It was a target-rich weekend for those of us who collect the loose and loony aspects of modern conservative rhetoric. Of course, with the former president* holding an outdoor rally in a pasture outside Las Vegas with the temperature clearing 100 degrees, there were bound to be some very large nuggets to be gathered. Put simply, he was plainly crazy with the heat. Actually, I suspect they could have put up a podium at Ice Station Zebra and he would’ve still been just as crazy. This was the height of it. You can almost hear the synapses in his brain sizzling and snapping like spark gaps between every two words.
“It must be because of M.I.T., my relationship with M.I.T., very smart, I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there… by the way, a lot of shark attacks lately…. Do I get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark?”
I’ll get back to you on that.
Meanwhile, over at National Review, longtime house organ for white supremacy, John Yoo emerged once again from the foul mists of memory to sign on wholeheartedly with the former president*’s Vengeance Over America ’24 Tour. Of course, as he once did with the hypothetical crushing of the hypothetical testicles of hypothetical children, Yoo gussied up his bloodthirsty partisan hackery with some quasi-academic gobbledygook.
“Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you. In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents.”
It takes a remarkable amount of sloppy arrogance to both misquote and misuse what we all learned as the Golden Rule, and to do so in service of an argument justifying retaliatory prosecutions on behalf of a half-mad crook of a president*. It appears in both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke.
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. —Matthew 7:12
And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. —Luke 6:31
In neither case is Jesus justifying acts of vengeance. Yoo must have Jesus Christ confused with The Count of Monte Cristo. The quote from Matthew, which is the better-known of the two, is telling the followers of Jesus to treat other people the way they themselves would like to be treated.
(And it’s not an exclusively Christian axiom. Two famous Jewish scholars, Hillel and Philo of Alexandria, wrote of something similar. The sentiment also appears in writings by Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, and Seneca.)
American conservatism is such a slide zone at this point, it’s no wonder that the former president* picked it up so cheaply. He always did go for distressed properties.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
Read More: Trump Spent the Weekend Warning a Crowd in the Las Vegas Desert About Shark Attacks
