MAGA Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

Back in 1999—the good old days—a Canadian band that called itself Great Big Sea released a wonderful song titled “Consequence Free.” It was a gentle poke at social conformity, guilt, and, yes, perhaps even what was then called political correctness. “Wouldn’t it be great,” the song goes, “if no one ever got offended? Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind?” And then in a soaring plea: “I wanna be—consequence free!” But the group wasn’t trying to be rude: It was looking for only “a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.”

I loved the song (and still do), not least because I always had something of a burr in my saddle about the language policing of late-20th-century political correctness. (I was also pushing 40 at the time and something of a loudmouth myself.) But I knew that I and these charming Canadian fellows were only engaging in wistful thinking about not being too hard on yourself. We were not daydreaming about how great it would be to fire off racial epithets or chest-thump about being Nazis.

How quaint that seems now.

Today, public figures say things that would have resulted in their disgracing and shunning 25 years ago, all while demanding to be relieved of consequences. Donald Trump, of course, is the poster boy for this juvenile insistence on a life without judgment or criticism. He has made a political career out of “telling it like it is,” which for Trump means saying things that are incendiary (and often untrue) and then pretending to be shocked that anyone could take offense at his guileless candor.

Trump has gotten away with this cowardly schtick for years, and he has built a following among Americans who take his hideous pronouncements as permission to be their worst selves. People now delight in shocking others the way toddlers who have learned their first swear words enjoy seeing the horror of adults around them. This, as the Never Trump conservative writer Rick Wilson once put it, is “performative assholery,” and it is everywhere.

Consider GOP Representative Clay Higgins. If you are fortunate enough not to be acquainted with his political history, Higgins was a captain in a parish sheriff’s department in Louisiana who was forced to resign in 2016 after he referred to Black criminal suspects as “animals,” among other things, along with other unprofessional behavior.

Higgins might have been too racist for a Deep South police department, but not for the voters of Lousiania’s Third Congressional District, which includes Lake Charles and Lafayette, where he was first elected to the House in 2016. This week, Higgins got on the Trump campaign’s bandwagon of hatred directed at Haitians. After a nonprofit organization filed private-citizen criminal charges against Trump and his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, for various offenses related to their lies about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, Higgins fired off this post on X:

After enough of an uproar, Higgins deleted the post—and then doubled down on it anyway. “It’s all true,” Higgins told CNN yesterday. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want.”

Although Higgins is an odious racist, he is also clever: He knows that in the modern Republican Party, tribal loyalty means that political consequences for almost anything are rare. Not only will he remain in the good graces of his constituents, he even had the feckless House leader, Speaker Mike Johnson, covering for him. Higgins, according to Johnson, “prayed about it, and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down.”

This is laugh-out-loud nonsense, and both Higgins and Johnson know it. The goal was to offend, to stir controversy, to rile up the MAGA faithful—and to get away with it. The whole episode was the very essence of the consequence-free GOP.

Which brings us to the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson.

Robinson apparently frequented some of the ickier parts of the internet, where he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and indulged in online behavior that need not be recounted here; in general, they were things one would not normally associate with a party that prides itself on family values and Christian morality. Even before these revelations—which prompted all of his senior staff to announce their resignations—he was already running an offensive mess of a campaign. (“Some folks need killing,” he said this past June—while standing in a church.)

Unlike Higgins, Robinson will almost certainly pay the price of an electoral loss. But amazingly, not only has he refused to withdraw from the race—which at least would have been an act of mercy to his party—but he won’t step down from his post as the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, either. After all, why should he? He’s the victim here, you see: He has denied the accusations and is even threatening to sue CNN for publishing these terrible things. (And yet, for some reason, when supporters offered to connect him with tech specialists to help investigate how all the stuff that seems to point to him ended up on the internet, he reportedly refused their assistance.)

Now, it’s true that the GOP does not have a monopoly on denial and huffy self-righteousness. Yesterday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was hit with a barrel of federal charges and his reaction was positively Trumpian: “I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target,” he said, “and a target I became.” If he took favors and bribes—and he’s not admitting that he did—it was obviously for the people of Gotham.

Republicans, too, sometimes end up in court—Trump, after all, has been indicted in multiple jurisdictions and convicted in one so far—but for the MAGA base, it is almost a badge of honor when a Republican is charged with crimes. Trump and others have argued that the current Justice Department is merely a Democratic political weapon, but that’s an odd charge against a DOJ that has sought accountability not just from Adams but from disgraced (and convicted) former Senator Bob Menendez and many other Democrats, including President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Adams is already facing calls from within his own party to resign. The GOP, meanwhile, so far can’t bring itself even to censure Higgins or to call on Robinson to step down from his office.

Higgins and Robinson, of course, do not belong in a courtroom: Being an offensive jerk is not a crime. But their behavior does raise the question of what, exactly, it takes to be ostracized by the Republican Party and its voters. When does so much racism, misogyny, and xenophobia finally become so toxic that Republicans join with other decent people in rejecting such behavior?

Right now, the limit for this kind of ghastliness does not seem to exist. And that is a tragedy for what’s left of the GOP—as well as for the civic health of the world’s greatest democracy.

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P.S.

It’s been years since I rewatched the movie Network, but I caught it again last night. (I got fixated on how a line from the movie showed up in another of my favorite films, Grosse Pointe Blank, but that’s not important, even if it was nice to see one great movie echo another.) It has become almost a cliché to say that Network predicted the era of cable news, but the parallels are unnerving. If you haven’t seen it, or if you haven’t seen it in a long time, steel yourself to sit through it again. (I say that because it is really hard to watch in places, especially when William Holden calmly recites the tawdry reality of his character’s seamy May-December romance with Faye Dunaway’s icy executive, a role for which she won an Oscar.)

The final product of the fictional The Howard Beale Show showed how an evening news broadcast degenerated into a circus, with an unhinged old man ranting at the audience while they clapped for segments such as “Sybil the Soothsayer,” “Vox Populi,” and “Miss Mata Hari and Her Skeletons in the Closet.” I was shocked at how eerily it predicted our present era despite being made almost 50 years ago—a good two decades before Fox News went on the air.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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