Murdochstein's monster
How a terrible creation haunts its creators
I have always been interested in how people come to believe what they believe - or in some cases how they come to say they believe what they quite possibly don’t believe. In my book about British Communism, Party Animals (not a bestseller, but the best thing I’ve ever written), the most egregious example of cognitive plasticity was the way British Communists who had worked with exiled Czech communists during the war, and knew them and their families, agreed to subscribe to a series of Stalinist conspiracy theories which ended up with those same past comrades being hanged.
That’s why when the latest indictments against Donald Trump dropped last week - these ones concerning how Trump conspired to try and stop Joe Biden becoming president following the 2020 election, I tweeted-musked-posted-Xed (what do we call it these day, anyway?) “It's going to be fascinating to track the various ways and hot takes by which commentators try to suggest that prosecuting Trump for his crimes is unfair, a mistake, illegitimate- all without ever questioning the evidence.”
A couple of days later my former colleague at London Weekend Television, the BBC and then latterly as a columnist on The Times, Gerard Baker, wrote a column for the paper which was given the headline “New Trump indictment is a dangerous move” and the drophead “To prosecute the former president for his madcap ideas is a misjudgment from which there will be no turning back”.
The first paragraph read:
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that the former president is a seriously bad man, a crook and a threat to the constitutional order of the United States, and to believe simultaneously that the proliferating criminal charges against him are a grave injustice, a dangerous abuse of executive power and, above all, a profound error.
Which sounded to me like an almost perfect expression of what I had predicted so I perhaps rather triumphantly X’ed that Baker had now obliged my minor prophecy . Gerry politely return-X’ed that actually he didn’t fit the bill because “I said: 1. impeachment was the right remedy for Trump's crimes- but for the cowardice of GOP senators he’d have been convicted. 2. The evidence and legal theory on which Smith case rests is flimsy- not a controversial view. 3. Given one and two a criminal case is high risk.” Ok, reader. You judge.
Baker is no head-banger. He’s not the shouty Trump backer you will get to see interviewed on Talk TV by a presenter who thinks you can grow concrete. He had a meteoric career with the FT in the US after I last worked with him, and in 2013 became the Editor-in-Chief of both Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. That is a big,big number in Rupertland. It means invitations, consultations and serious yacht-time. In 2018 Baker was kicked into the commentariat, losing his big editorial role but picking up the Times column and a show on Fox Business News in the US. When you read Gerry you are probably reading Murdoch in one of his more thoughtful moments.
So Baker has a Trump problem. He is one of the Dark Prometheans of the right-wing media whose backing of Trump helped bring America not fire, but chaos. Baker though entered the right (he was once a Labour supporter) via neoconservatism and the free market. Trump has been a superb vehicle for the protectionist right and the old America First strand of isolationism and a terrible champion of the US as a global power. As evidenced by the trajectory and fate of the erstwhile Fox star Tucker Carlson (who boosted Trump in public while privately expressing his contempt for the 45th president, and then ended up falling down his own conspiracy theory rabbit-hole) the closer you get to Trump, the more toxic he turns out to be. See also under “Johnson, Boris”.
The problem is if you’re on the political right in America - and to an extent over here - you have three choices and one of them isn’t really a choice at all. First, you can repudiate Trump, as Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney did. But that may lead to temporary oblivion as your party repudiates you. Second, you can embrace him and be part of his madness. And third you can attempt to straddle him, hoping maybe to slow him down till other candidates arrive, as the Murdochs I think have been trying to do. However one by one their softly-softly Trump alternatives: Pompeo, Haley, Pence, even DeSantis, seem to have failed. And the series of indictments that are keeping Trump front and centre of public attention are not helping any of these people succeed. You might even suspect the wily Bidenites of a plot, if you hadn’t already so heavily invested in the idea of Biden’s senility.
Baker’s Three Propositions
That’s the context. What about the specifics? Baker’s argument about the latest set of indictments consists of three propositions and, I would argue, three characteristic attempts to influence the reader via misdirection.
First proposition: the Jack Smith case is weak because Trump is too mad to be safely accused of knowing what the truth is and the prosecution rests on establishing that he knew he was lying. Or, in Baker’s words:
Proving, by somehow truffling through the rag and bone jumble that passes for Trump’s mind, that he knew the election hadn’t been stolen is not easy. Everything we know about Trump suggests that, whatever the truth, he almost certainly did believe he had won… He probably believes he discovered penicillin and wrote Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 for that matter. Prosecuting him for floating madcap ideas is legally dubious and politically reckless.
Second: the law should be kept out of politics. Or, as Baker put it himself back in April on his show on Fox Business when talking about indictments in the documents case, “It seems to me that this another step down the ladder to countries who use the law to pursue political ends”. In the Times piece Baker writes:
The framers of the constitution created the appropriate forum and sanction for disgraceful presidential behaviour — the impeachment process. Only the political cowardice of most Republican senators — not enough of whom voted to convict him in February 2021 and thereby bar him from ever running for office again — enabled him to get off. But now the Biden administration wants to use the criminal process to carry out the job Congress failed to do.
Third, and related to the other two:
A large number of Americans have been in revolt against what they see, with much reason, as an entrenched elite with control over all the main levers of legal, cultural and economic authority…
And, Baker suggests, that the belief of this “large number of Americans” (who seem only ever to be deployed from one side and in one context) that “the system is rigged” will have been cemented by what they see as lenient treatment of Hunter Biden. Convict Trump (Baker hints) and heaven knows how angry and detached they will become.
So to the first of Baker’s three:
“The rag and bone jumble of Trump’s mind” is a terrible argument, as any reasonably savvy 12-year-old could tell you. If generally applied it would make “but I am a barking narcissist” a defence to any and every crime, from fraud to rape.
But we don’t even need the adolescent for this one. Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr, who was dealing with Trump throughout this period, looking back and having heard the evidence at the Congressional January 6th hearings has said that “at first, I wasn’t sure. But I have come to believe that he knew well that he had lost the election.” In another post I will look at what you might call the “wilful heuristic” - deciding what you will know.