Nikki Haley Has Chosen to Be a Tool for Authoritarianism
JVL is always right.
Sarah, Tim, and I taped TNL late last night so you’d have some hot Super Tuesday reax to listen to / watch today. Keep your eyes peeled. It’ll be out shortly.
Heads up: No Thursday Night Bulwark livestream tomorrow because of the SOTU.
1. JVL’s Law
Here is Nikki Haley, a few minutes ago, ceding the Republican nomination to a man who drove the American economy into a ditch, mismanaged a pandemic resulting in hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths, attempted a coup, was found guilty of sexual assault in a court of law, and is currently facing 91 felony charges:
It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party who did not support him, and I hope he does. This is now his time for choosing.
She hopes that Trump earns the votes of Republicans.
Now is the time for his choosing.
If there’s been a more cowardly statement over the last year, I can’t think of it. Haley refuses to acknowledge that she was supported by a broad coalition of voters—Republicans, independents, and Democrats. She claims that she is rooting for Trump to win over only the Republican voters who supported her. And instead of leading and standing for the Constitution, she fobs off all questions of agency to Trump. It’s not time for Nikki Haley to choose. Oh, no.
It’s time for Trump to choose.
How clever! How Machiavellian! See how she preserved her own viability by seeming to put Trump in a box and making it about his choices?
Let’s state JVL’s Law again: Any person or institution which is not explicitly anti-Trump will become a tool for authoritarianism eventually.
That’s where Nikki Haley landed this morning. She has resigned herself to being a useful tool for Trump’s ongoing authoritarian attempt.
Perhaps her voters will make a better choice.
On that subject, I want to pass on the statement Joe Biden made immediately following Haley’s speech:
It takes a lot of courage to run for President – that’s especially true in today’s Republican Party, where so few dare to speak the truth about Donald Trump. Nikki Haley was willing to speak the truth about Trump: about the chaos that always follows him, about his inability to see right from wrong, about his cowering before Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign. I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.
We all know this is no ordinary election. And the stakes for America couldn’t be higher. I know that Democrats and Republicans and Independents disagree on many issues and hold strong convictions. That’s a good thing. That’s what America stands for. But I also know this: what unites Democrats and Republicans and Independents is a love for America.
Joe Biden gets it. He always has. If there’s one man in America who has understood from the jump what Trump is and the danger he represents, it’s Biden.1
2. Right as Rain
As of 10:00am this morning, Donald Trump is formally the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential contest.
I want to take a moment to remind you why you read this newsletter. I hope you’ll indulge me.
JVL on December 17, 2019: “Trump Is Forever.”
Trump owns the GOP in a way that is unprecedented in the modern era.
In the Republican party, Trump is forever.
JVL on October 8, 2020: “This is your Republican party now.”
Go write this down: After November 3, the price of admission to GOP politics is going to be an insistence that, actually, Donald Trump did win the election and/or would have won if it hadn’t been stolen/rigged.
That’s going to be dogma for everyone in Republican political life.
JVL on March 1, 2021, “Nikki Haley Needs an Act of God.”
Here is the plain truth: If Donald Trump runs in 2024, he will be the Republican nominee. Full stop.
JVL on July 20, 2022: “The Democrats Made Them Do It.”
Here is the real reason Republican elites and members of Conservatism Inc. are so wrapped around the axle about Democrats boosting their crazy candidates:
They need to blame someone for the outcomes they don’t like. But they can’t blame Republican voters.
Because if you acknowledge that we are living in a moment where some very large portion of Republican voters are illiberal, then you are forced into some uncomfortable choices. You can either:
Make your own accommodation with illiberalism; or
Start supporting Democrats, however imperfect they may be.
You can, perhaps, understand why this choice so vexes many people who have the Republican party and/or Conservatism deeply entrenched in their personal identity.
For them, it’s easier to throw their hands in the air and insist that real Republicans aren’t as bad as Mastriano and Cox—it’s just that the Democrats made them do it.
JVL on November 16, 2022, “Are We Really Going to Run 2020 Again?”
(1) The conservative elites are not in charge. If you only went by what you read on Twitter, you’d think that Trump 2024 was dead in the water. Everyone in professional conservative world says he’s toast.
This assertion is an overreaction based on motivated reasoning.
These elites no longer lead the party. (Maybe they never did?) In the current version of the Republican party, power emanates from the voters. And if the voters want Trump, then all of these people saying No Thank You to Trump today, will eventually fall in line when/if he’s the nominee. . . .
(2) DeSantis is not a star. I think this matters? The idea of Ron DeSantis is very attractive. But while the actual, flesh-and-blood guy would be acceptable to Republican voters, he’s not going to inspire worship.
Also: He’s not as strong as he looks. Charlie Crist was a tomato can and DeSantis ran just about even with Marco Rubio. Which tells you something about DeSantis's relative strength compared with your replacement-level R.
Look, Mike DeWine ran 9 points ahead of J.D. Vance and no one is saying he’s the Future of the Republican Party. . . .
Florida is a red state now. The DeSantis margin of victory was in line with Republican performance across the state. It wasn’t because he’s Godzilla.
(3) Trump has a series of events coming down the pike which will force Republicans to choose between him and the libs. . . .
We’re going to have a smaller fight over aid to Ukraine. Trump will be against it. The majority of Republican voters are against it now, too. Any Republican wanting to vote for it will be taking sides with the Democrats against Republican voters.
Trump might be indicted. If he is, will Republicans say, “Yes. Donald Trump broke the law and should be punished”? To do so would be to side with the Biden Justice Department. So they will either have to stay completely silent or join Trump’s defense.
In each of these cases, Trump will loudly be on the side of Republican voters while DeSantis’s optimal position will be to stay silent and try to be invisible.
That, my friends, is the value proposition of The Bulwark. We’re here to help you see around corners.
If you’re new here, thanks for joining us and I hope we’ve helped you get smarter. If you haven’t joined yet, I hope you’ll consider becoming a Bulwark+ member today. Good things only exist in the world when we support them.
But before we move on, I want to remind you of one other piece:
I would posit to you that, over the next month, we will be approaching the high-water mark for Trump’s poll numbers.
Trump is finishing a primary campaign that was mostly a coronation. His rivals barely criticized him and when they did, they made sure to stay away from his actual electoral vulnerabilities. This period will culminate with a series of blowout victories for Trump: He will win Iowa by the largest margin of any Republican, ever. He will win New Hampshire. He will beat Nikki Haley in her home state by more than 20 points.1
He will win every single primary and caucus.
And this juggernaut of winning will make Trump seem like a colossus.
But that view is likely to be misleading, because unlike every other contested primary in the modern era, Trump will arrive at the nomination in a pre-campaign state where he has yet to take a punch.
And the reality is this: Do you think Republican voters are likely to become more comfortable with Trump the more they see of him over the next 10 months? I do not. Historically, Trump’s approval numbers have moved inversely to the magnitude of his public presence.
I didn’t get all of this right—we’ll always have Vermont. But I do believe that Trump is at his ceiling because no one has campaigned against him yet, while Biden has had Republicans attacking him nonstop for three years.
Trump is about to take fire for the first time since 2020 and I expect his numbers to behave the way they have always behaved when Americans focus on him.
The question isn’t whether or not they’ll drop. It’s whether or not they’ll drop far enough, fast enough, to prevent him from taking power again.
That’s the work of campaigns. But it’s also the job of the media: To report what’s actually happening.
Let me spell this out for you, because I want to be clear on what The Bulwark does:
We will not shade the truth, ever.
We will always tell you what we really think.2
We will never be neutral on the question of liberal democracy.
This isn’t a place for both-sides, value-neutral reporting. But it’s also not a place for hopeium and happy talk.
3. The Speed White House
I worry that this important Noah Shachtman and Asawin Suebsaeng piece about drug use in the Trump White House is getting overlooked because it’s paywalled and also because it’s a big news week.
Two aspects of the story are worth noting. The first is about just how dysfunctional a scene it was:
If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, 'Are they on drugs?' - the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes.
In January, the Defense Department's inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
The report didn't say why so many of those pills had been given out. But for many who served in the Trump White House, the investigation highlighted an open secret. According to interviews with four former senior administration officials and others with knowledge of the matter, the stimulant was routinely given to staffers who needed an energy boost after a late night, or just a pick-me-up to handle another day at a uniquely stressful job. As one of the former officials tells Rolling Stone, the White House at that time was "awash in speed."
Knowledgeable sources say that samples of the stimulant were passed around for those contributing lines to major Trump speeches, working late hours on foreign policy initiatives, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe, coping with the deluge of media inquiries about that investigation, and so much more. (Trump's campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.)
Modafinil - also known by its brand name, Provigil - wasn't the only controlled substance that Trump officials young and old routinely acquired. "It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this," one source with direct knowledge of the matter recalls.
The anti-anxiety medication Xanax was also a popular, easy-to-get drug during the Trump years, three sources tell us.
That is . . . not optimal? And it suggests an atmosphere in which formal rules were routinely ignored.3
But the second piece of reporting is much more pernicious:
ADDING TO THE CLIMATE OF FEAR was the sense that even private therapy sessions would not be kept private in the Trump White House. The medical unit provided psychological counseling on request. But White House staffers were instructed to be on their guard. One former senior administration official tells Rolling Stone that within the first two years of the Trump presidency, they were warned by a colleague against divulging anything during a private White House medical session that they "would not want to be used against" them. At the time, this source notes, this puzzled the official, who was then told that under Trump, the office had a reputation for being more porous with private information "than you might expect."
The former administration official didn't think much of it at the time. The source shrugged the warning off as mere gossip and moved on. However, according to other individuals with intimate knowledge of the matter, it was hardly an idle rumor. Immediately after counseling sessions, therapists were pressed for information about what they were told.
"They'd say, 'We need you to see this person.' They'd walk me over there. I'd see this person. Then as soon as I got out, they would ask, 'Hey what happened?'" one of these sources tells us. To this source, this was a blatant violation of patient confidentiality. The source would try to be as vague as possible in their responses to the questions, but in the Trump White House, "it was all kind of open kimono," they say.
At the risk of overstating things, this is exactly the kind of practice you see in authoritarian systems. This is real Stasi shirt.
You should read the whole piece and consider subscribing to Rolling Stone to support this kind of reporting. America can’t say it wasn’t warned.
Remember that Biden was desperate to run against Trump in 2016, but was muscled aside by Obama. He thought he was done in politics until he saw the Charlottesville mess. He pegged Trump from the get-go and has always understood that we’re involved in a stakes game.
This means you’ll hear differing opinions and disagreements among writers and readers as we talk through complex subjects aloud and sharpen our thinking, but always with civility.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that an administration in which Dr. Feelgood ran the dispensary would also be an administration that was open to blackmailing foreign leaders and attempting coups.
But it also doesn’t not follow, either.
I do want to give some very mild pushback on the Rolling Stone article's characterization of Provigil/Modafinil as "Speed". I study neuropharmacology and psychology full time and I can categorically state that there is a fairly vast gulf of difference between Modafinil and amphetamines. If the academic bona fides weren't enough - I also have been prescribed both at different points in my own life as my doctors attempted to grapple with a circadian disorder and ADHD. The actual effect of both is very, very different, in my experience.
To the best of our knowledge, Modafinil is not physically addictive, amphetamines are. Provigil will keep someone awake but it will not get them high if taken in excess. Provigil does not promote direct dopamine release in the way that amphetamines do. Both have legitimate medical uses. Both are serious drugs that should not be prescribed lightly. I am not surprised that a presidential administration would rely on provigil to keep staff members going, it's very useful for that but really the fact that the White House at any point has had to rely on drugs to accomplish the people's work speaks to the ludicrous workload of any given White House staffer and the need for considerably more people to handle that workload, without pharmaceutical assistance being necessary.
To be clear, the article does elaborate on Provigil's method of action and makes clear some of these differences. The FAR more worrying thing is how cavalier the Trump White House was with prescribing benzodiazepine medications like Xanax. These are very powerful, very effective anti-anxiety sedatives that must never be used as long term solutions to anything because they are phenomenally addictive. What's more, not only are they addictive, their withdrawal syndrome is one of very few withdrawal syndromes that can actually be lethal in and of itself. That isn't even true of opioid withdrawal. Having gone through Benzo withdrawal myself after chemotherapy (it is also used as an anti-nausea/anti-emetic medication for people in chemo) I can say that I would not wish that ordeal on anyone. Tapering safely off those medications took longer than my fight against cancer did.
The human brain is a tremendously powerful and relatively poorly understood entity. We know a lot, but what we know is dwarfed by the scale of what we still do not know. These are some of the medications you want to be most judicious in prescribing - they are useful, they do work, but they have profound drawbacks that likely eclipse what we already know.
Marx said history repeats first as tragedy, then as farce. Something that amazes me is just how many ways Donald Trump embodies the second coming of so many of the Presidential tragedies of the Baby Boomer era. Nixon was a man who used resentment and greed to win, a crook unpunished who escaped out the back door. Trump has all Nixon's worst qualities, and none of his intelligence or reverence for the office of President, and so we get All The Presidents' Men by way of Yes, Prime Minister. Bill Clinton was a genuine Aristotelian tragedy; a man whose appetites drove him to overcome a terrible childhood and become President, only for that lack of control to lead him to some horrible acts against vulnerable people. Trump too is a man who made it to the Presidency purely because of his appetites; his overwhelming desire for respect and love drove him to pursue the Presidency, and then his inability to control that desire meant that he was singularly unable to navigate a pandemic in a way that would make people feel the sort of psychological comfort that could have helped him cruise to reelection. Even now, he and the Republicans are reenacting the tragedy of Hillary in 2016; party leaders convinced that they have the only possible candidate, an alternative pulling 20-40% who is ignored by those leaders Even though it should be a giant, flashing warning sign, and an opposite party running a guy who most people think can't possibly win, even though he's actually better at campaigning than his detractors give him credit for.
I firmly believe that the current Trump drama is the denouement of the Baby Boomer era. Catharsis is coming.