The Most Deranged Non-Argument of All: Attack the Person
Participating in politics never has been, is not now, and indeed must never involve engaging with others solely on the grounds of pure reason. Emotion matters, evidence matters, and we have seen to our horror what can happen when those who pretend to rely on cold, supposedly objective reason get their hands on the levers of power.
For most of the last few decades, however, I have been remarking on the notable decline in standards in US politics regarding what counts as an argument. Reason is not at all sufficient, but it certainly is necessary. And although Democrats offer more than the occasional example of forehead-slapping silliness, there is emphatically no equivalence between the two parties.
Long before Donald Trump came along, Republicans had decided that "message discipline" was more important than the message itself. Rote repetition of talking points became their standard operating procedure, no matter what any reporter or political opponent might do to expose the emptiness or wrongheadedness of any of those points. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was a key figure in making sure that the talking points were as inflammatory and vile as possible, instructing Republicans to use words like "sick," "pathetic," and "treasonous" when describing Democrats or their arguments.
Their strategy, then, became a two-step process of devolution: (1) refuse to defend arguments, and soon (2) make no arguments at all, preferring personal attacks instead. Even though this decline in political standards began long before Trump, however, he and his enablers have taken it to new levels of inanity. My most recent intervention on this front was my June 11 column (bordering on a cri de coeur): "The US Right Has Pretty Much Given Up on Making Arguments (Election Fraud Edition)."
Today, I want to add to that analysis by talking about what has become the most common Trumpist tactic, the perfect Gingrichification of the schoolyard bullying style of politics: the ad hominem attack -- that is, responding to an argument (or even an unwanted question) by attacking the person who said it.
One rather amusing recent example is Republicans' evident conclusion that the best strategy to get Ken Paxton, their ethics vacuum of a US Senate candidate in Texas, over the finish line in the general election is to attack his opponent on non-issue-based grounds. They say, for example, that James Talarico is a vegan (horrors!!), which is sadly not true. That false claim has become part of a broader Republican smear campaign about Talarico's supposed lack of manliness.
Easily the funniest moment in this farce so far was when Ted Cruz, who would be Talarico's Texas colleague in the upper chamber, said this on Sean Hannity's Fox show: "I gotta say, if you were making a list of 1,000 adjectives to describe this guy, 'masculine' would not be one of them." Ted Cruz. Yes, Ted Cruz wants the discussion to be about whether a politician is manly enough. Ted Cruz, who overcompensates so badly that he once tried to prove his toughness by creepily eating something that he called "machine gun bacon." Ted Cruz, to whom Triumph the Insult Comic Dog once said: "I support spaying and neutering—just like Trump did to you!"
So yeah, Ted Cruz is not exactly the go-to source for what would count as even the most minimal version of manliness. To his credit, Talarico responded by taking the high road, not only by choosing not to trade insults but by making an actual argument: "A man takes responsibility. A man upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors. A man does what’s right, even when no one is watching." Note that this is not only an argument, but it is a good argument. No argument is waterproof, but this one could only be blunted with a very carefully thought out rebuttal. And to paraphrase Texas's current junior senator: I gotta say, if you were making a list of 1,000 phrases to describe Republicans arguments, "carefully thought out" would not be one of them.
When Cruz brings up the subject of manliness, then, it is almost as much of a self-own as when the elder Trump brother attacked Hunter Biden for getting ahead by using his father's contacts, or when Matt Gaetz (remember him?) tried to slime the younger Biden as a drug user.
To be clear, arguing effectively does not have to mean refusing to be hard-edged. The difference is that one has to be able to back it up. I referred a moment ago, for example, to Ken Paxton as an "ethics vacuum," which he is. If someone wanted to argue the point, they would lose on both facts and logic. More broadly, when I describe some politicians as taking positions that make them "naive, stupid, or evil," it is possible to explain what those three things mean, how each of those descriptions does or does not apply to a particular person's statements, and then to defend the conclusion.
Politics, in other words, can be "not beanbag" but also not argumentatively bankrupt. But Republicans, especially under Trump, do not see it that way. Trump, after all, responds to anything and everything that displeases him by calling people "low IQ," a "horror show," or when he is especially lazy (and especially if the antagonist is non-White and/or a woman) "a stupid person" or "a dumb person." Any time he does not like a question, he loses his composure and changes the subject. He occasionally expands on his one- or two-word playground taunts, such as his rant about a "terrible reporter" being rude and "the way you ask these questions" being the problem. But again, the quick content-free dismissal is always there: "hoax," "scam," and perhaps most infamously, "piggy."
Many of Trump's supporters try to imitate this approach, none successfully, which I suppose is a reason for optimism. As I wrote in my June 11 column, J.D. Vance differs from Trump by sometimes attempting to make what sounds like an actual argument, but he is simply bad at it. Is it to Trump's credit that he does not even try?
By far the most fascinating Republican attempt at following Trump's strategy of attacking the person and not the argument, however, is the now-ubiquitous response to every criticism as being the result of Trump Derangement Syndrome. That obviously has no more content than calling someone a stupid person, but somehow it has become their weapon of choice. The person at whom the epithet is hurled is not merely "low IQ" but fully and irretrievably addled by their hatred of Trump himself -- which is the only possible reason that anyone would say anything bad about him, I suppose. Gas prices are up, not down? Trump derangement syndrome. Trump is weirdly proud of passing multiple cognitive tests? Trump derangement syndrome. The war against Iran strengthened Iran and costs billions of dollars and hundreds of lives? Why, it's Trump derangement syndrome, of course.
For what it might be worth, there are ripostes that can work well. See, for example, "The same idiots who think Trump, who dodged the draft five times, knows how to win a war also think Trump, who who declared bankruptcy six times, knows how to run the economy. That's what Trump Derangement Syndrome actually looks like." To be sure, that statement is itself logically deficient on its sub-merits, because it is possible for draft dodgers to become expert in war strategy and for failed business people to understand economic policy. But the larger point is that there is no evidence that Trump is good at either of those things, which means that the people who continue to believe in him in the face of at least facially contrary evidence are engaged in wishful thinking, which one can certainly categorize as a kind of personality-cult-like derangement.
This logic-averse approach to life has, of course, been around as long as humans have been around. That does not mean that everyone uses it or that the uses are equivalent, but it does mean that we have seen this for millennia, and philosophers have studied it carefully. "Argument ad hominem" comes in two forms: circumstantial or personal. Circumstantial ad hominem attacks go after the person by saying that of course they would say something, because they are a Democrat, or a reporter, or a lawyer, or a professor. Personal ad hominem attacks go after the essence of the person as defective.
Sometimes there is a mixture of the two, but the underlying problem in all cases is that they are logically irrelevant. "Immigrants commit crime at much lower rates than US citizens." "You're an idiot." Or, even if the critical comment comes from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Trump's response is no less of an ad hominem (personal) attack: "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy."
The last form of Republican non-argument that I want to discuss today is the "if he believes this, then he obviously believes that" distortion. Trump's attack on Pope Leo XIV, for example, included this:
I don't want a Pope who thinks it's OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don't want a Pope who thinks it's terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country.
Sure thing, fella. Leo is just dancing at the thought of Iran becoming a nuclear power. You understand this perfectly.
But again, this is hardly limited to Trump. For example, a New York Times report from February of last year described how Vance and Elon Musk have shown support for Germany's (at least arguably) neo-Nazi far-right party. The article included this: "Mr. Vance used his sharp-tongued online persona to mock criticism that Mr. Musk was promoting a dangerous group. 'It's so dangerous for people to control their borders,' he wrote. 'So, so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.'"
Sharp-tongued? I suppose that is one way to describe a completely vapid non-argument. "There's a guy who is being criticized for burning down his neighbors houses out of fear that they might be plotting against him. It's so dangerous for people to want to protect themselves. So, so dangerous." "My mother is being prosecuted for stealing money from nursing home residents. It's so dangerous for someone to want to have more money. So, so dangerous." One more: "I heard about a guy who violently raped and impregnated a woman. It's so dangerous for someone to want to become a father. So, so dangerous."
Again, the problem is not being sharp-tongued or sarcastic. My response to Trump's attack on the Pope in the peripenultimate paragraph above, for example, is dripping with mockery. Insisting on having actual arguments is in no way unilateral disarmament. It is, however, obvious when one side abandons all pretense at making arguments because they clearly have nothing defensible to say at all. If American Republicans had arguments that they could stand behind, one might think that we would have heard them by now. They are not deafening us with their silence but with their loud campaign of angry distraction.
- Neil H. Buchanan