The politics of shamelessness: a survival tactic from Trump to party loyalty

Every politician operates with a certain degree of shamelessness It s practically in the job description As they try to address 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 WE ARE STILL NOT GETTING THE STRAIGHT STORY ABOUT ALLEGED BIDEN DECLINE KURTZWhatever 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 specific flexibility particular 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 measure grounds only to be blocked by the courts Now suddenly he had done a and was trying to save the app despite a congressional ban Trump reported 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 sought to position himself as its savior This of syllabus 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 fruitful TRUMP RATTLED BY 'NASTY' 'TACO' QUESTION FROM REPORTERHe doesn t get hung up on what he mentioned the day before or an hour before He can go from expressing sympathy for Joe Biden s prostate cancer determination to saying he doesn t feel sorry for Biden at all He can go from blaming the Ukraine war impasse on Volodomyr Zelenskyy to ultimately 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 consistently testing limits on strategy 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 in fact did vote for the billion before I voted against it referring to military aid to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan The Republican ads promptly portrayed the 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 DEMOCRATS ABANDON TRADITION AS PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFULS OPENLY DECLARE WHITE HOUSE AMBITIONSThe MAGA-driven story would have been on television every 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 electoral contest It was a blatant lie and a big story The other day Trump got angry when a CNBC reporter required him about his TACO nickname Trump Invariably 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 accomplishment His supporters like that because the markets usually shoot up though the turmoil clearly shakes up the global financial sector 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 latest through AOC gets a few 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