Opinion
What Has Brett Kavanaugh Done to Us?
Frank Bruni: Greetings, Ross. What a quiet two weeks since we last met in this space. Kidding! I’m reeling from the last five days alone: Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, Brett Kavanaugh’s explosion, Jeff Flake’s pause. And amid all this? Hugely uncharacteristic restraint from the president. I am very curious to know what you make of that.
Posted — UpdatedBy Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat, New York Times
Frank Bruni: Greetings, Ross. What a quiet two weeks since we last met in this space. Kidding! I’m reeling from the last five days alone: Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, Brett Kavanaugh’s explosion, Jeff Flake’s pause. And amid all this? Hugely uncharacteristic restraint from the president. I am very curious to know what you make of that.
Ross Douthat: Well, we had one spasm of Trumpishness on Twitter about 10 days ago (which is to say, an eternity), where he challenged her story and attacked the Democrats in the style one would expect, and there was his news conference in which he compared Kavanaugh’s position to his own experience being accused of sexual assault — not exactly the comparison his nominee was hoping for, I imagine.
But in general you’re right: By Trump standards, the president has been restrained, and this has been a case study in something we’ve talked about before. Trump seems at times to be unable to master himself, but then there will come periods where suddenly he demonstrates that he can, in the right circumstances, hold back.
Bruni: Maybe it’s all just neurochemical fluke. Maybe it’s a function of how much or little well-done steak with ketchup he’s been eating — how freely the blood’s flowing. Because it’s not as if he has suddenly gone dull and dignified across the board. Almost overlooked amid the Kavanaugh developments was Trump’s weekend recounting of how he “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un after receiving and reading “beautiful letters” from him. It’s a Victorian-era epistolary romance! Updated for the age of ballistic missiles. It’s “Love Story” but with a new adage. Love means never having to say you denuclearized.
Douthat: Yes, the question is whether he loves Kavanaugh as much as he loves Kim. But even if he doesn’t, the White House definitely wants us all to think that there’s no Plan B — that they’re forcing a vote on Kavanaugh no matter what, that the base is now too invested in the idea that he’s being railroaded by Democrats for them to dump him, and that anyway there isn’t time to put someone else up before the midterms, and the politics of confirmation in the lame-duck are too dicey. Do you think that’s true?
Bruni: I think that narrative is real. In terms of what can happen before the midterms, when you look at the calendar, it is Kavanaugh or bust, and the White House knows that letting a very limited FBI investigation take place, and not complaining too much, could give Flake and Susan Collins and maybe even Lisa Murkowski what they need to get to “yes,” which is where I think Flake and Collins ultimately want to be.
Douthat: Yeah, an underappreciated dynamic in all this is that Murkowski and Collins really want to vote for Kavanaugh because they don’t want a more conservative nominee. So then will we be looking at a 4-4 court if he goes down and Democrats take the Senate?
Bruni: You mean Trump wouldn’t bother putting up a new nominee and would go with a 4-4 court and campaign on that in 2020? Wow, that’s a hell of a gamble. He would be saying to the country that he cared more about undiluted partisanship and pouting and gamesmanship than about his responsibilities and the proper functioning of the branches of government.
Douthat: I don’t think the idea is that he wouldn’t put up a nominee at all; he’d put up someone more conservative than Kavanaugh and let the Democrats have their revenge for the Merrick Garland nonconsideration by just letting that nominee twist in the wind. Which I think they would, given the mood — there’s no way a Democratic Senate confirms a Federalist Society-approved nominee at this point, right?
Bruni: The electoral politics of this is fascinating. For instance: While there’s zero doubt that Republicans want Kavanaugh on what would then be an entirely different court, if he does go down, they’re confident that it will energize and mobilize their voters in some of those key Senate races where a Democrat is seeking re-election in a red state.
But that partly presumes that impassioned Democratic voters will be less so if they succeed in scuttling the Kavanaugh nomination over these next weeks. Do you think Democratic turnout will be affected significantly by whether Kavanaugh gets confirmed or not?
Douthat: I think the challenge for Democrats is that the constituency most likely to be mobilized by anger over a Kavanaugh confirmation is upper-middle-class white women, and that’s the place where they’re having the most success already. It’s minority turnout that they’re worried about, black and Hispanic, and I’m not sure the Kavanaugh fight (unlike, say, a health care battle) brings as many working-class minority voters to the polls.
But with that said, I’d really like to see more polling on this. Kavanaugh was already a very unpopular nominee, but in the polls I’ve seen there’s a lot of uncertainty about the allegations — which leaves a lot more room for possible political effects depending on what the FBI turns up, further revelations, etc.
Bruni: I’m not hopeful about the FBI investigation. The time allotted is minimal, the scope was initially narrow, and events of about 36 years ago are extraordinarily difficult to reconstruct in a definitive way that will move partisans off their conclusions. I suspect that that’s a big part of Trump’s relative calm here. Not only does he not have a pre-midterms option other than Kavanaugh, but he assumes that we won’t really be in a different place at the end of this week than we were at the end of last. Don’t you think?
Douthat: I really don’t know. I’m probably wrong about this, but I keep feeling that there is somebody out there who can, if not clear this up fully, at least shed a lot more light on the situation — either by remembering the party or some piece of the evening as Christine Blasey Ford describes it or by remembering something else that would suggest more strongly that she’s misremembering. As I wrote last week, there are a lot of relevant people we haven’t heard from at all — including not only folks on the FBI interview list, Mark Judge and P.J. Smyth and Leland Keyser — but also Ford’s parents and siblings and Chris “Squi” Garrett, the friend of Kavanaugh’s who was his connection to Ford. We also haven’t seen her therapist notes, which are pretty important to her credibility. So it still seems to me that something might be lurking that would change the complexion of things dramatically.
Bruni: But do you not worry, as I do, that this focus on what we may yet learn about 36 years ago and what evidence could still be unearthed distracts from what we learned on Thursday and what evidence we have — about Brett Kavanaugh’s temper, truthfulness and, at this point, epic sense of partisan grievance? He lies, Ross. We now know that. Never lost a memory to too much alcohol? Renate Alumnius? There are a dozen or more details from Thursday and beforehand that show his willingness to massage the facts however necessary to get this court seat that he wants too badly and that he would assume and inhabit with a vengefulness that’s disqualifying. What comes around goes around? Those were his words on Thursday, more or less. Is that a Supreme Court justice you want?
Douthat: The thing about being pro-life is that I’ve lived my entire adult life believing that the high court’s jurisprudence has been a moral disaster for American life, which tends to breed a certain … detachment from the idea that there exists some ideal impartial nonpartisan style of jurisprudence that we can all rally around or even patriotically respect. I would definitely prefer, and have said so repeatedly, a figure like Amy Coney Barrett as the potential fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade rather than a man accused of sexual assault; nothing about the hearing changed my mind about that or made me think that Kavanaugh would be anything but a radically polarizing figure if he’s elevated.
I’m not, however, completely convinced that his rage and desperation at being asked to prove a negative about a potentially life-destroying allegation with nothing but a calendar for ammunition was proof that he’s a sociopath, as opposed to just a human being in extremis.
Bruni: It was and is definitely an “in extremis” situation. I grant you that. And yet: The way he went after Amy Klobuchar? Other flashes of nastiness and meanness? That attitude toward Democrats of “damn all of you and the donkeys you rode in on”? And this from a man who was himself all guns blazing, all partisan passion, all pornographic specificity when it came to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? That stays with me. And his demeanor during his testimony on Thursday was in some measure probably deliberate, a decision he made. Think about the transformation from zombie Kavanaugh on Fox News a week ago Monday night to fire-and-fury Kavanaugh on Thursday afternoon.
I am convinced that between those two moments, someone whispered to him about what Donald Trump wanted to see and about Trump being the most pivotal figure of all in whether this nomination was to keep moving forward.
Douthat: I guess my feeling is that because much of the media thinks it’s obvious Kavanaugh did it, he’s basically in a no-win situation. Go on TV and do a low-energy refutal? “Oh, you’re trying to look like a choirboy, and it’s phony.” Go on TV and show tons of emotion, getting angry and sobbing and then getting angry again? “Oh, you don’t have the temperament for the job.” I also suspect Kavanaugh shaded the truth in a couple of his yearbook answers, but when I read lists of his supposed litany of lies I mostly just see someone being his own defense attorney — e.g., saying that Ford’s witnesses “refuted” her is not a lie but a self-interested interpretation; putting the best possible face on your drinking is not the same as denying that you drank too much sometimes; changing the subject from alcohol to your own academic success is just a clumsy attempt to be your own character witness.
And some of the alleged “lies” are clearly just misreadings of his remarks. He correctly described the Maryland and D.C. drinking laws in his prepared remarks and just glossed the issue later. He doesn’t claim he didn’t “ralph” from drinking at Beach Week; he just said he has a weak stomach for beer or spicy food (which is the truth, I understand), in order to imply that any ralphing-after-drinking wasn’t proof he was incapacitated or blacked out.
Bruni: It is undeniably true that if Kavanaugh did none of the things that he’s accused of, and if Christine Blasey Ford’s memory is somehow incorrect, all of his behavior over the last few weeks must be seen through that lens. But “shaded the truth,” “self-interested interpretation” — I think that we, meaning you and me and lawmakers and Americans, make excuses and grant forgiveness when we want to, in accordance with a tribalism too intense right now.
Douthat: I am just a little skeptical of how his critics, in a culture where almost everyone (myself included) drank a lot in college, are assessing Kavanaugh’s attempts to deny — again, in a prove-a-negative-situation — that his drinking made him a potential blackout rapist. I’m open to clear proof of perjury, but right now I’m still focused on the assault allegations themselves, where I would really, really like one directly corroborating witness — just one — to events that all seem like they could very well have corroborating witnesses. I just think that kind of resolution would be vastly preferable to an attempt to catch Kavanaugh out on one of his yearbook denials and declare that justice has been done.
Bruni: Let’s stop the litigating there and end on a point where I’m guessing we have agreement: This latest chapter of the Trump presidency, like everything else about it, has brought the schisms of contemporary America and contemporary politics into the boldest, sharpest, scariest relief imaginable. No?
Douthat: Yes. Part of why I want some real resolution about the allegations themselves is that otherwise this is going to be an open wound for years to come, in an already bloodied body politic. So that, above all, is what I’m hoping for this week. Thanks for chatting, Frank.
Bruni: Here’s a prayer for the healing of wounds, maybe not this week, and maybe not by our next conversation, but before too long. Thanks, Ross.
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