My One and Only Trump Moment
Mark Meadows, a member of the falsely named House Freedom Caucus — falsely because, beginning in 2016, they speedily and collectively transformed themselves into the Congressional Demagogue Pom-Pom Girls — has, like almost everyone else who siphoned fame and glory (read shame and ignominy) out of the former president’s gasbag, written a book to salvage his reputation and rake in some easy money. According to Business Insider, Meadows “writes” (please!) that Trump was “extremely put off,” during the confirmation hearings for supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, by Kavanaugh’s endless half-boastful, half-apologetic mooning about how much he likes beer.
So here, to go all antithetical for a moment, I must say “Three cheers for the Orange One!”
As I have noted before, Trump’s distaste for drinking is the one and only point on which I see eye to eye with him, and I am pleased to see that his nominee’s teary-eyed paean to the great love of his life — drunkenness — struck the same chord with Trump as it did with me. Meadows claims that Trump seriously considered withdrawing the nomination due to Kavanaugh’s shameful weakness during the hearings. All things being equal, he probably should have followed through on that consideration; however, knowing all too well the optics victory the left would have claimed from it — “Trump concedes to the MeToo movement” — I also understand why he did not.
Kavanaugh’s pathetic display of alcohol dependency, literally crying in the U.S. Senate over his lifelong, and seemingly almost life-defining, pleasure in drinking a lot of beer, as though this sudsy sentimentalism were some sort of certification of moral purity — “I cannot be the bad man they say I am, for I am a true blue all-American beer guzzler!” — was a strong indication of the man’s lack of that firmness of principle and intransigence of “sober reasoning” that ought to be expected of a supreme court justice. This weakness for a popular vice might have no bearing on his suitability for various jobs or minor responsibilities, but for a man tasked with deliberating and choosing dispassionately and with full attentiveness in matters of great national significance, well, let us just say that I would not have wished to nominate a man who regards his heavy beer drinking habit as a special badge of character and proof of decency.
Of all the appointments and nominations that Trump turned on and/or overturned during the course of his one term as president, this is perhaps the one and only instance regarding which I have to concede — wonder of wonders — that Trump’s disgruntled second thoughts were warranted.
