The Romney moment

In national security, if nothing else, what happens in the bathroom should stay in the bathroom

During a parking lot conversation with one of the backers of an improved skate park in Harrisonburg, I reached into my vehicle for a hat. Between that and the sunglasses and the long-sleeved shirt, it takes me as long to go out in summer as in winter. Some time into the conversation it occurred to me what hat I had probably pulled out, and I took it off to check. It was from Wonder Skate Shop, one of the focal points for city skateboarders.

I thought about that when I saw someone out and about Saturday wearing a Trump hat. There was a surreal aspect to it so close on the heels of Trump’s indictment for the kind of crimes the Rosenbergs were electrocuted for, but a part of me gave the hat’s wearer the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he had just grabbed whatever hat was in his pickup. He was slightly older than me, old enough to have been eligible for the draft when Selective Service and the Vietnam War made consideration of the nation’s defense and security a more palpable thing than it’s been for later generations.

Did he even know what he was wearing? Or did he wear it with active intent, with the purpose of showing that he’s part of that rock-hard plurality of Americans who still worship Trump, who believe his side of a story before they’ve heard it, who find him a mythic figure instead of a comic one, and who are willing to accept that if he pays off a prostitute, steals nuclear secrets, accepts Russian campaign help, or endorses a can of black beans from the Oval Office, he must have a good reason for it.

Someone I know told the story of going to court in support and defense of an addicted relative, and of the painful epiphany he suffered as he listened to the case. The case may have been possession, credit card theft, receiving stolen property, or the other tawdry tragedies that often hang off addiction like tinsel on a Christmas tree. For the person telling the story, it was the sheer weight of the stories and charges on the one hand and the explanations and rationalizations on the other. Maybe the cop had lied. Maybe the store had singled her out. Maybe the prosecutor just didn’t like her. But he added it up and decided that the whole world hadn’t conspired to make a victim of one sad addict, no matter how much her family may have loved her.

I have to think there are those people who have had enough of Trump. There’s little solace in knowing they’ll probably just switch to DeSantis or Youngkin or some other executive bully who’ll take us backwards on civil rights, voting rights, and educational progress in so many ways that we can’t keep track. But at least maybe some of them will leave the Trump ballcap behind the seat and grab one expressing their misguided support of the Yankees or the New England Patriots, or their belief that Budweiser is drinkable, or some other abuses of the First Amendment.

A month before I started college, the Watergate affair reached its climax with a tape showing that Nixon had done the very thing he’d denied doing for a year and a half. He was gone from office in a week. Those were the days. Support fell away like brown leaves in a November wind, but the tree stood. A quarter of Americans still supported him. That’s the same quarter that will never take off their MAGA hats.

For the rest, there has to be that Romney moment. In his 2012 campaign for the presidency, Romney stood in front of a jet with Trump’s name on it in letters taller than either one of them and accepted Trump’s endorsement. He not only accepted the reckless lies about Benghazi, but actually initiated them before the bodies were cold in Libya. But even he reached his limit with the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. His was the only GOP vote in the Senate to convict Trump for his role in that insult to democracy. He’d reached his limit with Trump and, we can hope, with himself. There are, we can hope, others who’ve reached that point and changed hats, metaphorically and literally.

The rest will be like the riverboat passenger in the final chapter of Herman Melville’s final novel, “The Confidence Man.” The title character, the devil looking for fools, convinces an old man he needs a life preserver in his cabin, and gives him a chamber pot to use for that purpose. Voltaire tells us that those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. The absurdity of the chamber pot as life preserver was fiction. The absurdity of storing nuclear secrets next to a toilet was not.