Things are beginning to break through.
Of the false narrative of kings, and the logic of latrines.
Longtime readers of the Monday Update will know that I am not a hopeium dealer. If you’re looking for someone to tell you that everything is going to work out, you’re at the wrong Substack.
However, I’ve witnessed some anecdotal evidence that “The People” are maybe starting to realize what is going on.
Longtime readers will remember that there is a figure in my life which I often use as a weather vane to see where the winds of the Trump-lite supporters are heading. Usually, he’s a pretty good indicator for what you see showing up in polling data and focus groups around the same time. Recently, I had another conversation with him, and it seems like some stuff is starting to break through.
Back when Trump was appointing a bunch of wildly incompetent people to Cabinet positions, I asked this person what he thought about Pete Hegseth being chosen to run the Department of Defense. The response? “I’m all for it.”
Even after the first Signal group chat fiasco, this person continued to offer some excuses for Hegseth. But as time has gone on, and more stories about him have piled up, they’ve realized this guy is just bad at his job, and a national security risk.
More importantly, they’ve properly identified why Hegseth hasn’t been fired yet:
“Trump hasn’t fired him yet because he doesn’t want to admit he chose the wrong person. If he does that, then he’s acknowledging that Hegseth was a mistake. And Trump can’t allow himself to look like he made a mistake.”
Other conversations with this individual have revealed that they don’t think Trump has the best economic advisors either, and that maybe some people in the administration are getting played by the Russians.
Now look. I’m not saying the this person has abandoned the Trump train. Overall, there is still a sense that they think that Trump is trying to make America strong again, or whatever. The realization that some of these people working for Trump are incompetent has not yet translated to the idea that the root cause is Trump himself.
However, as the above conversation suggests, they are starting to recognize that Trump’s massive ego lets himself be surrounded by bad people if they flatter him, and it’s his arrogance and inability to admit that he was wrong that continues to allow these bad people to influence how the country is being run.
I think of it a little like how in the late Middle Ages, there was a lot of blaming the figures in the royal court for the troubles of the land, and not the monarch himself. Early on in the reign of Richard II of England, when the peasants were rioting and running roughshod through the countryside and the streets of London murdering a bunch of nobles and officials for various transgressions (real and imagined), the young king actually remained quite popular and was seen as a hero of the common folk. This was actually a pretty common mythology that existed among “The People” across various countries from 14th century England and France to early 20th century Russia - that the King/Czar himself was good and caring and merciful, and any bad policies and cruelties coming from the royal decrees were actually the work of nefarious advisors and evil uncles and the like who were subverting the good will of the rightful ruler.
Eventually, however, if the excesses of tyranny continues, the people eventually catch on to the idea that the guy in charge is just as much to blame as the shadowy courtiers. King Richard II was deposed after the the usual type of royal misrule tipped over into full scale tyranny against political rivals at the end of his reign. Getting rid of Rasputin did not spare Czar Nicholas II from the Russian Revolution - at the end of the day, it was his own incompetence that undid him as well.
Let us hope that things don’t have to get that bad for our citizens to become disillusioned with the hero-worship of their leaders. Unlike medieval England or czarist Russia, our starting place is a democracy, where it is much easier for people (still) to talk freely of their discontent and erode the false narrative the ruler would have them believe.
I’m not saying the string of bad news from Trump administration failures is going to convert the MAGA faithful. But a lot of people voted for Trump because they genuinely believed he was going to “fix things” - and they can see that things are not being fixed. If you can’t yet get them on board with admitting they were wrong about Trump himself, you can probably get them to start realizing that everyone else around him is a shit show. And eventually, they’ll realize that shit only falls one way, and that’s down from the top of the latrine.
I’ll close out this out with something that Will Saletan wrote last week:
I wish more Americans had recognized the evil Trump represented when he ran for president in 2016. I wish they had recognized it when he ran again in 2024. I wish they recognized it now. We would be a better, safer country if more of our people cared enough about the Constitution and the rule of law to reject this tyrant and his party.
But that’s not the world we live in. Kamala Harris tested the proposition that there were enough of us. And she came up short.
We need to reach beyond the audience that shares our values. We need to reach people who don’t agree with us on much but who recognize stupidity when they see it—and are willing to throw the bums out.
See you next Monday.