Trump’s political shamelessness may be his greatest strength with MAGA voters

Every politician operates with a certain degree of shamelessness. It’s practically in the job description.

As they try to navigate in howling political winds, they regularly have to justify changing their positions. Maybe the country’s mood has shifted. Maybe it’s a matter of party loyalty. Maybe they’re bowing to pressure from big donors.

And maybe they’re being hypocritical because something they opposed during the Biden administration is now perfectly fine in the Trump administration.

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Whatever the circumstances, it’s shameless to offer an explanation that everyone knows is garbage. 

And they have to do it with a straight face. They can’t very well say, Donald Trump is going to make sure I’m primaried if I don’t go along on this one. So they offer the transparently bogus explanation.

That, you could argue, is the nature of politics. You need to have some flexibility, some wiggle room. 

In one of my two interviews with President Trump last year, he tried to explain why he had totally flipped on TikTok. After all, he had spent his first term trying to ban the Chinese-owned company on national security grounds, only to be blocked by the courts. Now, suddenly, he had done a 180 and was trying to save the app, despite a congressional ban.

Trump told me he changed his mind because outlawing TikTok would help Facebook, which he considered a greater threat. 

I didn’t buy it. He had concluded that TikTok was incredibly popular, especially with younger people, and wanted to position himself as its savior. This, of course, was before Mark Zuckerberg began cozying up to Trump, such as by making a million-dollar donation to his inaugural.

Trump may have the biggest shameless gene of them all–and that’s part of why he’s successful. 

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He doesn’t get hung up on what he said the day before or an hour before. He can go from expressing sympathy for Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis to saying he doesn’t feel sorry for Biden at all. He can go from blaming the Ukraine war impasse on Volodomyr Zelenskyy to finally condemning Vladimir Putin to calling it Biden’s war.

Ross Douthat has a smart take on this in his New York Times column:

“The willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters — reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits (on policy, on power) but also generally willing to pull back.”

So MAGA voters trust Trump to go pretty far–but not too far?

That brings them into John Kerry territory: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” referring to military aid to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Republican ads immediately portrayed the 2004 presidential nominee as a flip-flopper. Kerry later allowed that he had been “inarticulate.” 

It’s useful to think about flipping the script. In the media furor over Trump’s spate of pardons, the president gave one to the leader of a violent Chicago gang, Larry Hoover, a drug dealer who’s been serving six consecutive life sentences for killing a man. 

Largely symbolic? Sure, because Hoover will remain in prison on state charges. Doesn’t matter.

If Biden had done that, conservative voters would have gone haywire. How dare he side with a murderer? Does Biden have no regard for human life? The man who was killed doesn’t get a second chance.

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The MAGA-driven story would have been on television every 10 minutes. With Trump, it was a blip, barely a story at all.

Naturally, Biden’s hands aren’t exactly clean on the pardon front. He repeatedly promised not to pardon Hunter, then did exactly that after the election. It was a blatant lie and a big story. 

The other day Trump got angry when a CNBC reporter asked him about his TACO nickname, Trump Always Chickens Out, based on the chatter on Wall Street. He called the question “nasty,” this from the king of bestowing derogatory nicknames (see Joe, Sleepy). 

Poultry metaphor aside, the president does frequently delay draconian tariffs, conduct quick negotiations and declare victory. His supporters like that because the markets usually shoot up, though the turmoil clearly shakes up the global economy.

As Trump bounces back a bit in the polls, says Douthat, “with a different president…you might say that this recovery happened in spite of the White House’s various backtracks and reversals (plus various rebukes from the judiciary). But with Trump it’s more apt to say that it’s happened because of these setbacks and recalibrations. Seeing Trump both check himself and be checked by others is what an important group of voters expect from his presidency. They like that Trump pressures institutions they distrust or dislike, from official Washington to elite universities, but their approval is contingent on a dynamic interaction, where he accepts counterpressure and retreats.” 

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One reason Trump gets away with all this is that the Democrats don’t have a national spokesman. Tim Walz, the VP flop, toying with running for president? People like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer aren’t breaking through. AOC gets some good jabs in on social media, but she’s not even a member of the leadership. 

You also have to credit Trump’s political skills. He doesn’t have the slightest fear of being shameless.