Very interesting update from MAGA-whisperer Marc Caputo at The Bulwark. Following on Trump’s tweet of support, the idea is that Pete Hegseth has bought himself at least time to continue his nomination fight because Trump likes his fight. But the operative theory is twofold, that even though Hegseth doesn’t currently have 50 votes that they can break the GOP senators’ … well, let’s call it their moonwalk confirmation strategy (I’ll explain that later) and that Hegseth is good to have as a punching bag because maybe that will help RFK Jr. and Kash Patel move through more easily. Caputo quotes a Trumper: “Hegseth is a heatshield. Pete can take the heat, and that’s better for everyone else.”
The core idea here, I think, is that Trump’s people don’t think senators are really going to be ready to defy him if and when this comes to a vote. Again, the moonwalk confirmation strategy, which we’ll return to.
I’m skeptical this will work. But I’m not saying it can’t or it won’t. But what’s happening here is actually pretty important, quite apart from whether this clown becomes Defense Secretary. Because these confirmation feats of strength are where Republicans are — in the most performative and shambolic way — setting the ground rules for at least the first two years of Trump’s second term: How much is Trump really going to be calling the shots?
Old timers will remember that a couple years into the occupation of Iraq there was a new theory of the case which took hold for a while on the right. It was no longer possible to pretend that the war wasn’t a disaster in any conventional sense or any sense anyone ever would have imagined before the war started. But that didn’t mean that there still wasn’t a need to explain why it was awesome. This was the birth of “the fly paper theory of the war.” It might have seemed bad that our occupation army was constantly being attacked with IEDs and by snipers and wounded and killed by a growing insurgency that had no end in sight. But that was actually great. Why? Because our occupation army was acting like fly paper, drawing in all the jihadis and bad guys so we could fight them in Iraq on our own terms rather than fighting them here in America like happened on 9/11. We were “fighting them over there so we didn’t have to fight them here.”
I remember I got an email from a reader who said this was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard in his life, that it was like saying you were setting up a really septic hospital so you could have it out with the germs on your terms. If you take the analogy in one direction, it’s not great, I guess, since you don’t want to compare even a vicious guerrilla army to germs. But I don’t think that was the reader’s point. It was that you’ve got the issue of finite numbers wrong. You’re not doing some diversionary tactic that’s drawing off the bad guys. You’re just creating more bad guys. And sort of like our septic hospital you can basically create new ones to the end of time. If we’re considering anti-occupation resistance guerrillas bad guys, and they’re not usually nice, there’s always more.
In any case, I guess you had to be there for what was then the fairly moronic pre-social media public debate about how things were going for us in Iraq in 2003-6. I raise it here because I think it’s possible that this is similarly an example of a fairly suboptimal situation for an over-clever theory has been devised which purports to explain why it is in fact awesome.
We shall see.
