Shameless, All the Way Down
I would not believe Donald Trump if he told me he was lying.
Mehdi Hasan’s memo on Zeteo today asks, “Is Tulsi Gabbard the Most Shameless, Desperate Member of the Trump Cabinet?” He acknowledges it’s stiff competition:
There’s Liddle Marco, who sold his soul so he could disappear into not doing any the multiple jobs — Secretary of State, National Security Adviser, US Archivist, USAID Administrator — for which he’s manifestly unequipped and unqualified.
Also in the running: JD Vance, who (like Rubio) once likened Trump to Hitler. Can someone help me understand why it’s only Democrats who are mocked for going full-reverse? (“I was against it before I was for it,” seems to be OK with the GOP, as long as “it” is their grip on power.)
Robert F Kennedy, Jr, wasn’t a fan until he was offered the chance to fulfill his ambition: wreck the entire public health apparatus of the United States. With measles roaring back, can polio be far behind?
And of course Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard herself, who once denounced the January 6 rioters and those who encouraged them as domestic enemies.
I’d say there are plenty of other worthies, too: Pete Hegseth, for example, whose fabricated tough-guy persona comes off as trying too hard not to look weak — and instead comes off as cluelessly, hopelessly out of his depth. Or Kash Patel, who prefers cosplaying an FBI field agent to his actual desk job of running the FBI.
There’s no shortage of shallow, vain, shameless, desperate, and weak people in this administration. Lack of basic competence is a job requirement, along with a willingness to abase yourself so the boss can imagine he looks good. For my money, though, the most shameless and desperate character — primus inter pares — is Donald Trump himself.
Trump has, after all, shown himself to be utterly without shame. If you can’t acknowledge that after his ten years in politics and fifty in the public eye, then you either haven’t been paying attention or you are lying to yourself (and to everyone else). He is an inveterate, instinctual, and thoroughly unrepentant liar. If given the choice between a lie and a simple truth, Trump will always lie. When caught out he will double down and deny that he ever said it, and when confronted with irrefutable evidence he will insist that it’s an AI deep fake. When over the weekend he posted a racist meme on his pathetic social media platform, he let it stay up for hours; he let his press office blame an unnamed staffer (at 2 in the morning?); and when asked about it directly he said both, “No, I haven’t seen it,” and “No, I posted it, it wasn’t a mistake.”
Trump is also desperate: to stay out of prison, and to remake reality in his own twisted image. Desperate to deflect blame, avoid responsibility, and live in the continued glow of his own imagined greatness. He would like to be in the pantheon of great American presidents: Washington (first president, reportedly could not tell a lie); Lincoln (preserved the Union and abolished slavery); FDR and LBJ (the New Deal and the Great Society). But his only play here — since he is incapable of building anything — is to demolish it all: presidents from FDR to LBJ might have created the post-war world order, but Trump can — and will — burn it down to cement his place in history. That, and rename every building in sight for himself.
A memorial to FDR was dedicated more than fifty years after his death. A case can be made that a physical monument was unnecessary. The true legacy of a president — or a man — isn’t where his name is chiseled in stone, it’s the ways his life positively touched and improved others. It’s the New Deal bureaucracy; it’s the Great Society programs; it’s the determination to land on the moon and fire the imaginations of a new generation.
Trump’s determination to erase it all is evidence (if any were still needed) of his contempt for everything but himself. The small people around this small man reflect no values of their own, only his cruel and malignant self-centeredness.