BREAKING! Many People Genuinely Think Donald Trump Is Unfit For Office

Chait observes that Greenwald’s ongoing defenses of the alt-right faction of the Trump administration and minimization of Russian interference in the election inevitably involve assumptions that opposition to Trump must be based on support for neocon foreign policy priorities:

The opposition to Trump naturally shares a wide array of motives, as would any wide-ranging coalition. Greenwald’s column consistently attributes to those opponents only the most repellant beliefs. He doesn’t even consider the possibility that some people genuinely believe McMaster is a safe, responsible figure who might help dissuade the president from doing something terrible.

Greenwald emphasizes, “Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, went to the pages of the Washington Post in mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump with unbridled scorn, saying what he hated most about Trump was his refusal to consider cuts in entitlement spending (in contrast, presumably, to the Democrat he was endorsing).” It is true that Trump promised not to cut entitlement spending. Greenwald’s notion that this promise placed him “presumably in contrast” with Hillary Clinton ignores that fact that Clinton also promised to protect these programs.

This actually concedes too much — Clinton promised to expand Medicare and Social Security, a break with Beltway orthodoxy Glenn ignores because he has a narrative that Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal harridan no set of facts could possibly refute.

The passage about entitlements appears deep in Paulson’s op-ed, which Paulson began by lambasting Trump for encouraging “ignorance, prejudice, fear and isolationism,” among other flaws. Greenwald asserts that Paulson identifies Trump’s hostility to cutting entitlements as “what he hated most” about the Republican nominee, but nothing in the op-ed indicates this is what Paulson hated most. Greenwald just made that part up.

The same concoction of motives is at work in Greenwald’s contempt for McMaster and John Kelly, the new chief of staff. The pair of former generals “have long been hailed by anti-Trump factions as the Serious, Responsible Adults in the Trump administration, primarily because they support militaristic policies — such as the war in Afghanistan and intervention in Syria — that are far more in line with official Washington’s bipartisan posture,” he writes.

Note that “primarily.” Greenwald is arguing that news coverage treating them as competent managers, as opposed to the amateurish nationalists, is propaganda by the elite plumping for greater war in Afghanistan and Syria. He is implying that if Kelly and McMaster took more dovish positions on Afghanistan and Syria, their public image would be altogether different. Greenwald supplies no evidence for this premise. In fact, McMaster’s most acute policy struggle has been his efforts to maintain the Iran nuclear agreement, one which has placed him on the dovish side, against an established neoconservative position. Greenwald does not mention this issue, which fatally undermines his entire analysis.

Greenwald’s argument that if you defend McMaster’s actions within the Trump administration it’s because you love American military intervention so much you want to marry is based on similar logic to arguments that it’s contradictory for Democrats to complain about James Comey being fired in order to obstruct justice while also objecting to Comey’s election tampering. But there’s no contradiction at all. You can think competent people are preferable to incompetent people ceteris paribus without subscribing to the competent person’s worldview. But, as Chait says, Greenwald’s view of politics is a Procrustean bed in which every dispute is viewed through the lens of the allegedly unique evil posed by the American security state.