A month ago in the Washington Post, not long before the Colorado mess, neoconservative icon Robert Kagan wrote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” We may accuse Kagan — husband of Victoria Nuland, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, and co-author (with Bill Kristol) of the “benevolent hegemony” theory of world conquest that was the real reason for America’s Iraq invasion — of much. We can’t accuse him of not knowing history. The graphic was a bust of Caesar, perfect for a six thousand word opus on stopping Donald Trump at all costs, whose sniper-scope subtext was as subtle as the Bullwinkle float at the Thanksgiving Day parade. It could have been headlined, “Where’s Hinckley When You Need Him?”
Kagan kept trying to suggest a biological solution to the Trump problem without actually saying it. The word count can get hot quickly when you’re trapped in that kind of mind-loop. Here he tries to express the idea, “We gotta stop Trump before the election”:
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Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective… What limits [his] powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent.
If elected, Kagan went on, it would mean:
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action?
What’s the irony level of a clarion call for a Caesarian “intervention” appearing in the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post? Can that level of hypocrisy be quantified?
This is the paper that re-branded itself as America’s living bulwark against authoritarianism after Trump’s election, covering its new slogan like the naming of a Pope. They ran multiple self-referential stories about the significance of their decision, and paid CBS $5.25 million to introduce football fans to “Democracy Dies in Darkness” via a preposterous Super Bowl spot, which was narrated by Tom Hanks with the leaden gravitas of the U/North ad in Michael Clayton. It showed scenes of Normandy, Selma, and Apollo 11, then a montage of journalists who died for truth, before declaring, “Because knowing makes us better”:
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This was after Trump’s inauguration, and right after his conniption-fit inspiring “The FAKE NEWS media… is the enemy of the people” tweet. The Post’s message couldn’t have been clearer: we’re willing to die for the truth, and under Trump, we may have to. (After Kagan’s piece, the message seems to have been reversed, but who’s counting?)
Poor Bob Woodward was dispatched to tell the slogan’s origin story on Face the Nation. It’s revealing in hindsight. We learned from Jeff Gerth’s epic Columbia Journalism Review story on Trump-Russia coverage that Woodward tried to warn Post reporters away from the “garbage” Steele Dossier, only to discover a “lack of curiosity” on the subject from staff. It’s therefore an eyebrow-raiser that Woodward took this early moment to note that “Trump is right” that “some of these stories have been out of bounds,” but “the key is to get the big things right.” It was a muted plea, but at a time when it was heresy to suggest Trump could be right about anything, even partially, Woodward was showing a measure of the courage the Post was bragging about. No one caught it.
