American politics is often crazy. It can seem absurd at times, with fierce, lively debates and opinions that many outside America would call extreme.
It is also easy to grow cynical about the open role that money plays in politics here (did you know it costs $1 billion to run for president?). But compared to Europe, at least we are open about how our politicians—how shall I put this—respond to financial incentives.
Europeans often try to pretend that their elected officials are as pure as the wind-driven snow.
Above all, American politics is never boring. It is fun, and from time to time downright entertaining.
If you want some real political comedy, watch the fourth debate between the 2024 Republican presidential candidates, which was held on December 6th in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. After the usual warm-up, about 15 minutes into the debate, the candidates began shooting verbal fireworks at each other.
There were times when the candidates made me laugh as if I was watching “Seinfeld” or “Saturday Night Live.”
It was actually good that the candidates escalated their rhetorical exchanges to this level. For the first time since the first debate back in August, they were no longer stick-like figures following written scripts. All of a sudden, the candidates seemed to get out of their focus-group-based personas; perhaps unintentionally, they let us know what they really think about things.
It is rare to see a politician in this mood—or mode. I have had the opportunity to sit down with, talk to, and reason with numerous elected officials, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate. I have had meetings with many presidential candidates, often in less formal settings. They all have one thing in common: they are extremely good at maintaining a bland but likable professional attitude.
Therefore, it is all the more interesting to meet the ‘real’ person behind the candidate. It can be a very revealing experience—and in my experience, it is almost always a positive one. It is refreshing to see that the man or woman behind the candidate’s face is a warm, genuine person.
It has happened that the glimpse behind the ‘mask’ was not as pleasant as you would have hoped for. I remember specifically one presidential candidate. He turned out to be particularly unsympathetic, and he was pretty good at hiding it behind his candidate persona.
The night after our meeting I prayed that he would never win an election again. To date, he has not…
The candidates that emerged from behind their campaign faces in the Republican debate in Alabama were not unpleasant in any way. The experience was in fact the exact opposite: we got to see the passion, the drive, and the electability—if any—of at least three of the four candidates on the stage.
There were two, in particular, who stood out: Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, did their best to stay relevant through the debate, and especially DeSantis did a commendable job of it. But at the end of the day, Christie and Ramaswamy dominated the scene.
That domination was not necessarily to the benefit of Republican voters, but at least they got to see who these two candidates are. Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who has no prior political experience, worked himself up to an almost angry level in a few intense exchanges with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. He passionately declared his allegiance to practically every political conspiracy known to the American people, including the one that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump.
It is not necessarily a liability for a presidential candidate to believe in conspiracy theories. It has been said that a conspiracy theorist is the guy who is right first. Whether or not that is true about the 2020 election is not something to debate here; suffice it to say that, on the one hand, nobody has proven that Trump actually won the election, and on the other hand there are genuine questions about the integrity of the election itself.
However, that is not the point; what matters is what conclusions the candidate draws from reasoning about conspiracies. Ramaswamy went out on a limb, portraying himself as the ‘truth sayer’ and the person who will not pretend that he believes something he really does not believe.
All in all, Ramaswamy was entertaining, but he failed to make himself credible with his conspiracy rant. That, together with an ad hominem attack on Nikki Haley, showed in generous proportions that he is immature, lacks experience, and suffers from overconfidence. It should make every voter question whether Ramaswamy is a serious candidate in the first place.
Governor Christie was equally passionate, but he came at it from the very opposite angle. A bona fide neoconservative, Christie defended the Republican establishment against Ramaswamy’s every attempt to mock it. Christie did not let any of Ramaswamy’s attacks go unanswered, except for one. In the middle of one of his rants, Ramaswamy made a distasteful comment about former vice president Dick Cheney, calling him a “fascist.” Christie was classy enough to let that one speak for itself.
With that said, Christie was not exactly a rhetorical martial artist. He bulldozed himself through the debate, often coming across as a rough-edged, uncompromising, war-loving neocon. Given his level of passion and commitment during this debate, we can safely conclude that what we saw on the stage in Alabama is genuinely the Chris Christie we would get as president if he happens to make it all the way to the White House.
To that point, he made a strange comment about Donald Trump that raised a few eyebrows. Christie referred to the former president as “the fifth guy who doesn’t have the guts to show up” and—given that nobody had talked about him 17 minutes into the debate—likened Trump to “Voldemort, he who shall not be named.” He then went on to make a rather audacious statement about his competitors on the debate stage and their relations to the former president:
The fact is that when you go and you say the truth about somebody, who is a dictator, a bully, who has taken shots at everybody, whether they have given him great service or not over time, who dares to disagree with him, then I understand why these three are too timid to say anything about it.
Christie is correct in that Trump often takes crude and indiscriminate jabs at people, but to call him a dictator takes the conversation to a whole new level.
I have noted before that Christie has a relationship to Trump that almost looks like the nerd who is envious of the popular kid in high school; now that the popular kid is in legal trouble, the nerd is walking around the school smirking. Is his “dictator” comment yet another way to try to overcome a complex of inadequacy vs. Trump?
I would be inclined to answer ‘yes’ if it was not for the fact that another anti-Trump Republican, Liz Cheney, just recently referred to the former president in very similar terms. In a long, laudatory article in the Washington Post on December 5th, coinciding with the launch of her new book, Cheney explains that she is considering a run for president on a third-party ticket.
She also warns
that Trump could transform America’s democracy into a dictatorship if he is reelected; anticipating, she said, that he would attempt to stay longer than his term.
This is a startling comment, especially from someone who—often with merit—accuses Trump of using excessive rhetoric.
Having followed Liz Cheney’s political career closely for ten years, I have built up a lot of respect for her. I know her as an intelligent and patriotic woman with integrity. I have previously expressed my significant disagreement with how she handled her position on the January 6th Commission, but that has not substantially changed my respect for her. (Name one politician who has not lied to further his or her own career. I’m waiting.) I also happen to agree with her criticism of Trump for referring to his political adversaries as “vermin.”
At the same time, unless she has irrefutable evidence to back it up, her suggestion that Trump would turn America into a dictatorship goes beyond the limit of what can reasonably count as a civilized political debate. Now that Cheney is hinting at what most of us have known since she left Congress in January 2021, namely that she is going to run for president, she will be held to the same high standards that she wants to hold former president Donald Trump to.
From this viewpoint, Cheney’s allegation that Trump would become a dictator, conspicuously echoed by Chris Christie, compels her to answer a few questions. If she is to be trusted with the same job that she is trying to keep Trump out of, we voters need to know that her judgment is more informed and more dispassionate than that of the former president.
In so many words, we need to know that we can trust her to not turn America into a dictatorship.
1. What exactly does Liz Cheney mean by a dictatorship? Conventionally, the term refers to a political system where a supreme leader, or a council of supreme leaders, can govern a nation without ever being challenged by political opponents. For this to happen, the dictator would have to end elections, close—or at least make useless—the legislature, and subjugate the judiciary to the point where it rules in his or her favor at all times. Is this the kind of government that Cheney thinks Trump will create?
2. How exactly does Liz Cheney envision that Trump would become a dictator? If elected president again, he cannot simply decree that Congress is to be closed. He would need a formidable force to execute his orders. Does Liz Cheney think that Trump would—let alone could—order the U.S. military to seize Capitol Hill and close down Congress? What evidence does she have to back up this formidable accusation?
3. What about herself? Liz Cheney has just written a book about oath and honor, which is the actual title of the book. At the same time, during her participation in the January 6th Committee, she was part of a cover-up of more than 40,000 hours of video evidence that, according to those who have had time to watch it, clearly disproves the official narrative that the events of January 6th, 2021, was an insurrection against the United States government. There were criminal acts committed, but no insurrection. Does Cheney consider this cover-up to be compatible with a presidential candidate who can hold the highest elected office in the country, and do so with respect for the constitution, the rule of law, and the fairness and integrity we all expect from our president?
These are genuine questions for Liz Cheney. If she can provide respectable answers to all of them, she will have earned a significant amount of credibility as a presidential candidate. If, on the other hand, she does not answer them, we have to raise serious questions about how much higher on the moral scale she can position herself in comparison to Trump.
It is important for Cheney to respond to these questions. I cannot remember any time in American politics when a serious presidential candidate has accused another serious candidate of having dictatorial ambitions. Maybe Cheney sees Trump as such a different candidate that she thinks the accusation has merit—but if she does, she owes the American people a thorough explanation.
We await her answers.
Anti-Trumpers: “He Wants To Be Dictator”
Photo: Oscar C. Williams / Shutterstock.com
American politics is often crazy. It can seem absurd at times, with fierce, lively debates and opinions that many outside America would call extreme.
It is also easy to grow cynical about the open role that money plays in politics here (did you know it costs $1 billion to run for president?). But compared to Europe, at least we are open about how our politicians—how shall I put this—respond to financial incentives.
Europeans often try to pretend that their elected officials are as pure as the wind-driven snow.
Above all, American politics is never boring. It is fun, and from time to time downright entertaining.
If you want some real political comedy, watch the fourth debate between the 2024 Republican presidential candidates, which was held on December 6th in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. After the usual warm-up, about 15 minutes into the debate, the candidates began shooting verbal fireworks at each other.
There were times when the candidates made me laugh as if I was watching “Seinfeld” or “Saturday Night Live.”
It was actually good that the candidates escalated their rhetorical exchanges to this level. For the first time since the first debate back in August, they were no longer stick-like figures following written scripts. All of a sudden, the candidates seemed to get out of their focus-group-based personas; perhaps unintentionally, they let us know what they really think about things.
It is rare to see a politician in this mood—or mode. I have had the opportunity to sit down with, talk to, and reason with numerous elected officials, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate. I have had meetings with many presidential candidates, often in less formal settings. They all have one thing in common: they are extremely good at maintaining a bland but likable professional attitude.
Therefore, it is all the more interesting to meet the ‘real’ person behind the candidate. It can be a very revealing experience—and in my experience, it is almost always a positive one. It is refreshing to see that the man or woman behind the candidate’s face is a warm, genuine person.
It has happened that the glimpse behind the ‘mask’ was not as pleasant as you would have hoped for. I remember specifically one presidential candidate. He turned out to be particularly unsympathetic, and he was pretty good at hiding it behind his candidate persona.
The night after our meeting I prayed that he would never win an election again. To date, he has not…
The candidates that emerged from behind their campaign faces in the Republican debate in Alabama were not unpleasant in any way. The experience was in fact the exact opposite: we got to see the passion, the drive, and the electability—if any—of at least three of the four candidates on the stage.
There were two, in particular, who stood out: Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, did their best to stay relevant through the debate, and especially DeSantis did a commendable job of it. But at the end of the day, Christie and Ramaswamy dominated the scene.
That domination was not necessarily to the benefit of Republican voters, but at least they got to see who these two candidates are. Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who has no prior political experience, worked himself up to an almost angry level in a few intense exchanges with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. He passionately declared his allegiance to practically every political conspiracy known to the American people, including the one that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump.
It is not necessarily a liability for a presidential candidate to believe in conspiracy theories. It has been said that a conspiracy theorist is the guy who is right first. Whether or not that is true about the 2020 election is not something to debate here; suffice it to say that, on the one hand, nobody has proven that Trump actually won the election, and on the other hand there are genuine questions about the integrity of the election itself.
However, that is not the point; what matters is what conclusions the candidate draws from reasoning about conspiracies. Ramaswamy went out on a limb, portraying himself as the ‘truth sayer’ and the person who will not pretend that he believes something he really does not believe.
All in all, Ramaswamy was entertaining, but he failed to make himself credible with his conspiracy rant. That, together with an ad hominem attack on Nikki Haley, showed in generous proportions that he is immature, lacks experience, and suffers from overconfidence. It should make every voter question whether Ramaswamy is a serious candidate in the first place.
Governor Christie was equally passionate, but he came at it from the very opposite angle. A bona fide neoconservative, Christie defended the Republican establishment against Ramaswamy’s every attempt to mock it. Christie did not let any of Ramaswamy’s attacks go unanswered, except for one. In the middle of one of his rants, Ramaswamy made a distasteful comment about former vice president Dick Cheney, calling him a “fascist.” Christie was classy enough to let that one speak for itself.
With that said, Christie was not exactly a rhetorical martial artist. He bulldozed himself through the debate, often coming across as a rough-edged, uncompromising, war-loving neocon. Given his level of passion and commitment during this debate, we can safely conclude that what we saw on the stage in Alabama is genuinely the Chris Christie we would get as president if he happens to make it all the way to the White House.
To that point, he made a strange comment about Donald Trump that raised a few eyebrows. Christie referred to the former president as “the fifth guy who doesn’t have the guts to show up” and—given that nobody had talked about him 17 minutes into the debate—likened Trump to “Voldemort, he who shall not be named.” He then went on to make a rather audacious statement about his competitors on the debate stage and their relations to the former president:
Christie is correct in that Trump often takes crude and indiscriminate jabs at people, but to call him a dictator takes the conversation to a whole new level.
I have noted before that Christie has a relationship to Trump that almost looks like the nerd who is envious of the popular kid in high school; now that the popular kid is in legal trouble, the nerd is walking around the school smirking. Is his “dictator” comment yet another way to try to overcome a complex of inadequacy vs. Trump?
I would be inclined to answer ‘yes’ if it was not for the fact that another anti-Trump Republican, Liz Cheney, just recently referred to the former president in very similar terms. In a long, laudatory article in the Washington Post on December 5th, coinciding with the launch of her new book, Cheney explains that she is considering a run for president on a third-party ticket.
She also warns
This is a startling comment, especially from someone who—often with merit—accuses Trump of using excessive rhetoric.
Having followed Liz Cheney’s political career closely for ten years, I have built up a lot of respect for her. I know her as an intelligent and patriotic woman with integrity. I have previously expressed my significant disagreement with how she handled her position on the January 6th Commission, but that has not substantially changed my respect for her. (Name one politician who has not lied to further his or her own career. I’m waiting.) I also happen to agree with her criticism of Trump for referring to his political adversaries as “vermin.”
At the same time, unless she has irrefutable evidence to back it up, her suggestion that Trump would turn America into a dictatorship goes beyond the limit of what can reasonably count as a civilized political debate. Now that Cheney is hinting at what most of us have known since she left Congress in January 2021, namely that she is going to run for president, she will be held to the same high standards that she wants to hold former president Donald Trump to.
From this viewpoint, Cheney’s allegation that Trump would become a dictator, conspicuously echoed by Chris Christie, compels her to answer a few questions. If she is to be trusted with the same job that she is trying to keep Trump out of, we voters need to know that her judgment is more informed and more dispassionate than that of the former president.
In so many words, we need to know that we can trust her to not turn America into a dictatorship.
These are genuine questions for Liz Cheney. If she can provide respectable answers to all of them, she will have earned a significant amount of credibility as a presidential candidate. If, on the other hand, she does not answer them, we have to raise serious questions about how much higher on the moral scale she can position herself in comparison to Trump.
It is important for Cheney to respond to these questions. I cannot remember any time in American politics when a serious presidential candidate has accused another serious candidate of having dictatorial ambitions. Maybe Cheney sees Trump as such a different candidate that she thinks the accusation has merit—but if she does, she owes the American people a thorough explanation.
We await her answers.
READ NEXT
No Whites, Please.
French Prime Minister François Bayrou: Portrait of an Eternal Centrist
Realism Vindicated