The cowardly pundits who would end America

Entire swaths of right-wing media privately loathe Donald Trump — yet publicly praise him. Their double-talk could be our demise.

A few weeks ago, I was on one of the cable news networks, sparring with a “conservative” commentator who’s the perfect metaphor for today’s GOP: he mocked Trump during commercial breaks but fawned over him when the cameras were rolling.

This has become depressingly common. So many of the president’s loudest TV “supporters” today are people who once warned that he was a danger to democracy — who fought his rise when it was fashionable to do so — only to fold like a cheap suit the moment he won and refashion themselves as warriors for the cause. Most of them didn’t evolve, they just inverted.

This particular commentator exemplified the species. He’d worked in Republican politics and opposed Trump back when opposing him was a badge of seriousness. Then, each time the winds shifted, he shifted with them until, eventually, he emerged as a full-throated MAGA firebrand, complete with the indignation and bravado that only the late converts seem able to muster.

Oddly enough, I find it easier to get along with the real diehards. The true believers, who genuinely think Donald Trump is going to save America from socialism or globalism or whatever other animating menace has convinced them to his side, are often surprisingly kind, polite, even earnest. They actually believe what they’re saying.

The cowards are the hardest to deal with.

In green rooms and on set, they tend to be especially rude to anti-Trump conservatives. Why? Well, in my experience it’s because they don’t like a mirror held up to themselves. They don’t like sitting next to someone who did the right thing even though it was the hard thing — or who blew up their career, their social circle, their financial security to tell the truth. Your presence alone becomes an accusation of the lie that they are living.

So they lash out. They smirk and sneer and posture in front of the cameras.

And that night, I was on set with one of them.

While we were preparing for the show to go “live,” the president was in the middle of another online tirade. Trump was posting incendiary, unhinged bursts on Truth Social, one after another. Off camera, the commentator was openly mocking him. How unstable he seemed. How reckless the language was. Each fresh outlandish post drew another joke or eye roll.

Then the cameras started rolling.

He let his face fall. The joking stopped. And in the very next segment, he vehemently defended one of those same Trump controversies he had just ridiculed. The spin was slick and practiced, and as always, his defense was fierce.

I marveled it at, in a way. His chameleon-like adoration of a president — who he clearly loathed deep inside — was practiced to the point of effortlessness and reflexivity. Yet the pundit and I had common backgrounds. For many years, we were a similar brand of conservative and both recognized the grave danger a wannabe dictator like Donald Trump posed to the country. The pundit realized, however, that staying in the opposition would not be a profitable path.

These days there were two glaring differences between us, I thought. I wasn’t getting paid to sit there and commentate, and my conscience didn’t flip flop along with the political fortunes of the man in power.

More to the point, people like the pundit aren’t just an irritating species of coward. They’re dangerous. And history is merciless on this point.

While authoritarianism tends to be built by the fanatics, it is stabilized and mainstreamed by people who know better and comply anyway. In Nazi Germany, many of the most “respectable” editors and cultural figures privately ridiculed Hitler as a vulgar madman, but they publicly laundered each new escalation of repression as sensible governance. They reassured folks that emergency powers were temporary, that purges were stability, and that the criticism of racial laws was overblown.

But the examples go well beyond that. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, you read about writers who whispered their horror in kitchens and bedrooms yet who still performed loyalty in print or on stage, helping to create the suffocating illusion that everyone believed the lie. In Fascist Italy, elite journalists mocked Mussolini in salons while hailing him in headlines as the only man who could restore order. Then there’s Vichy France. There, conservative columnists who despised the Nazis nonetheless urged “calm,” “cooperation,” and “discipline,” thereby convincing a shattered public that compliance was some kind of patriotism.

The phenomenon continues today. In modern Russia, television hosts who send their children abroad and stash their wealth overseas still go on air nightly to justify war, repression, and murder on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Across decades and different regimes, the pattern becomes apparent. These cowardly pundits binge on noxious cocktails of ambition and fear in order to save themselves and protect their own interests; in doing so, they convince everyone else to get drunk on the lies. Misery loves company, right?

So back to this particular pundit. People like him are helping to normalize Trump’s lawlessness and soften state-sponsored cruelty. They put a slickster’s defense on behavior that should never be made to seem routine, as if to say: It’s a little wild, but it’s fun, isn’t it? All the while, democracy is bleeding out in the background.

But this sickness runs deeper than the cable news defenders of a wannabe dictator.

Just this week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said aloud what Washington has whispered for years. Many of her elected Republican colleagues mock Donald Trump behind his back by making fun of the way he talks, deriding his actions, and ridiculing the movement they now publicly worship. And yet she watched them transform overnight once he consolidated power into slavish devotees. In her words, they went from making fun of him to “kissing his ass.”

She also described the machinery of fear that now enforces that obedience. After Trump labeled her a “traitor,” she received a pipe bomb threat at her home and direct death threats against her son. She told Trump. She told the vice president. The response was indifference. And when asked why so many Republicans stay silent, her answer was similar to what many of us have been saying for a decade. They’re terrified of stepping out of line and becoming the next target of a presidential mob.

I wrote about it in Blowback after Trump’s first victory. Walking around the House floor at night was surreal. The same Republicans who’d once equated Trump to an “evil force,” who privately feared he would destroy the party and the country, were suddenly giddy with opportunism the moment he seized the wheel.

“Sure, he’s a dick, but now he’s our dick,” one congressman told me, leaning against a gold railing on the House floor.

The party would benefit from his chaos, the Southerner continued. Left unsaid was the fact that the same congressman had considered rescinding his endorsement days earlier, just before Trump won. That was the bargain. “We know he’s corrupt and dangerous,” they conceded privately, “but now he’s useful.” Sadly, that bargain became the immoral engine of everything that’s followed.

Cowards are more than just sociological curiousity. When they publicly flatter what they privately despise, they make it so much easier for the public to do the same — and to sanction their own repression. The word “normalize” has become overused, but that’s what these people do. They excuse the excesses and make it possible for one man to violate the rights of millions, while convincing the people that it’s for their own good. We’ve heard this story many times. Now it’s become ubiquitous in our country, from green rooms to the halls of power.

To be sure, there are risks to telling the truth. Sometimes the gravest risks. But the people who speak out are quite literally the only hope for democracy to survive the intimidation of an authoritarian. I, for one, would rather spend the rest of my life in a despot’s prison than be the jailer of my own conscience.

Your friend, in defiance,

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