On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton under the headline "Tom Cotton: Send In The Troops, For Real." The piece was ostensibly written in response to the protests against the Trump administration's anti-immigrant crackdowns currently taking place in Los Angeles, and it argues that the administration should use an "overwhelming show of force" to put an end to the protests.
It's an odd piece of writing. For one thing, the troops have already been sent in—President Trump has sent National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to guard federal buildings and ICE agents, against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom. For another, the "show of force" has already happened—protestors have spent the last five days being beaten, arrested, tear-gassed, and shot with debilitating "less lethal" munitions. Taken on its own, it's hard to imagine what the editors of the WSJ opinion page might have expected moderately informed readers to gain from Cotton's piece, other than a vague sense of confusion and the less-vague sense that a United States Senator was upset.
That's because the piece itself wasn't actually published for the sake of WSJ readers, and it is not even about the protests in Los Angeles. Cotton and the paper are engaged here in nothing more than some trollish meta-commentary. When Cotton published what was effectively the same argument in The New York Times during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, the external and internal backlash to that piece was severe enough that the Times' opinion editor, James Bennet, lost his job. (That happened after Bennet admitted that he hadn't even read the piece before it was published.) In the intervening years, Bennet became something of a martyr in center-right media circles, the denizens of which convinced themselves that an opinion editor losing his job because he had allowed some dumb and offensive bullshit to be published in his section without even reading it first was some kind of lethal blow against open discourse. You need all of that stupid and exhausting context to understand what the WSJ and Cotton were actually doing on Tuesday, which was trying to score some points off the Times.
This is, among other things, extremely lame behavior. But it also highlights what has long been one of the most maddening aspects of how the Trump administration and its broader network of pallid cronies conduct themselves. One way to read Trump 2.0 is as a kind of revenge tour against all the political and cultural forces that managed to mount a successful rebuke to his administration in the 2020 election. Vengeance is certainly a motivating factor this time around, and is always at the center of everything Trump wants and does, but there also remains an undercurrent of desperate attention-seeking. Some of it is about rewriting the story, but mostly it is about re-telling it.
Living under Trump 2.0 often feels like having been forced back into the worst house party imaginable, where all the attendees are not only standing too close and speaking too loudly, but demanding your full attention. Tom Cotton tells a stupid, cruel joke that didn't land the first time, and then looks you right in the eyes while he repeats it. JD Vance leans over from the couch to force his phone into your face so he can show you the "epic meme" he just dropped on "the menswear guy." Robert Kennedy Jr. won't stop garbling something about beef tallow. Trump keeps demanding that everyone look at his chart about the tarriffs. No one is listening to anyone else.
If this all feels shabby and embarrassing, that's because it absolutely is. But any impulse to scoff at these lurkers is headed off by the fact that they are currently very much in charge. All the time they spend assuring everyone of how much fun they are having doing all this winning has somehow not made any less time for enacting their cruelties on the world. That is part of what has been so meaningful about this week's protests: They offer a chance to confront those cruelties head on, to reject them where everyone can see. People like Trump, Vance, and Cotton want to keep you trapped in that sad, sweaty room with them because that is where they are most comfortable; their political ideal is a place where every conversation can be had on their terms and abstracted through their whiny grievances. But they can't stop people from leaving the party and going outside to see the reality of the conservative project, which is masked men kidnapping people from their homes and workplaces while friends and neighbors look on in horror. What this week has proven is that people can only watch an injustice like that happen so many times before they join a march, or pick up a rock.
Cotton may have felt like he was spiking the football on the Times and triggering the libs yesterday, but there is something more desperate underneath all that smug bluster. The conversation Cotton wants to keep having, and the gratification he receives from it, might be nearing its end. The party's winding down. More and more people are going outside.
