Proving My Point, Sadly
Very early in 2016, when I stepped into the midst of the rapidly evolving Trump cult at American Thinker (where I had been a successful and popular contributor for several years) to deliver my first few missives on the folly and danger of supporting an ignorant vainglorious self-promoting sociopath in the Republican presidential primaries — I know, when you state it directly this way it seems a bit self-evident, but such is the reality of arguing with cult followers — I expected to incur the wrath of many, including some longtime readers. Perhaps at that time I had not fully divined the strength of the idol’s hold on his fans, and therefore imagined that some of these formerly sensible people might be reasoned out of their initial emotionalism if only one could get through the wall of collective enthusiasm temporarily blocking access to their intellects.
Needless to say I was wrong. I wrote often and with vigor on this topic during the very early days of primary voting, which is to say weeks before there was any real sense of inevitability around Trump’s candidacy. But if I am to be honest, I must say that I do not believe I turned one single Republican voter away from Trump. Trump’s celebrity, his wealth, his low-minded brazenness, and the blessing of legitimacy bestowed on Trump by several very influential “conservative media” figures, most notably the unprincipled showman and unrivalled king of talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, simply sealed off millions of minds from reasoned examination and collegial discussion forever. Trump was God, all other candidates were Satan, and this implicit opinion was, if anything, only more pronounced in those who, to justify their rejection of every principle they ever held, adopted the convenient self-absolving mantra, “Of course he’s not perfect, but….”
With regard to the American conservative media itself, there were a few notable holdouts who attempted to take the position I was taking at American Thinker: “Surely people who already respect my ideas, who have regarded me as a principled and trustworthy voice for years, will give my opposition to Trump a fair hearing; surely if they listen, I can slowly turn some of them away from this insanity.” And these big-name conservative media figures, being vastly more popular and influential than I, had every reason to assume such a confident position about their ability to turn hearts and minds away from Trump.
The most prominent of these popular conservative media figures to make their stand firmly against Trump during the 2016 primaries were Mark Levin and Glenn Beck. Both, incidentally, publicly cited my articles during those months to support their respective cases against Trump with my specific facts and reasoning. By the end of 2016, both men, like the candidate they preferred, Ted Cruz, had fallen (in all senses of the word) fully into the Trump fold, meekly and humiliatingly. Such is the price of ego, of vanity, of needing an audience, of prioritizing one’s reputation and fame over one’s eyes and reason. In short, such is the price of lacking the character and maturity to put one’s intellect and “the truth as one sees it” above everything, i.e., to refuse to sacrifice your mind to vested interests — which, by the way, is no great feat, but merely the minimum condition of being a man. Neither Beck nor Levin, though already wealthy beyond all practical need, could muster this much pride.
Beck, who held out longer, had already destroyed his reputation and career by the time of Trump’s first election, and no amount of abject grovelling before the cult (whose members had once been the core of his enormous audience) could salvage his well-established career as an upper echelon talk radio host.
Levin’s case is more complicated and annoying. For, despite all his screaming and his Trump-style reliance on nasty nicknames, he was certainly the most politically serious of all the major conservative radio hosts, a former Reagan administration official who truly understood the significance of that last great American president, and continued to stand by Reagan’s principles of limited government, free markets, and individual sovereignty at home, buttressed by a foreign policy based on peace through strength and open support, direct or indirect, moral and material, for those under attack or threat by America’s major global adversaries — a foreign policy that appreciated the essential connection, particularly in the age of weapons of global reach, between national self-interest (the proper motive of any country’s government) and moral clarity.
However, under the pressure of attacks from longtime listeners who had adopted the cultish position that anyone who refused to support Trump wholeheartedly had to be condemned and rejected unconditionally, Levin slowly began to moderate his anti-Trump position. The cracks were visible: Levin was positioning himself to be able to claim that any future shift into the Trump camp was consistent with everything he had ever said — which it most certainly was not. Eventually, he weakened his Trump criticism — which, as noted above, had previously been strong enough for him to have found my written arguments compatible with his own views — to the point of insisting that Trump was his clear “second choice” after Cruz, which was tantamount to an endorsement, in the sense that (a) Cruz’s campaign was already on its last legs by that point, (b) Trump during this time was engaging in the most vulgar and morally unsavory personal smears against Cruz, such that a supposed Cruz supporter giving him “second choice” status at that point was basically papering over the fundamental and necessary case against Trump being a man rational or moral enough to lead a country, and (c) any open statement that one would happily support Trump were he the candidate effectively gave his candidacy full legitimacy as one worthy of a “Reagan conservative’s” vote.
Since the 2016 election, I have basically ignored Levin, as his sellout was complete. He threw himself wholly and enthusiastically at the mercy of the cult leader, and has dutifully accepted his milk and cookies — a Fox News show, invitations to Mar-a-Lago, and an occasional public shout-out from the social media account of God Himself — and resigned himself (though surely without admitting it is resignation) to being a pale shadow of the fiery Reaganite who would have rejected (and once did reject) almost everything Donald Trump stands for, domestically and internationally, with every fiber of his former pit-bullish being.
And so it is with slightly snarky amusement that I read today of Levin’s mild and mewling attempt to distance himself from his owner’s recent moronic tirades about Volodymyr Zelensky, a president, however flawed, who displays more genuine manhood every single day than Trump has accumulated in his seventy-eight space-wasting years (or has it been Eternity?).
Trump says Ukraine started the war, just as Putin says. Trump calls Zelensky a dictator who rules without elections (a rich accusation from a man who overtly and knowingly attempted to scrap his country’s constitution to overturn a legitimate election loss, and who whipped his idiot cult into murderous hatred toward his own vice president simply for the latter’s daring to stand up for that constitution), just as Putin says. Trump says Zelensky doesn’t want peace because he is unwilling to lose his “gravy train,” just as Putin says. Trump and his administration acolytes say that Ukraine must give up substantial portions of its land, must never join NATO, and should receive no more American weapons — just as Putin says. Trump treats Zelensky as the owner of a business against which Trump is engaged in a hostile takeover, and insists that Zelensky will lose everything if he is unwilling to sign over his country’s resources to “pay for” America’s assistance, as though strategic military alliances to stave off aggressive tyrants in the name of mutual security were mere commercial enterprises in which one side is buying support and the other is selling it. (As though Ukraine’s using those American resources to massively deplete the Russian army and military apparatus — and dying on the battle field in large numbers to achieve this — did not constitute “paying their fair share.” The level of moral shamelessness one must adhere to in order to support or abide by Trump’s rhetoric this week would have seemed unfathomable among adult human beings before this era of the Trump cult. Blindness this bold makes one embarrassed to be a member of a species that could produce such dross.)
Trump, not to put too fine a point on it, is talking and behaving like a willing and admiring agent of Vladimir Putin, just as he has been doing consistently and with abandon since the 2016 GOP primaries.
In response to this, Levin has somehow managed to gather up the last dusty remnants of his Reaganite heart from around the floor of his greed- and popularity-rotted soul to issue something vaguely like a rebuttal to his owner, though one spoken weakly and apologetically so as not to earn too harsh a jerk of his chain.
From an article in The Hill:
Levin said Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, is to blame for the war and defended its president and Parliament.
“The [Ukrainian] Parliament — with all parties in the Parliament — support what he’s doing. They’re trying to survive,” Levin said on his Wednesday broadcast.
“Ukraine did not invade Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine.”
“Elections have consequences, so be it. But I want to make sure the facts are on the table and you, the American people, draw your own conclusion,” he continued.
“MAGA doesn’t support Putin,” Levin added.
After ever-so-politely but accurately ascribing proper blame for the war, directly but meekly contradicting everything Trump is saying these days, Levin dares to push just a little bit farther, before surrendering all his credibility yet again.
First, the daring push: “Elections have consequences, so be it. But I want to make sure the facts are on the table and you, the American people, draw your own conclusion.” In other words, Trump won the election, and he is anti-Ukraine and anti-Zelensky, but Levin wishes to make sure “the American people” have the facts and draw their own conclusions. But how could anyone not living under a rock for the past three years fail to know the relevant facts about this war by now? To whom is Levin addressing this bizarre call to acknowledge the obvious? The answer of course is that he is addressing his own audience, which is to say millions of Trump-loving cultists who have bought into the same Putin propaganda their idol believes, and for the same reason: Their souls have been trapped for the past nine years in a media and political echo chamber that is created, owned, and operated by the Kremlin. And Mark Levin himself, a former proud Reaganite, has been one of the most loyal servants of that echo chamber, and has helped to legitimize and sanction it repeatedly, through every one of Trump’s blatant atrocities against America’s institutions and moral premises, since 2016.
And then the pitiful attempt at a face-saving apology to the master and return to the fold: “MAGA doesn’t support Putin.” Yes it does, Mark. It does and it has and it will. Always. Because MAGA — a slogan that is also the most absurdly obvious lie in the history of The Ministry of Truth — exists for Putin’s benefit. Trump is merely proving that today, trying to make up for the time he and his hero lost during the Biden administration. When Trump says, as he does incessantly, that this war would never have happened if he had been president in 2022, he is merely saying, with the thinnest veil, that he would have ensured that Putin got what he wanted without having to invade — the “security guarantees,” the absorption of the “Russian territories,” and a strong anti-NATO, Putin-normalizing voice in the White House.
For Levin to say MAGA is not pro-Putin is merely to say that Levin himself is still squeamish about the idea of appearing pro-Putin by continuing to support a pro-Putin president who was elected by a grassroots populist movement that overwhelmingly approves of that president’s pro-Putin position and is therefore hoping for Ukraine’s defeat and surrender. It is not just Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other profiteering blowhards of the MAGA fringe, Mark — although you would do well to ask yourself why such obviously money-obsessed showmen would think it in their best interests to take such a vocal anti-Ukraine stand throughout this war, as though they had reason to think this stand would play well with the cult. It is Senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul, among others, former Tea Party stalwarts who have been consistently spouting Putin talking points and smearing Zelensky in exactly the same terms Trump has taken to using in recent days. It is all the best-known MAGA congresspersons who rant and scream against Ukraine, and attend pro-Putin rallies.
Every one of the millions of Americans who once belonged to the Tea Party movement, but who has, like Levin, sold his mind to anti-Constitutional Trump-cult populism for the past nine years, knows very well — it is impossible not to know — that Trump is a Putin admirer and lapdog, and that Trump’s friendliest and most popular media voices have been increasingly fervent in attacking Ukraine’s right to defend herself, along with denying that America has any legitimate interests in helping her fend off Putin’s practice-run attack against a massive European neighbor.
In spite of all this, Levin, begging reality to match his broken soul’s rationalizing necessities, has the gall to insist that “MAGA doesn’t support Putin.” Sorry, Mark, but if MAGA has anything to do with Donald Trump, his administration, his leading allies in Congress and the media, and his personal brand of populist demagoguery, then it most certainly does support Putin.
