Categories of Contempt

A typology of my domestic political disgust.

Photo by Barbara Burgess on Unsplash

The hard-working readers here at Drezner’s World have probably noticed that in my commentary about the Trump administration, a disproportionate share of my ire is targeted towards those who are perceived as the more “normie” Republicans: folks like Scott Bessent or Elbridge Colby or Marco Rubio. One can ask: why not aim more at someone who is manifestly unqualified for their job — someone like, say, Pete Hegseth?

I have a short answer and a long answer. to this question.

The short answer is simple: it is more troubling to see folks with some degree of acumen willingly ben the knee to Trump’s whims just to have some measure of power and status. Pete Hegseth is a malevolent, buffoonish clown; I expect absolutely nothing from him and am therefore unsurprised that he’s acting like a clown who is spectacularly out of his depth. Once that recognition is made, there is really little point to making it again.

The likes of Rubio, on the other hand, are rather different. He is clearly intelligent enough to know what (and who) he is enabling and does it anyway. To the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, that is the more contemptuous behavior, and therefore merits more comment and derision.

The longer answer, however, is that Trump’s myriad transgressions require an entirely new typology of contemptible individuals — and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of all the different subcultures of sycophancy.

For example, what should I make of the MAGA faithful, the likes of Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Nancy Mace, folks who actually believed the MAGA bullshit that Trump and his team have spewed out over the past decade? They’re all genuine bigots, which is certainly contemptible. At the same time, they also genuinely believe in at least some of the foreign policy ideas that Trump embraced over a decade ago. I can’t get exercised by them all too much — mostly because, in the end, I think they’re a marginalized group with minimal political power.

Then there are the Stormtroopers — the folks working in the federal government who have enthusiastically embraced what Trump is selling. You know these are the weak-minded guys who Obi-Wan handles in this scene:¹

There have been a raft of recent stories about the degree to which low-level thugs have taken advantage of their government positions to revel in their ability to bully and surveil citizens. For example, Wired’s Yulia Almazova recently reported on what U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers have been doing on their computers: “In one case, a CBP officer allegedly used government databases to contact a flight attendant. In another, an officer was accused of pulling information from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. Other CBP employees were accused of providing border-crossing data to someone involved in a ‘heated divorce.’”

Another example is DHS more generally. In the wake of organized resistance to their Minneapolis incursion, DHS decided to investigate progressive organizations. According to the New York Times’ Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño:

Homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.

In one instance, officials used administrative subpoenas to obtain more than three years of financial records from the Sunrise Movement, an environmental action group, and a labor union, the Communications Workers of America. That time frame went well beyond the civil unrest in Minnesota, which was prompted by the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to the state during the winter.

In another, investigators scrutinized three years’ worth of wire transfers made by the nation’s biggest health care workers union, the Service Employees International Union, in what they referred to as an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing.”

All of this is pretty vile, and the folks doing it at DHS appear not to care about how vile it is.

And yet, it is also worth noting that abuses of government power by career employees span most administrations. That Wired story, for example, examined CBP actions from 2009 to 2022. Stormtroopers are an endemic problem. Clearly, the Trump administration is not helping, but this is not a new phenomenon.

Then there are the Trump emulators, the aspiring politicians who see Donald Trump as their political lodestar and think that behaving like him, they will acquire power. The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg wrote an excellent column about the likes of U.S. Representatives Max Miller and Cory Mills, Republican House candidate Brandon Herrera, and other kindred spirits. As Goldberg notes, “Thanks to President Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans have become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.” It is actually worse than that — in Miller’s case, the Trump White House overtly intervened to tell Republicans to back off their criticisms of Miller.

These folks are infuriating, and a sign of how Trump has normalized the idea of GOP candidates running despite serious scandals that would have forced a previous generation of candidates to drop out.

And yet, to the hardworking staff here at Drezner’s World, the group that is even more infuriating are the allegedly normie Republicans. These are the folks who have held their noses and continued to vote Republican despite all of… this… for the past ten years.

For example, Brandon Herrera has made remarks that are clearly sexist and anti-Semitic. Despite all of this, House Speaker Mike Johnson is attending Herrera fundraisers. And as Goldberg notes in her column, “I haven’t seen much public hand-wringing about the decision of the pious Johnson to raise money for Herrera, nor debate about what his candidacy means for the Republican Party’s attitude toward women, Jews or seniors.”

Or consider this paragraph from Politico about GOP thinking regarding Max Miller: “Some Republicans argue they have no choice but to close ranks around a candidate accused by his former father-in-law, Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno, of being unfit to serve and needing psychological help; Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, has also said Miller should resign and not run for reelection. Miller has remained defiant amid the calls to resign.” My point is that they absolutely have a choice.

Furthermore, they keep making their choice in a way that empowers the worst elements of their party. G. Elliott Morris recently explored the gap between Trump’s high disapproval polling and the Democrats smaller margin in the generic congressional ballot. His conclusion: “Voters who pulled the lever for Trump in ‘24 and call themselves Republicans but not conservatives stay Republican…. The pattern is hard to miss. The subgroups that keep “Republican” in their identity stay Republican by 37 points or more in the generic ballot even while disapproving of the man leading their party, — while both subgroups without it defect to the Democrats by a margin of 30-plus points. Party identity is doing a lot of work, even among Trump voters.”

Here’s a helpful chart:

It’s this group that, in the end, are the pivotal Trump enablers. Senators like Chuck Grassley or, even better Bill Cassidy.

When I see someone like Brandon Herrera or Max Miller pop up in the news, it does not take long to conclude that there’s no point condemning someone who has already lost their soul. Mike Johnson and Bill Cassidy, however, likely think that they have only rented theirss temporarily.

These are the folks for whom calumny has been sparser — but dear God do they deserve it.

1. Side note: it was impossible to find this clip from the original release from Star Wars, and it’s a reminder that George Lucas’s special editions of these films subtracted as much as they added.