A Vox article, The MAGA stars freaked out by their own movement -- The right’s leading lights are looking for anyone to blame for the right’s growing extremism — except themselves, discusses an interesting observation about some of the MAGA elites who question or occasionally criticize Trump. Despite their vast cluelessness and utterly closed minds, a few elites (former elites actually, they're now in the MAGA doghouse) are experiencing a flicker of recognition that briefly flashes through their minds. Vox quotes this from US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) in 2017:
“They weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
Well, that's all well and good, but Massie nonetheless supported Trump for the most part. However despite his support, the “craziest son of a bitch” took Massie down in the last primary in Kentucky. Trump was in a snit because of Massie’s stance on the Epstein files and the Iran war. Trump endorsed Massie’s challenger in KY, and the libertarian got blown right out of his seat in congress.
The Vox article points out that at no point, during or after the race did Massie publicly leap** to the logical next step of reflecting on how his own stupid, morally rotted actions contribute to the “craziest son of a bitch” problem. Massie’s years of vocal support for Trump, and his anti-democracy Tea Party politics, helped turn the GOP into the authoritarian political chaos agent he once criticized and whined about. What an effing blind idiot.
** Well, not much of a leap really. Actually no leap at all. However, a gigantic ego helps keep Massy's mind free of inconvenient reasoning like “Geez Louise, I supported the craziest son of a bitch, but is it possible I could bear some responsibility for my own mistakes? Nah, not possible. Joe Biden and Hunter's laptop did it, not me.”.
Vox summarizes it like nicely this:
Massie is the poster child for a particular kind of conservative now emerging in Trump’s second term: influential Trump allies who have sounded the alarm about the right’s direction, but who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their own actions in the Trump era may have had something to do with it.
The hot dog thing
Vox points out that this phenomenon is somewhat like a real-life version of the famous sketch on Tim Robinson’s show I Think You Should Leave. There, a hot-dog-shaped car crashes into a storefront and a man in a hot dog suit says, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” The “hot dog men” are almost all men are easy to spot. Their painfully slowly growing ranks says something serious. Namely, America's authoritarian radical right-wing political machine is acting in ways that even some of its most aggressive and radical voices are slowly coming to recognize as dangerous or worse. None of the radical authoritarians in the GOP shows any ability to contain or redirect the most tyrannical, most corrupt forces they unleashed.
The core argument Vox is making is pretty simple. A few of the radical right elites have come to a point where MAGA's continuing radicalization has begun to spin out of their control. Those elites thought they were steering the ship, but their ship is the Titanic and they don't know how to steer. Of course, admitting one's error is tough to impossible. admitting culpability for something bad happening is even harder.
In politics, all movements have had “hot dog men” moments of desperately blaming anyone but themselves for their mistakes. At present, a growing number of hot dog men in the right’s top ranks are still in blame-shifting mode. But, bad as it is, that's significant an improvement over still being in the three monkeys mode where a few, maybe 2% of MAGA elites are firmly nested. They're very busy feathering their nests, while either ignoring evil or supporting it.
The few clueless MAGA elites
Most MAGA elites know exactly
who and what they stand for, i.e.,
themselves, corruption, tyranny & cruelty
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