In a classic “Seinfeld” episode, George Costanza’s new girlfriend abbreviates her dialogue by saying “yada yada yada,” often eliding the most pertinent parts of a story. George adopts the habit, too, and he and his girlfriend end up yada yada-ing over “little” details like criminality and an untimely death. It’s hilarious and patently absurd — the conversational equivalent of burying the lede in journalism.
This is what a lot of self-identified heterodox political commentators do when they talk about former President Donald Trump. You can see it often on “Real Time With Bill Maher” panels, hear it on any number of “politically homeless” podcasts or read it daily on scores of Substack sites. These ostensible independents view “the establishment” — which includes everything from centrist Democrats to anti-Trump conservatives to non-right-wing media — as the true threat to freedom and the American way. They might concede Trump’s vulgarity is distasteful or that he’s sometimes incompetent and often incoherent, but when it comes to confronting his incorrigible criminality, corruption, racism and misogyny, and his relentless dishonesty on matters both trivial and existential, they typically yada yada past the gory details and pivot into pathological whataboutism and both-sidesism.
I could list so many more of his outrageous, inexcusable words and deeds, but it wouldn’t matter. Yada yada yada to all that, Trump’s useful centrists will argue.
In just the past 30 days, Trump has helped whip up a racist, xenophobic furor against Haitian immigrants in Ohio based on lies; suggested that people who criticize Supreme Court justices should be imprisoned; and mused that police should be allowed free rein to commit wanton violence on retail thieves over the course of “one real rough, nasty” day. I could list so many more of his outrageous, inexcusable words and deeds, but it wouldn’t matter.
Yada yada to all that, Trump’s useful centrists will argue. Only the humorless, Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted could possibly take the former president’s rhetoric seriously: “That’s just Trump being Trump, shooting from the hip, flying off the handle, being funny in his uniquely Trumpian way that triggers the hated establishment.”
Last week, Judge Tanya Chutkan released special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page brief laying out evidence that he says shows Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was a private matter and not in the capacity of a sitting president. (The Supreme Court ruled this summer that a president acting in his or her capacity as president is essentially immune from prosecution.) It’s all there: Trump knew he lost the election very early, but Smith’s filing says he engaged in numerous criminal acts to overturn it anyway. Smith’s brief says he also encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, refused pleas from his own staff to call for calm, and after being told by an aide that Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger thanks to his own instigations, he reportedly replied, “So what?”
As I’ve previously written, if Trump hadn’t ever given his riot-inciting speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, he still attempted a self-coup through alleged fraud, intimidation and threats of violence. But high-profile MAGA-adjacent “independents” have spent the past four years yada yada-ing away the whole thing as an unfortunate and brief act of mob violence. Some have even suggested it might have actually been a trap laid by Democrats.
So don’t expect to hear anything louder than throat clearing about the Smith brief (if even that) from Trump’s useful centrists. They’re still having a fit over Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s stupid, discrediting lie about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests (he was most likely in Nebraska at the time).
As someone who is actually without a political tribe — in that I don’t neatly fit into any ideological box and feel no need to carry water for either party — I’ve concluded that Trump is, by leaps and bounds, the greater threat to American democracy and rationality.
And yet, I still say go ahead and nail Walz on his lies. Make him squirm. Hold Vice President Kamala Harris’ feet to the fire on any of her untrue or misleading statements, too. Make all power-hungry politicians feel uncomfortably accountable when they mislead the public.
And then look back at Trump. On the ledger of politicians’ falsehoods, do statements like Walz’s mistruths about whether he was in China 35 years ago (he claims he “misspoke”) even remotely measure up to Trump’s attempted self-coup or his racist incitements against immigrants?
As someone who is actually ‘politically homeless’ ... I’ve concluded that Trump is, by leaps and bounds, the greater threat to American democracy and rationality.
At the vice presidential debate last week, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, refused to answer the direct question of who won the 2020 election. You’d think a true political independent — no matter how much they’re triggered by the “woke” or the “establishment” — would see Vance’s nonanswer as a craven cop-out, given how thoroughly adjudicated the legitimacy of the 2020 election has already been. But not if you’re Free Press columnist Abigail Shrier, who lamented during the debate, “Dear Lord, more January 6 questions?!”
Heaven forfend a candidate for the second-highest office in the land, whose running mate tried to steal the previous election, be asked about it. We nonpartisans really ought to just move on, I guess.
Many anti-anti-Trumpers yada yada’d through 2022’s Jan. 6 Committee hearings — where remarkable video evidence and testimony from ex-Trump White House officials (including Trump’s own daughter) and other Republicans laid bare Trump’s grand conspiracy to overturn a free and fair election. Trump and his allies have also spent the past four years plotting to do it again — and thanks to state-level election overhauls and a sympathetic judiciary, they’re much better equipped to do so now. Also poisoning the discourse are pro-Trump billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who publicly spread the fiction that Democrats are cheating — already, they say — to win the 2024 election. Axios recently reported, “Through public remarks, Truth Social screeds and more than 100 preemptive lawsuits, Donald Trump is assembling a detailed catalog of excuses for rejecting the results of the 2024 election — if he loses.”
Yada yada yada, Walz lied about parts of his biography.
I used to think Trump-sympathetic nonpartisans suffered from a failure of imagination. Ever since Trump’s escalator descent in 2015, warnings that Trump could do unthinkable things (like try to steal an election he lost, then preemptively discredit the next one) have been dismissed as the panicked bleatings of basic establishment Chicken Littles.
But Trump is a known quantity in 2024. He was president. He’s been the GOP nominee three consecutive times. He’s been convicted of felonies and found liable for sexual abuse. He’s threatening to use the Department of Justice to jail his political rivals.
At what point do Trump-sympathetic independents think it’s OK to take Trump at his word when he promises to do horrible things — like once again pre-emptively attempting to overturn an election based on nothing?
Go ahead and nail Walz on his lies. Make him squirm. Hold Kamala Harris’ feet to the fire on any of her untrue or misleading statements, too.
To be clear, I’m not here to police anyone’s political preferences. It’s perfectly respectable to be a nonpartisan who thinks Harris and Democrats are worse. But you can’t credibly make the case that Dems are worse by blithely waving away Trump’s most egregious offenses.
I’ve unequivocally criticized left-wing excesses and liberal threats of censorship, as well as Biden’s and Harris’ records. And yet, I’m reminded of the late legendary libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who despite leaning right his entire adult life, explained his vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016 on the basis that “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
Yes, you can reject political tribalism and still choose a side in an election. But if your criticisms of Trump, MAGA and Republicans are rare, trivial and half-hearted — and you denounce Trump opponents (including those exiled from the center and the right) as TDS-afflicted liberals — you’re not politically tribeless and you’re not fearlessly independent. You’ve got a tribe; it’s Trump’s, and you’re a reputation sanitizer for his presidential campaign.