Behind the Curtain

Politics has a way of making people stupid. Or just appear so, in any event.

• "If I'm gonna be fair these questions needs to be asked today. Why is the release of the Epstein list always a shit show?" tweeted Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.
• "What's the point of booting out illegals and criminals while somehow becoming a safe haven for the Tate brothers?"

MAGA world erupts over Andrew Tate release, Epstein stunt

Given the fact that he owns a successful media company, it's highly unlikely that Mr. Portnoy honestly doesn't understand what's in play here. The Trump Administration expected the broader Republican voter base to reward it for it's actions. Mr. Portnoy feels the need to project ignorance because the alternative is to look bad. But politics makes everyone look bad, and it couldn't do a better job of it had it been purpose-built to do so.

The Trump Administration may have miscalculated, but the calculations are pretty clear. To the degree that Jeffrey Epstein is considered to have colluded with the "élite," it is the Democratic political, technology and social "élite" that has been accused of aiding and abetting him. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that "The Epstein Files: Phase 1" are going to back that up, even if they needed to be heavily edited in order to do so, and the Trump Administration was expecting that people would start going after prominent Democrats on that basis. Again, that assumption may have been mistaken, but given the way this has been working out in the past, it wasn't unreasonable or irrational. (Why the Judiciary Committee decided to Rickroll people, however, is completely beyond me.)

As for the Tate brothers, President Trump pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, despite supposedly believing that drug trafficking should carry the death penalty, as an open reward to Libertarians who a) voted for Mr. Trump and b) believed that Mr. Ulbricht was being persecuted by an overreaching state. Given that Andrew and Tristan Tate have also cultivated images of themselves as victims, their popularity among right-leaning young men and the fact that unlike the stereotypical American image of a drug dealer, they're White, it's not much of a stretch this time either to see the Trump Administration believing that there were political benefits to being seen in their corner.

Given that a large part of media savvy is understanding how people think, it seems unlikely that Mr. Portnoy wouldn't have grokked this. But the open transactionalism and potential hypocrisy do make parts of MAGA world look bad in the eyes of people who are important to them. (In other words, people other than Liberals/Democrats.) But this is the nature of politics, especially politics in a nation where people tend to care more about the outcomes they want than any level of consistency in the processes employed to attain those outcomes, but are still self-conscious enough about it to not want to be seen that way. An unwillingness to be honest with oneself and others tends to have that effect.

As much as I would love for the American public as a whole to drop the pretense, it's not going to happen. Public piety still demands lip-service to certain precepts, while insisting on sincerity. And so there will be people who make a show of that sincerity, perhaps because they've worked very hard to believe in it themselves. But even when they don't, given the consequences from deviating from the script, I expect that people will still continue to read from it, and express surprise when it's at odds with reality.