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Thursday
Kevin McCarthy, the former Speaker of the House who has sometimes sabotaged his standing with Republicans by telling uncomfortable truths about Donald Trump, recently noted that Trump has turned his vice president decision into a version of his hit television show Celebrity Apprentice. Always one to milk every drop out of such a situation, Trump will probably keep the showing going until July’s Republican convention.
The situation has me thinking of a different show, one described in Book I of Gulliver’s Travels. There, competing for colored threads that allegorically represent the Orders of the Garter, the Bath, and the Thistle, Lilliputian courtiers debase themselves before the emperor. Here’s Jonathan Swift’s description:
There is likewise another diversion, which is only shown before the emperor and empress, and first minister, upon particular occasions. The emperor lays on the table three fine silken threads of six inches long; one is blue, the other red, and the third green. These threads are proposed as prizes for those persons whom the emperor has a mind to distinguish by a peculiar mark of his favor. The ceremony is performed in his majesty’s great chamber of state, where the candidates are to undergo a trial of dexterity very different from the former [tightrope walking], and such as I have not observed the least resemblance of in any other country of the new or old world. The emperor holds a stick in his hands, both ends parallel to the horizon, while the candidates advancing, one by one, sometimes leap over the stick, sometimes creep under it, backward and forward, several times, according as the stick is advanced or depressed. Sometimes the emperor holds one end of the stick, and his first minister the other; sometimes the minister has it entirely to himself. Whoever performs his part with most agility, and holds out the longest in leaping and creeping, is rewarded with the blue-colored silk; the red is given to the next, and the green to the third, which they all wear girt twice round about the middle; and you see few great persons about this court who are not adorned with one of these girdles.
I found descriptions of the various orders on Wikipedia. The Order of the Garter, which dates back to 1348, is the most senior order of knighthood in the British honors system. The Order of the Bath, which evokes the medieval knighting ceremonies, was invented by George I (the Lilliputian Emperor in this allegory) in 1725, only a year before Gulliver’s Travels was written. James II, meanwhile, established the Order of the Thistle 40 years earlier. It was an honor he bestowed on 16 lords and ladies and, while he claimed he was reviving an earlier tradition, he probably invented the whole thing out of whole cloth.
In short, the honors were cheap incentives designed to keep courtiers “leaping and creeping” in obeisance. The “first minister” mentioned by Gulliver is Prime Minister Robert Walpole, a genius at political gamesmanship.
Note: While Walpole was excoriated by such writers as Swift, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding and (for a while) Samuel Johnson for his political machinations, some now consider him to have been England’s greatest prime minister.
Whether or not Trump is a political genius, he certainly knows how to get GOP politicians to leap and creep. Molly Jong-Fast provides a list in a Vanity Fair article:
–Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio—once derided by Trump as “Little Marco”—claimed on ABC that Trump has a “legitimate” claim to complete presidential immunity;
–North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum says that the New York hush money case is simply about a “business filing error”;
–Ohio senator J.D. Vance says that, unlike Mike Pence, he would have sent the 2020 election back to the states;
–South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott is one of many who refuse to say they will accept the 2024 election results if Trump loses;
–New York Rep. Elise Stefanik refers to those imprisoned for storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 as “hostages” and says she will accept election results only “if they’re constitutional”—which is to say “constitutional as defined by Trump”;
–Texas Rep. Byron York is similarly slippery. For him, as apparently for Vance, it is up to Republican legislatures to determine whether the election is fair.
Of course, the litmus test for entering the veepstakes is whether or not you are willing to say that the 2020 election was rigged. As Jong-Fast puts it,
Openly lying about an election, despite a mountain of evidence proving otherwise, is a way for these men [and women] to prove their fealty—as though they’re trapped in an Orwell novel, mindlessly repeating the party line logic of 2+2=5.
And then Jong-Fast all but borrows from Swift as she sums up the current situation:
When you take a step back here, it’s easy to see how Trump’s veepstakes resemble a kind of extremist political audition, in which the most ass-kissing, reality-refuting contender has the best chance of becoming the former president’s second.
In other words, don’t click on any articles about possible vice presidential candidates until July, which is when Trump will make his selection.
