Hypocrisy Is the Point
It isn't a bug in the MAGA movement. It's the tattoo of loyalty.
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I want you learn about a moment from this week and tell me what you see.
On Kaitlan Collins’s show, Jim Jordan was asked a simple question. For years, Jim and the rest of the House Oversight machine treated Hunter Biden traveling overseas with his father as a five-alarm corruption scandal. Endless hearings. Endless innuendo. So Kaitlan asked the obvious follow-up: if that was disqualifying then, what about Eric Trump flying to China with the President of the United States right now?
Jim didn’t even try. He didn’t draw a line. He didn’t offer a principle. He just said he didn’t “have any issue at all” with it. Same trip. Same country. Same family business overlap. Different last name. Case closed.
The internet, predictably, lit up about the hypocrisy. And it should. But I want to push past the easy dunk, because I think we’re missing what’s actually happening. I keep coming back to a theory that’s gotten harder to shake.
MAGA doesn’t tolerate hypocrisy. It rewards it. The hypocrisy is the point.
I served in the House with these guys. I sat in those conference rooms. I know the people who used to lecture me, hand on heart, about character and consistency and “what would we say if a Democrat did this?” Those same people now stand on national television and contradict themselves inside a single sentence, and they do it without flinching. That used to confuse me. It doesn’t anymore.
Here’s what I think is going on. Inside the movement, openly contradicting yourself on camera is not an embarrassment. It is a status symbol. It is a tattoo of loyalty. The more obvious the contradiction, the more you are proving to your tribe that you will go anywhere for the cause. Anyone can defend a consistent position. It takes a true believer to defend the opposite of what you said last year and dare the press to make something of it.
Once you see it that way, the pattern stops being baffling. It starts being a system.
They warned, for months, that Kamala Harris would drag us into a war with Iran. Now we are in one. Gas prices are climbing. American service members are deployed. And the same voices who promised this would never happen on their watch are now defending it, cheering it, telling Kaitlan Collins on live TV that higher gas prices are just “life.” Higher gas prices were a constitutional crisis under Biden. Under Trump, they are weather.
They spent the Obama and Biden years screaming about the deficit. About spending. About the national debt as a moral failing we were leaving to our grandchildren. Now? Spending like the credit card never has to be paid. Not a peep from the deficit hawks, because the deficit was never the point. The opposition was the point.
They would have lit themselves on fire if Barack Obama had ordered a triumphal arch and a ballroom built in his own honor in Washington, D.C. They’d have called it Caesar cosplay. They’d have done six hearings on the marble. Trump is literally building monuments to himself in the capital, and the same people are silent or, worse, fundraising off it.
They held hearing after hearing because Hunter Biden took a $50,000-a-month seat on a Ukrainian energy board. Real questions. Fair questions. I’ll grant them that. But Donald Trump is personally taking ownership stakes in companies, pulling in billions while sitting in the Oval Office, and the Oversight gavel is suddenly very quiet. They convened panels over Hunter selling paintings above market. Meanwhile, the Trump family is hawking a “T1 gold phone” that was marketed as a proud American-made device and then quietly turned out to be — according to reporting — a reskinned Chinese handset, with the “Made in USA” language stripped from the website once people started checking, and roughly 600,000 customers still waiting on a phone they prepaid for. A grift in gold paint. Crickets.
I could keep going. You could keep going. That’s the tell.
Because if this were about issues, even one of these would matter. One. If it were about corruption, the gold phone alone would be a scandal. If it were about war, the Iran deployment would have triggered the same fury they manufactured over every Obama airstrike. If it were about spending, the deficit caucus would still exist. If it were about nepotism, Eric on Air Force One to Beijing would be the lead story on Fox for a week.
None of it lands. Because none of it is the actual subject.
The actual subject is which side are you on. That’s it. That is the whole movement, distilled. Our team is good. Their team is evil. And once you accept that frame, every contradiction becomes a feature. Every hypocrisy becomes a loyalty test you pass in public. The louder you defend the indefensible, the more clearly you are signaling: I am with my tribe, come hell or high water. The ends justify the means, because the “ends” is just winning, and the “means” is whatever Trump did this morning.
This is not conservatism. I know conservatism. I lived inside it. Conservatism had rules it actually applied to itself. What I’m describing is something else — a tribal identity movement that wears conservative clothes because the closet was already there.
So here’s the part Democrats and independents need to hear, because I think a lot of you are exhausted, and I get it.
You do not get to wait Trump out.
I believe — I really do — that when Trump finally exits the stage, the scales are going to fall from a lot of American eyes. The trance will break. The grandkids are going to ask the hard questions at Thanksgiving. The Republican Party that signed onto all of this is going to face a reckoning it cannot dodge, and history is going to be brutal on the people who knew better and chose the tribe anyway. I believe that.
But “eventually” is not a strategy. Between now and then, real damage is being done — to the Justice Department, to our alliances, to the credibility of American elections, to the basic idea that a public official should be embarrassed to lie on television. If you are a Democrat or an independent or one of the small remaining number of conservatives who still believe in this country more than you believe in any one man, you cannot outsource the defense. You have to make the case. Loudly. Constantly. To your neighbors, your family, your union hall, your church.
Don’t argue with the cult. You won’t win that. Argue past it, to the people who are quietly watching and quietly horrified and quietly looking for permission to say so.
I know these people. I served with them. I watched a lot of them choose, in real time, between the truth they used to preach to me and the tribe that was about to win the primary. They picked the tribe. Some of them will, one day, be sorry. Many of them won’t.
Either way, the rest of us have a country to hold together until the spell breaks.
Let’s not wait.
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