Most of us can see that Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General is a wrong’un, even if we set aside the fact that Matt Gaetz was, until an eyeblink ago, under investigation on sex trafficking offences (no prosecution was brought).
There is quite enough in his political record to disqualify him, from claiming that the January 6 assault on the Capitol was the work of left-wing agents provocateurs to endorsing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
Even in the Grand-Guignol of Trumpery, the Floridian Congressman cuts a grotesque figure. But he has been slavishly loyal and, in Maga-world, that’s what counts. As Trump put it, “Gaetz is a tough son of a bitch. He’s my son of a bitch.”
Then again, if you don’t like attorney generals being appointed through cronyism, you might want to look closer to home.
Richard Hermer KC is an old colleague of Sir Keir Starmer’s from Doughty Street Chambers, the achingly woke firm that prospered on the back of the corpus of human rights law brought into existence in the 1990s. He has acted for Kenyan Mau Mau paramilitaries against the British Government, for Shamima Begum against the Home Office, and for Gerry Adams against victims’ groups.
The excellent Yuan Yi Zhu has noted some of the decisions with which Lord Hermer (as he has become) has already been involved: withdrawing British objections to international arrest warrants against Israeli officials; backing the expansion of the UN Security Council; and handing the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. His was the most influential voice urging prosecutions for racial hatred after the Southport riots.
So what? Well, Hermer is the first AG in more than a century to be brought in from outside Parliament. Every post-war Conservative holder of the office was an MP. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown nominated peers, but they were already in the House of Lords before they took the job.
Starmer, keen to bring in his fellow crusader for judicial activism (and, for what it’s worth, donor to his leadership campaign), ignored that precedent.
Yes, he was within his rights. He was flouting a convention, not a law. But so is Trump when he flouts the convention that America’s chief law enforcement officer (to say nothing of its president) should not have been in trouble with the authorities.
People who get upset about Trump’s appointments rarely get upset about Starmer’s – and, naturally, vice versa. Tribal considerations dominate politics, as they dominate most controversies in a social species. When a politician on our side is accused of impropriety, we cast about for extenuating circumstances. A politician on the other side? Throw away the key!
To put it another way, most people’s definition of “corrupt” overlaps almost completely with their definition of “holds views of which I disapprove”. Which insight is critical to explaining how Trump was re-elected.
I have watched many of my American conservative friends acting like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, winning the victory over themselves.
They generally started by backing Trump on functional, faute-de-mieux grounds: an unpleasant candidate, yes, but preferable to Hillary. Within a few months, though, they were Drinking Liberal Tears, Draining the Swamp, Making America Great Again etc.
Once they had made their initial commitment, they fitted everything else into it. Thus, the January 6 insurrection was liberal hype about a few weirdos in fancy-dress – and, anyway, the election probably was stolen. The lawsuits against Trump? Sheer persecution.
Sometimes I argue back. If the attack on the Capitol was high-jinks rather than a serious attempt to overturn the election result, then why the rage, from Trump and his cultists, against Mike Pence? If the 2020 election was truly stolen, why did the Democrats not repeat their villainy in 2024?
As for the lawsuits, are you seriously arguing that it is fine to pay off a porn star and then lie about it provided there was no technical violation of campaign finance law?
The response is almost always along the lines of “So you like Kamala?” (For the avoidance of doubt, I think Kamala would have been an awful president. But her awfulness does not redeem Trump.)
Politics has always been tribal, but there is an all-or-nothing intensity to today’s quarrels. What has changed? Does it have to with the bank bailouts, and the de-legitimisation of the authorities that followed? Or the balkanisation that has grown out of unprecedented migration? Or are smartphones making us angrier?
Whatever the explanation, liberal democracy has been in retreat globally since 2012. As we become more polarised, we become worse people. I keep thinking of something CS Lewis said during the Second World War, which eerily anticipated our present screen-addled age:
“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.”
Trump may make sensible decisions on deregulation, but his is morally unfit. Starmer may be doing dreadful damage to Britain, but he is not wicked. If we can’t hold such ideas in our heads, we are already devils.