All the Ex-President’s Sycophants
Trump has become the Typhoid Mary of Broken Moral Compass syndrome.
THE WILLINGNESS OF DONALD TRUMP’S fans and followers to overlook his abundant flaws is truly awesome to behold. He seems to exert a Svengali-like influence, pulling into his orbit even people who once could clearly discern his manifest unfitness.
A few days ago in The Bulwark, Charlie Sykes examined the sad case of Ben Shapiro, who went from proclaiming “I will never vote for Donald Trump because I stand with certain principles” in 2016, to endorsing him in 2020, saying, “Whatever damage he was going to do, he’s already done,” to singing Trump’s praises in 2024, long after Trump had demonstrated that there was plenty more damage and dysfunction that he could produce. Like attempting a coup and calling the January 6th rioters “patriots” and those incarcerated for their crimes that day “hostages.” And being charged with 91 felonies. That sort of thing.
Then there is the small matter of Trump’s public proclamations that he will behave like a dictator if re-elected, a disconcerting prospect that Shapiro has tried to brush off. He recently argued that people who “want Donald Trump not to screw with the elections anymore” should vote for Trump, because he is constitutionally barred from serving a third term and will by then have, as Jonathan Chait wryly put it, “gotten it out of his system.”
What is happening in cases like these? How can a rational mind go from recognizing the obvious to denying it? How can Ben Shapiro not see how this diminishes him, intellectually and morally?
I looked at the article Shapiro wrote in March 2016. He said then-candidate Trump stood for “targeting of political enemies” as well as “nastiness toward women and tacit appeals to racism and unbounded personal power.” He noted that Trump “opposes all conservative principles” and argued that conservatives should hold out for someone worth voting for. He addressed head-on the criticism that this might lead to a Hillary Clinton win, saying that outcome would be better than “diluting conservatism into the vacillating, demagogic absurdity of Trumpism” and turning it into “the crypto-racist, pseudo-strong, quasi-tyrannical, toxic brew leftists have always accused it of being.” Shapiro beat his chest and thundered:
I will not be complicit in that. I stand against the establishment that sowed the seeds of Trumpism. I stand against the Republican Party that insists that victory matters more than principle, because victory without principle isn’t just meaningless, it’s counterproductive to my belief system.
Four years later, in October 2020, Shapiro proved he was right about the corrosive effect he thought a Trump presidency would have on conservatism, by showing how low his own standards had fallen. In a video posted to social media, Shapiro said he was wrong about Trump on policy if not on character. He offered this blanket defense: “You don’t have to like Trump’s character, you don’t have to love his Twitter account to vote for him. You don’t have to approve of the crazy or bad things that he says or the way he often acts.”
Shapiro, whose first choice for president in 2024 was Ron DeSantis, has now endorsed Trump, saying “It’s time for the party to coalesce around the guy who is going to beat Joe Biden.” No sign of “certain principles,” or any at all.
NONE OF THIS IS EXCEPTIONAL. Trump brings lots of people to their knees, seeking his forgiveness for the bad things they’ve said about him in the past, often after he has ridiculed and humiliated them.
I have sought out explanations for this behavior. Perhaps the best I’ve found is that Trump occasions a kind of Stockholm syndrome, in which those around him come to identify with their abuser. But when it comes to political and media players, there may be an altogether different malady at work, which I’ll call Broken Moral Compass Syndrome.
Take the GOP candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Tim Scott, who threw their hats into the ring as alternatives to Trump only to join him on stage for his New Hampshire victory speech last Tuesday. Ramaswamy once called Trump’s election denialism “abhorrent” and described January 6th as a “dark day for democracy.” Throughout Ramaswamy’s entire failed campaign, he dutifully refused to offer any criticism of Trump while embracing the things he’d once decried, during one debate calling January 6th “an inside job.”
Now here was Ramaswamy sharing a stage with Trump and blasting his lone remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, for not immediately ceding the nomination to Trump: “What we see right now with her continuing in this race is the ugly underbelly of American politics.”
Scott, who during the campaign offered only tepid criticism of Trump for being insufficiently hardcore in his opposition to abortion and for making “terrible and not helpful” comments about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the October 7 Hamas attacks, stood behind Trump with a big grin on his face during much of the former president’s talk. Trump noted that Scott supported him and not Haley for president, even though she initially appointed Scott to the U.S. Senate, saying “You must really hate her.” Scott stepped to the microphone to declare, “I just love you.” Adam Kinzinger called it “pathetic.”
DeSantis was not on hand for these festivities, but he’s danced the same dance. Trying to position himself as the Trumpier-than-Trump candidate, he criticized the former president for running up the national debt and being insufficiently mean to illegal immigrants, and was, in turn, mercilessly mocked by Trump as “Ron DeSanctimonious,” only to ultimately offer up his groveling endorsement.
Trump does that to people. He’s been doing it for years. Way back in 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina correctly sized up Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.” After January 6th, he pronounced “count me out. Enough is enough.” Privately, he talked about the possible need to evoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove Trump from office. But, as it turned out, Graham had not had enough. He went back to his usual, heavy-duty brown-nosing, even arguing last month that Trump’s assertion of total immunity for any crimes he committed as president is a “legitimate claim.” A year ago he told Fox News: “I know the downside of Trump, but let me tell you about the upside of Trump: There are no Trump policies without Donald Trump.” His moral compass is shot.
Now Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman reveal, in their new book Find Me the Votes, that Graham “threw Trump under the bus” in his testimony to a secret grand jury in Georgia, saying Trump would believe that “martians came and stole the election” if that’s what someone said. (Apparently, Graham even revealed to the grand jury that Trump cheats at golf.)
Let’s take a moment to process what this means. Graham knew in 2015 that Trump was unworthy. He’s known for some time that Trump is deranged. He’ll even say as much behind closed doors. And yet, publicly, he still stands in Trump’s corner. Publicly, he does not even strive to retain a speck of integrity.
THE QUESTION OF HOW TRUMP WORKS HIS MAGIC with the masses is worth asking, and attempts to answer it will fill many a book that will be banned from school libraries. But the question of why people like Shapiro, Ramaswamy, Scott, DeSantis, and Graham (and, perhaps someday, Nikki Haley) fall for it has a much simpler answer: They don’t. They know better. They are all just positioning themselves for their own personal advantage.
Haley, during her still-ongoing but likely doomed campaign, has needled Trump for “wanting to be an isolationist” and for being less than honest: “Just because President Trump says something doesn’t make it true.” Oh, snap! She’s pegged him as someone who often feels threatened and insecure and faulted his need for constant drama, saying, “With Donald Trump, you have one bout of chaos after another—this court case, that controversy, this tweet, that senior moment.”
Trump, meanwhile, has bashed his one-time ambassador for being “extremely disloyal,” referred to her as “birdbrain,” and accused her of being “in the pocket of the open border establishment donors her entire career.” During his New Hampshire victory speech, he vowed to get even with Haley and claimed without giving specifics that Haley would “be under investigation within minutes” if she won. And, in a recent frightening example of his casual relationship with reality, Trump blamed Haley for the events of January 6th, saying she was in charge of security at the Capitol that day; he apparently confused her for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for whom this is also not true. This prompted Haley to say, “we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit.”
And yet, will anyone be surprised if, after this and all the vicious digs yet to come, Nikki Haley ends up on a stage with Trump, cheering him to victory? And if that happens, will Mike Pence be far behind?
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