JVL: Should you give Trump a chance?

I don’t know about you, but I’m still recovering from Sunday night.

Inexplicably, my 8-year-old son has become a Patriots superfan. He’s basically a miniature version of Tommy from Quinzee. And all through the first three quarters he kept insisting that the Patties could still come back. And I, being from Philadelphia, tried to explain the facts of life to him: That no one comes back from a 25-point deficit in the Super Bowl. That the Pats weren’t going to score 19-unanswered points in the fourth. That Atlanta was just the better team that day. That becoming a sports fan means inviting heartache and misery into your world on a regular basis because the tragedies outnumber the happy-endings by 10-to-1. Even for great teams.

That the lesson I took from growing up as an Eagles fan was that for some people there are no happy endings. Ever.

And then that happened. I don’t know what they’ll call it when Super Bowl LI moves from being mere news to mythology. The Comeback? The Houston Miracle? The Boston TD Party?

All I know is that it undermined all of the lessons I was trying to teach my kid and set him up for impossible expectations for the rest of his sports life. Imagine your worldview if the very first time you watched a Super Bowl was that game? It’s all downhill from there.

In a sense, I pity him. But perhaps it’s best this way. The cold of reality will hit all the harder once Brady retires and Belichick is called back to the Netherworld. Then my son will be ready to experience the true desolation and futility of sports fandom. The hate will flow through him. And I shall teach him how to pack a snowball around a D-cell. It’s his patrimony.

We’ll get to the important political stuff down below.

It’s time to play "Grade the Democrats." Four prominent Democrats--who are coincidentally all thinking of running for president--have delivered ambitious policy speeches in the past three weeks. Responsible citizens will want to know what is on their minds (without having to actually sit through the speeches themselves). Using the foolproof technology of the Pericleator, a device that measures speech quality, The Weekly Standard has evaluated the addresses.

—David Brooks, “Grading the Democrats,” from our February 4, 2002 issue.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips: On Federer and Nadal at the Aussie Open.

**

Rex Weiner: About Steve Bannon’s obsession with Titus Andronicus.

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David Kaiser: On Trump, Strauss, and Howe.

Here is one possibility: The Democratic party in reality is the cartoon version of the Republican party stood on its head, with cold-eyed self-serving economic interests using the so-called social issues to stir up the rubes while they go about seeing to their own paydays and pensions.

The economic interests attached to the Democratic party are fairly easy to identify: people who work for government at all levels. You may come across the occasional Ron Swanson in the wild, but when it comes to the teachers’ unions — which are the biggest spender in U.S. politics — or the AFSCME gang or the vast majority of people receiving a taxpayer-funded paycheck, the politics of the public sector is almost exclusively Democratic. And what they care about isn’t social justice or inequality or diversity or peace or whether little Johnny can use the ladies’ room if his heart tells him to — they care about getting paid.

—Kevin Williamson on the Democratic party’s contradictions, February 2, 2017

I’ve known David Frum almost since I first came to Washington. A mutual friend of ours once described him thusly: “David is one of the handful of people in this town whose intellect is genuinely intimidating.” That appraisal always struck me as pretty much correct.

That’s not to say that Frum is personally intimidating—he’s very much a good guy. But rather that whenever he says something I disagree with, I begin my assessment with the assumption that I am likely mistaken.

Which is what happened last week. Frum participated in an Intelligence Squared debate in Washington arguing against the following proposition: We should give Trump a chance to succeed as president.

I know what you’re thinking: How could you be against giving Trump a chance? Heck, how could you be against giving anyone a chance? In any situation. “Give the other guy a chance” is practically part of the American credo. Shouldn’t Trump skeptics (like myself) at the very least, as Clive Crook says during the debate, not close our minds “to the possibility that he might do some good things”?

But as I said, Frum is worth taking seriously even when you think he’s totally wrong.

I’d encourage you to watch the entire debate—it makes for highly interesting viewing. (The actual debate starts around the 20:00 mark.) But if you don’t have an hour to devote to it, let me sum up Frum’s chain of argument.

1) When is it that you can stop giving a president a chance? The phrase “give Trump a chance” is a bit nebulous, but what it boils down to is something like this: “We assume his intentions are good; we give him the benefit of the doubt; and we want to work with him first, rather than oppose his program.”

So when is it reasonable to retreat from that position and consider the president an opponent who should be countered? Conservatives might ask themselves when they reached that position vis a vis Barack Obama.

Frum’s argument is that surely at some point, between Inauguration Day and Election Day, citizens have to reach a verdict on their view of a president. So what’s at issue isn’t “You have to give a Trump a chance because it’s the right thing to do.” But rather, “You should not reach any conclusions about Trump just yet.”

In other words, according to Frum, what we’re really haggling over here is timing. I find that part of his argument entirely persuasive.

2) With that behind him, Frum moves on to claim that with many presidents, the important information needed to decide whether or not to give them a chance lies in the future. But that with Trump, everything we need to know about him lies in the past.

It’s an interesting argument. And though I’m not totally convinced by it, I don’t dismiss it, either. And conservatives who would dismiss it ought to, again, think about how they regarded Barack Obama in the early days of his administration.

3) Is there anything to be gained by not giving Trump a chance? This is where Frum makes his strongest, and most disturbing, points. He maintains that we will not find out the true extent of Russian involvement in the 2016 election—or the true state of Trump’s financial interests—unless we are in an oppositional position. He says that “giving Trump a chance” necessarily means that those two mysteries will never be solved. These are solid, practical arguments.

4) But Frum’s philosophical argument is even more compelling. We must storm-proof our democratic institutions, he says. Frum recalls an early description of America’s Constitution as “a machine that would go of itself.”

Yet “it’s not a machine,” he insists. “It’s not a mechanism. This phrase ‘checks and balances’ that you hear? There’s no mechanism. There are no checks. There are no balances. There are only people. Meeting their responsibilities as citizens. Or failing to meet their responsibilities as citizens.”

That’s stern stuff. And if you’re a Constitutional conservative—as opposed to simply a Republican team player—it’s impossible to ignore.

It’s especially difficult to dismiss because Frum is not an alarmist. In his long essay on Trump in this month’s Atlantic, Frum says that “fascism” of the 1930s variety is no longer the threat. Donald Trump is not Mussolini. Instead, modern economics and the media have created a world in which democratic institutions across the world are being undermined by a soft authoritarianism. The worry is not that America becomes Il Duce’s Italy, but rather Victor Orban’s Hungary.

As I said, I’m not entirely convinced by Frum. But he’s always worth taking seriously.

But enough politics. The new episode of the Substandard podcast comes out tomorrow. We talk about the Super Bowl and sports movies. As always, you can subscribe on iTunes here or Google Play here. You’ll thank me for it.

Best,

JVL