Please Find Less Stupid Ways to Defend Trump

Mike Solana's bizarre take on the Kimmel controversy

In following the coverage over Kimmel on Thursday, there were two critiques of the emerging left-wing consensus that I noticed. One was smart, and the other was very dumb. Unfortunately, as you might guess, the stupid one got more attention, and was made by a much more prominent figure. I think that contrasting these arguments and their reach can provide a microcosm of what has gone wrong in public discourse.

First, there was an op-ed in National Review by Dominic Pino pointing out that the FCC has long been used as a tool of government censorship.

Why does Carr have this power in the first place? It would be nice if his tough-guy impersonation for a right-wing podcast could be dismissed as merely talk, but the FCC is in fact able to exert pressure over broadcasters by threatening to revoke their licenses.

That was the method by which the FCC for years enforced the “Fairness Doctrine,” which said that broadcast commentary on public affairs had to be balanced with contrasting views. This was a restriction on free speech as well, enforced by the same threat that Carr has crudely employed, except it was supported by Democrats, so it was considered vital to democracy.

As historian Paul Matzko has chronicled, the FCC under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson used the Fairness Doctrine to target right-wing radio hosts in the 1960s. Under the advice of United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, the Kennedy administration created a front organization to file Fairness Doctrine complaints with the FCC against anti-Kennedy broadcasters. Networks either changed their programming to comply with the FCC’s demands or pulled conservative shows off the air.

The Democratic National Committee fleshed out this strategy during the Johnson administration, with political operatives paid to covertly coordinate FCC complaints against right-wing broadcasters across the country. One station sued, and in the 1969 case Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was constitutional. Unknown to the justices was that the initial complainant to the FCC that led to that case was paid by the DNC. “The Supreme Court had been hoodwinked by the most successful government censorship campaign of the last half century,” Matzko wrote.

I am grateful to Pino for making me more informed on this issue. He critiques the Trump administration, puts what is happening in a historical context, and proposes a policy solution – the privatization of the airwaves – that would prevent abuses in either direction going forward. This is a valuable perspective.

Pino’s post promoting this article has 62K views as of this writing, so it’s reached an audience. But a much more prominent critic of the left-wing position is Mike Solana. In a tweet that has received over half a million views, he complains that “the average american will come to believe, if they do not already, that donald trump ordered jimmy kimmel off the air. and this didn't happen.”

To this I responded, “Historians now have most people believing that Joseph Stalin personally drove people in trains to camps in Siberia.” If you’re interested in reading about the events leading to the Kimmel suspension, I highly recommend this article, which shows the administration applying legalistic and propaganda pressure at various places. Trump didn’t personally fire Jimmy Kimmel, in the same way that Putin didn’t personally march into Ukraine in a tank. But this is a clear instance of a leader taking action against a disfavored opponent, something Trump has been doing regularly throughout his second term.

Even if it were true, as some have argued, that ABC wanted to get rid of Kimmel anyway and this was just an excuse, this still doesn’t in any way absolve Trump. It would still be the case that he applied pressure on a company over speech he didn’t like, and this was a but-for cause of the suspension. Let’s say I have a friend who wants to divorce his wife, but needs a reason to file divorce. I decide to help him by setting up a situation where she cheats on him with another man. Finding his pretext, my friend divorces his wife. I’m still the cause of the divorce. Similarly, assuming ABC thought Kimmel’s ratings were too low to justify the costs of his show, Trump using his power to provide them with an excuse to part ways with the comedian is still an instance of the president suppressing speech he doesn’t like.

By praising Pino’s article, I hope to show you that I am not unwilling to listen to anything that can be taken as a defense of Trump, or putting his actions in a larger and more sympathetic context. I just want the argument to be well reasoned and based on an acknowledgment of the facts. Is that too much to ask for?

Solana tries to maintain some principles, here seemingly acknowledging that it would be bad if Trump did push Kimmel off the air. But he seems to be so partisan brained that he preempts uncomfortable questions about how a free speech activist can support this current government by denying what we all just witnessed happening. While Pino introduces new facts into the discussion, Solana gives you less than you would get from simply reading the news yourself. The latter in this case is providing negative value commentary.

Pino has 9K followers, Solana 378K. This captures the problem with the discourse, particularly on the MAGA side. The right-leaning audience wants boisterous personalities who will just tell them the media is wrong on the issue of the day. This is what I’ve called the Michael Shellenberger problem. You grow as a right-wing influencer by centering a struggle over personalities, which involves defending Trump and attacking his critics, on whatever grounds are most convenient. The audience is much less interested in a nuanced take acknowledging the truth about Trump, while also providing sensible and historically grounded critiques of past actions by Democratic governments that have led us to this point.

The reach of partisans like Catturd and that Gunther guy can be chalked up to a lot of people having very low IQs. Shellenberger and Solana reach some people who are intelligent, so their success requires a different kind of explanation. Why do so many people, some of them clearly smart, simply want to hear that Trump is right and his critics are wrong over and over again on every issue, even when the facts are not on their side and there is no non-partisan principle at stake? Why, when Donald Trump does something, do some feel the need to twist what has happened in order to personally defend the man himself?

This is speculation, but I think that what’s going on here is that the relatively intelligent Trump supporter has a guilty conscience. If you look at the facts of almost any controversy he’s involved in, the man is indefensible. You say you hate corruption? Dishonesty? The weaponization of government? Incivility? On every one of these things he is much worse than his opponents.

Nobody wants to admit that they support the most immoral man in public life simply because they agree with him more on the issues than his opponents. That was the message of my case for voting Trump, but no other 2024 endorsement sounded like that. Practically every person who defends Trump needs to believe that he is actually a good guy, or least not as bad as his critics say, or maybe the kind of force we need at this particular historical moment. So they get into the minutiae of Russiagate, or January 6, or whatever. They are so polarized against the media that they don’t read actual news articles from outlets like The Washington Post, instead getting their spin from Solana’s tweets or Shellenberger’s Substack, receiving a more distorted version of the facts than what you’ll hear in the MSM.

One thing that’s entertaining about all of this is that Trump doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than what he is. The day after Solana’s tweet, the president suggested that the licenses of networks be taken away for giving him the bad press. Note that the Mueller probe started in part because, in the midst of Trump’s defenders claiming that he fired James Comey for other reasons, the president went on NBC News and told the world that he did so because he was unhappy with the probe into his own campaign. The man just goes around announcing that he wants to behave like a dictator and suspend the Constitution, and there is still a massive audience out there for content that puts forth justifications for his behavior that he wouldn’t bother to make himself.

There are things you can say to put Trumpism in historical context, and discuss the ways in which government has too much arbitrary power over business, which it has abused before. But then you’d have to know something about history, maybe read a book, or at least an article or two. Who has got time for that? So instead the right-wing ecosystem is dominated by influencers who will always be ready with a take about how actually Trump isn’t that bad and the real issue is that the media is always lying about him.

I wish people like Dominic Pino had more of a voice, and those like Solana and Shellenberger were listened to less. I try to do my part. Sometimes more serious readers don’t like my more eccentric tweets and obsessions. But those are among the main reasons I reach a decent sized audience in the first place. I entertain with jokes, dunks, and videos of tits bouncing around. People get angry. But in the end there is something underneath it all, and even the trolling has a point.

I also hope this article explains why I spend so much time encouraging people to engage with the MSM. At least get your facts right about what happened in any particular case before you complain about bias in the coverage! Most right-wingers who are engaging with political content don’t come close to even meeting that standard. It all goes back to them not reading anything. Here’s Yarvin the other day complaining about how January 6 showed that conservatives are oppressed by American institutions. I’m not sure what his version of events is with regards to what happened on that day and in the weeks leading up to it, but this take shows that he’s most likely just mistaken on the underlying facts, which is unsurprising given that he relies mostly on right-wing sources for what he thinks he knows.

I don’t think I can reach the conspiracists or the braindead partisans, but maybe a Mike Solana reader will see this and decide that things can be different. I even dare hope that, given he is not completely stupid like Catturd or genuinely mentally disordered like Tucker, Solana himself might decide to do better.