutions to his attempt to nullify the 2020 presidential election because he did not like having lost it. It is inevitable that the personal deficiencies and the public failings interact: He did not try to hang on to power in 2021 because he had some great political vision but because he was afraid of going to jail or facing financial ruination for his many crimes and because he is too much of a weakling to endure the sting of the American people’s rejection in 2020. 

Trump will be sentenced for his New York crimes on January 10. The judge is expected to give him “unconditional release,” meaning that he will simply confirm Trump’s dozens of felony convictions (34 of them) and impose no additional punishment. That would be a mistake. Trump should be obliged to report to jail on the 10^th and then released no sooner than on the morning of the 20^th for his inauguration. He should be made to serve the balance of his sentence after his presidency. Judge Juan M. Merchan serves the people of New York, not the federal political calendar, which can be accommodated without being surrendered to entirely. But I will not hold my breath waiting for that to happen. 

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” John Adams wrote. “Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”

Oh, yes: “binary choice” and all that. What was the binary choice on Election Day of 2024? It was between mediocrity and Moloch, and Americans chose Moloch. Republican primary voters chose Moloch over Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis and Doug Burgum and all the others who now bend the knee to the man they all know—and some at least have said, though DeSantis’ personal cowardice in the matter has been remarkable—to be unfit for the office. The founding generation had John Adams, who was willing to defend the rule of law even against its natural enemy: the people. We have Meatball. 

Be careful who you invite in. Vampires aren’t real, but autocrats and caudillos and grifters and enablers all are real enough, and the American people have just offered an engraved invitation to the people behind the chaos of January 6, 2021, to return and to do their worst. 

And Furthermore … 

I find myself slightly in disagreement with my friend/colleague/boss Jonah Goldberg here. Jonah frequently says that the people who voted for Donald Trump—at least, the marginal voters who gave him the majority—did not vote for chaos, retribution, shenanigans, Matt Gaetz as attorney general, that kind of thing. Jonah believes that what the people who voted for Trump were voting for was an end to inflation and chaos at the border. It was, in his telling, a vote against the Joe Biden administration’s incompetence and the excesses of Democratic officeholders and, perhaps and to a lesser extent, of the cultural Left at large. I don’t know that Jonah is right about all that. I think it is fair to say that he has a higher opinion of the American people than I do (which is not a very high bar to clear) and a more generous attitude toward Trump voters (a lower bar still). 

I think we have to at least entertain the notion that this—all of this—is exactly what the people who voted for Trump were voting for, including the late-breaking swing voters who aren’t longtime MAGA cultists. I write that because the 2024 election was a lot like the 2016 election. Republican primary voters could have chosen some much more capable and much more conservative Republican with a fine record in office: the aforementioned Gov. DeSantis or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Neither even got close—Republicans wanted Trump. It is not as though there were no sufficiently rightward-leaning figure available to strict conservatives; it is not as though DeSantis were insufficiently confrontational to serve as the Kulturkampf battering ram so many Republicans desire. They know what Trump is—a bully, an ignoramus, and a would-be tyrant—and they will have no other. 

And the general electorate went along with that. 

What Jonah foresees—because he has at times experienced a particularly stupid and dishonest version of the same thing—is Trump doing something awful or foolish and then Democrats pointing to Joe Republican and to Republicans at large and saying: “See! You own that! That’s what you voted for!” Jonah, being a more generous-minded sort, says that this is unfair, that if Trump decides to name Jeanine Pirro to the Supreme Court or just go ahead and conduct an actual blood sacrifice to Moloch on the White House lawn, that this is not what the people who voted for him were voting for. I don’t know. I don’t know how we’d know that, for one thing, and I am quite sure that at least some of them were voting for that—the notion of Attorney General Matt Gaetz did not scandalize every Republican. Maybe some voters who didn’t support Trump last time around decided that they like chaos or Trump’s entertainment value, or maybe they came around to his argument that the system is so corrupt and dysfunctional that the best option is to administer a human enema in the form of Donald Trump. It is worth keeping in mind that many Americans loved Donald Trump and enjoyed his bullying and corruption and performative libertinism long before he was an active politician. We’re a country with a Mack truck for an id and a Prius for a superego. Americans did not invent pornography or mass-market media, but we did invent mass-market pornography. 

I don’t know that it would be particularly fruitful to work through how much we can blame individual Trump voters for individual Trump shenanigans. (“How much should I hate my MAGA uncle?” either is, or will be, a Slate headline, I’m sure.) But shenanigans—and crimes, and full-front assaults on the Constitution and the rule of law—are foreseeable consequences of a Trump vote, even if they are undesired. Drunk drivers don’t intend to get into accidents—that is not their intent when they decide to drive to the bar, decide to drink Wild Turkey for four or five hours, etc. But that is how that kind of thing happens. Maybe at the last minute you do the smart thing and call an Uber, but even that would be a case of sober you outsourcing decisions to drunk you—which comes with its own kind of moral culpability, even if the final outcome is not the worst possible one. Supposedly, the typical drunk driver drives drunk more than 80 times before catching a charge—but he wasn’t any more irresponsible the 99^th time than the first time. The odds just caught up to him later rather than sooner. People wearing handcuffs often are distraught or angry, but very, very few of them are genuinely surprised. They know why they’re there. 

The level of high culture, religion, public and private morality, political decency, etc., all wax and wane in a society if it is sufficiently long-lived. Maybe we are just at a low point, as we were in the 1960s or in the years after the Civil War—another time Republicans accepted personal corruption as an ordinary cost of doing political business. But I do not see a lot of anguished Republicans out there, or a lot of anguished Trump voters who previously were unaffiliated with the Republican Party. They seem to be getting what they asked for. They seem to like it. 

In any case, I am not convinced that Jonah is correct about what the Trump voter was voting for. We know he was voting for Trump. And Jonah and I know what that means. Maybe the people who voted for Trump know, too. 

Economics for English Majors

Here is some news from Euronews, which reports that “Mississippi, the poorest state in the United States, is close to surpassing Europe’s largest economy Germany’s GDP per capita.” More: 

The poorest US state’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is higher than that of Europe’s top five economies, except for Germany. However, Mississippi competes closely with Germany, with a difference of just €1,500.

GDP per capita, adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), in the US also surpasses that of all EU countries, except for Luxembourg and Ireland, which are outliers.

Muppet News Flash: The United States is very, very rich. Everybody knows that, except Americans, who labor under the misapprehension that Europeans live it up with “free” health care and college. 

Those “outliers” are kind of interesting, too. You can get some funny averages with small populations: Ireland, for example, has a very small population (a bit smaller than Wisconsin’s) but it is, for tax purposes, home to a lot of big corporations’ subsidiaries and their assets. Ireland is not as attractive a tax haven as it once was for U.S.-based firms, but it remains home to a lot of capital that doesn’t do very much work in Ireland. In 2018, the International Monetary Fund estimated that 40 percent of all foreign-direct investment in the world was in empty corporate shells set up for tax purposes; almost all of the money invested in “special purpose” entities is parked in a handful of relatively small countries: the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, and Singapore, along with the Hong Kong “special administrative region.” Ireland goes so far as to use a different GDP-equivalent metric that excludes most of that parked money in order to get a more accurate view of actual economic conditions in the republic. Do note that most of these tax-haven jurisdictions are rich in reality as well as rich on paper—the Netherlands and Ireland and Singapore may not be quite as rich as a practical matter as the data would suggest, but they are doing well. 

So is Mississippi. The United States is not a tax haven the way Bermuda is, but we still have a relatively attractive tax and regulatory environment. We also have things that Singapore and the Netherlands don’t: a massive work force that works harder and more productively than any other in the developed world; the world’s finest system of higher education, turning out creative and productive workers by the hundreds of thousands every year; venture capital and private equity money coming off of both coasts in great gushers and the financial expertise to make the most of it; ginormous domestic markets; an incredibly well-diversified national economy; etc. We’d be better off with the administrative excellence of the Swiss in our public sector and a more Singaporean (in at least some aspects) business environment, but we have a lot going for us. 

There’s a famous story about Milton Friedman being lectured by a critic who insisted that there was no poverty in Scandinavia. “That’s interesting,” he answered, “because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.” Neither one of those claims is entirely true, but both are largely true. What’s interesting to me is that by most estimates there are more people of Norwegian ancestry living in the United States than in Norway, more people of Swedish ancestry living in the United States than in Sweden, more Irish Americans than Irish, etc. Sweden, not that long ago—by historical standards, I mean—was a byword for poverty: It was both poor and agricultural and seen as backward, which is why so many Swedes ended up moving to the United States in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Sweden today is more like Singapore than it is like the 1970s Euro-socialist cartoon of the U.S. progressive imagination: entrepreneurial, free-trading, etc. 

Countries can move forward in the rankings. They can move backward, too. 

Words about Words

Headline: “I didn’t know I was middle-aged until I wrote a book about sexy moms.” 

When I published my debut novel this year, I unwittingly found myself in an accidental field experiment on whether motherhood is synonymous with “middle age.” A few months prior, I was at a toddler’s birthday party when my husband casually referred to me and all the same-aged women in the room as “middle-aged.” Being 39, I told him the joke was not funny. After a brief poll around the room, all the other husbands and dads agreed: Late 30s was definitely too young to be deemed “middle-age.”

Oh, I have some bad news for you, Sunshine! Age 39 is halfway to 78 in a country where the average life expectancy for a woman is just over 80—so, yes, it is about midway through life’s (statistically average) journey. Age 40 is the classic age for a midlife crisis: I’ve never seen This Is 40, but the title is no surprise. In Sunday’s Economist newsletter, Adam Roberts describes the older Millennials (who are in their 40s) as “on the cusp of being middle-aged,” which I don’t think is quite as precise as writing “in early middle age” would be.

People don’t like the term “middle-aged” because they hear it as “borderline old” and “sexually undesirable.” There is something inescapably unhappy in a society in which the decline of sexual desirability is seen as tantamount to death, a kind of living death, as though what we really want and need in this world is sexier grandmas and granddads. Now, in my particular white-trash milieu, it’s not super-unusual for people to be grandparents before they are 40, so in the math there must be some . . . wiggle room, I guess you’d call it. 

“I didn’t know I was middle-aged,” says the headline. I did! I’m planning to live to be at least 104, so I’m right there in the middle, I guess, though I’ve identified as middle-aged since I was about 14 years old, which was handy because my eyes at the time were still good enough to read the agate stock market columns in the newspaper.

(Agate? Ask your grandparents, kids. Not the sexy ones, either.) 

There’s a neighborhood in Dallas called Lower Greenville, and the area south of it is called Lowest Greenville by the locals. So, sure, 39 is “late 30s”—latest 30s, right up until midnight before your 40^th. 

But you know: It’s not the 40^th birthday that’s hard, or the 50^th: The big, round-number birthdays have some novelty. Turning 50 feels like an occasion. 

Turning 52 is more like, “Oh, f … iddlesticks.” 

Elsewhere

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. 

You can buy my other books here. 

You can see my New York Post columns here. 

Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t. 

You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here. 

In Closing

We’ve had terrorist attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas. Something about the fun places really brings it out in a certain breed of lowlife. Both suspects are dead, and nobody is going to miss either of them.* And while we will mourn the dead and care for the injured, Las Vegas and New Orleans are going to go right on being Las Vegas and New Orleans, the two great freak-flag-flying American cities shouting, as with one voice, “Hold my beer!” 

Correction, January 6, 2025: This newsletter has been updated to reflect the fact that the suspects in both the New Orleans and Las Vegas terror attacks are dead.