Love Conquers All
Except in politics, where hate usually does the trick
Editor’s Note: Have a question about how to score Ozempic due to manufacturing shortages, as you try to slim down for your holiday parties, which will only fatten you up again as you eat and drink your way through them? Ask your friends with Type 2 diabetes, who maybe won’t mind parting with their life nectar just so you can drop ten pounds to fit into your Christmas corduroys. But don’t ask Matt. He’s a dealer in hope, not in anti-obesity drugs. Any other questions? By all means, Ask Matt® at askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Matt,
Ask yourself this: What is it about Donald Trump that enthralls otherwise sane and reasonable people to embrace him…….I’m not talking about other politicians, I’m talking regular people. Also, why is it that the Republicans feel a need to constantly pivot further right than is necessary that makes them risk looking like Anthony Michael Hall in Weird Science?
Chris H.
Not to start off all quarrelsome, Chris. But I will not be asking myself that question, since you just asked it. So please don’t tell me what to do. You’re not the boss of me.
But to answer your question(s) in roundabout fashion — the only fashion I know: back when I was still a serial magazine profiler, instead of a serial Substack essayist, I spent a fair amount of time hunting for what we in the trade called “characters,” who in the long-forgotten pre-Trump era, were colorful subjects who were generally news-adjacent, but who illuminated the world in their own oddball ways. For me, it was a workaround, a way to dodge having to profile the more staid (i.e. boring) newsmakers who tended to occupy center stage, but whose publicity handlers and overriding dedication to cautious self-preservation made it damn near impossible to get anything interesting out of them.
This was another time, of course. The pre-Trump era was only eight years ago, but it might as well have been forty-eight years ago. It bears little-to-no resemblance to present-day America, where center stagers now not only don’t try to conceal their eccentricities, but rather, purposefully showcase them, hoping to appeal to an electorate that has gone increasingly eccentric (i.e., bonkers) itself. Somewhere along the way, at least on the right, the fringe became the mainstream. And so, if current players aren’t natural carny barkers, stoking discontent and paranoia every time they open their mouths, well, their cold-blooded reptile brains now tell them that they’d better do strong impersonations of such rage pimps if they’re to have any future in the Republican Party. Which explains, among many other things, the entire candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy, or the sad slide of Sen. Mike Lee 2.0.
But one of those fringier characters of yesteryear, who would end up becoming a center-stage newsmaker himself as the longtime political consigliere to Donald Trump, was the Dirty Trickster Roger Stone. Whether you were just hanging out drinking with him, or writing about him (I did plenty of both over the years), Stone had a habit of tossing off “Stone’s Rules,” pithy edicts for living. Some were borrowed from other people: Unless you can fake sincerity, you’ll get nowhere in this business. Some were genuinely helpful and pragmatic: Don’t order fish at a steakhouse; or Undertakers and chauffeurs are the only people who should be allowed by law to wear black suits.
But the truest of all Stone’s Rules, the crystalline insight that explains where we are now, is this: