In Defense of Pretexts

Donald Trump has attacked foreign lands and condoned right-wing street violence routinely over his two presidencies. At times his actions have generated sustained controversy, at other times they’ve disappeared behind new outrages. But with the exception of the January 6 insurrection, we have never understood them in hindsight as inflection points in U.S. politics.

Viewed from one angle, the Saturday night assault on Caracas, followed by his valorization of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, fall neatly into the more crowded category. Gross-yet-familiar abuses dividing our capacity to respond.

But my impression is most people, even many of Trump’s own loyalists, haven’t experienced all this as just another week in Trumpville. They feel more disturbed—or, in MAGA, more titillated—as though a new threshold of wickedness has been crossed.

That’s been my feeling since Sunday morning, for reasons I at first struggled to articulate. But now I understand them a bit more clearly. Achieving clarity entailed winding the clock back to earlier, deadlier, more destructive acts of war or clandestine foreign meddling, and drawing contrasts.

What I came to is this: For my entire adult life, I've watched American leaders justify war and atrocity with lies about democracy and freedom and self-defense. Many of the architects of U.S. interventionism have been breezy cynics, cavalier about violence, happy to visit it on far off strangers to advance corrupt or bloodless ends. That overgeneralizes, but not by much. A war profiteer is more evil than a practitioner of realpolitik in some abstract sense—a distinction that may be of interest to God—but when their interests align, the result is mass destruction that they own jointly. There’s a reason their critics call them The Blob.

They’ve chosen war for reasons morally upright people would never countenance, then justified it in terms meant to assuage them: Domino theory, democracy promotion, nuclear nonproliferation, choose your window dressing.

When Donald Trump wields the same power in superficially similar ways, it’s thus tempting to take comfort in familiarity, or long-burning cynicism. We’ve been looting the third world, including in Latin America, for decades. Meet the new boss, etc. If you believed those old pretexts and false pretenses, you’re a chump.

Well, I didn’t believe the old pretexts and false pretenses. I found them despicable. Yet what’s so alarming to me about the recent dark turn in American politics is the fact that they’re gone.

You might ask: Are these things really worth missing? Aren’t they just symptoms of bad faith? Haven’t you spent the Trump years on a crusade against the scourge of bad faith in right-wing politics.

The answer to all of these questions is yes.

I would of course prefer to live in a world where policymakers and elected officials were scrupulously honest and above board. If that were our condition, we wouldn’t have pretexts, because we wouldn’t start any wars. We might finish them, but we wouldn’t go looking.

Building a world like that should be our north star. But in the world of today—of mixed and rotten motives, where wars of choice happen whether I want them to or not—I’ll take false justifications for bad acts.

If you care about America’s highest aspirations—freedom, equality, self-governance rule of law—the pretexts matter. We can be clear eyed about the people who lay false claim to these ideals, yet still take some solace in their lies, because the lies confirm that the ideals still have power.

Why pretend that a war of plunder is meant to spread democracy or fight communism or defend the homeland, unless you know that the public values certain higher principles, and may revolt if you traduce them? If your true motives are toxic, you have to conceal them, because the people—we the people—are better than you.

This is the tribute vice pays to virtue in the rawest sense, and it is revealing. These are cynical people, many of whom have no place in their hearts for principle or consistency. But if that is their nature, why would they pay tribute to anything? Vice is vice.

They do it because virtue still controls. It’s still the default. Because they haven’t won the masses over to uncut evil.

By dispensing with the pretexts, Trump suggests he thinks he’s overcome that obstacle, worn the public down, made us as malevolent as he is. He still pays some tribute to virtue. He won’t cop to having launched a war. But the theft and subjugation are right there on the surface, without any tributes to virtue.

I think this is what has people so unsettled. Why he has to be stopped preemptively and forced to reverse, or else be run out of office. If he prevails—not just in acting lawlessly, but in doing so nakedly, and without pushback—then it’s over. We become changed.

That’s why I miss the pretexts. It’s also why I take some solace in the fact that his Venezuela “policy” polls poorly. That his menacing of Greenland polls even worse. That the Senate just passed a war-powers resolution meant to foreclose further unauthorized military action. These things matter. They mean we aren’t changed. Yet.