Normally I don’t write this sort of “look at what outrageous thing this conservative pundit/politician said!” piece here, because we already have enough. And Hewitt has gotten more than enough pixillage here lately thanks to misappropriating Robert F. Kennedy’s famous speech on the night of the King assassination as a criticism of today’s Democratic Party, drawing a sharp rebuke in the Washington Post’s own pages from Kennedy’s grandson, Joe Kennedy III.
But that was perhaps a diversion from what came this past weekend in Hewitt’s next Post column, which I have had to read several times to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, that it wasn’t some sort of satirical piece.
Before you click, I think some context is necessary. First, you may recall that Hewitt was initially resistant to Trump as the Republican nominee, saying (correctly, as things have turned out) that he didn’t have the temperament to be president, and showing up the candidate’s appalling lack of foreign policy knowledge on his radio show. Trump, as usual, pushed back, and after some initial resistance Hewitt caved in and was fully on board by June 2016. Even after the Kavanugh appointment, which by Hewitt’s stated logic should have been the point at which Trump had served his purposes, Hewitt appeared to love the taste of the Kool Aid more and more.
Around the same time that Hewitt realized that Oceania had never been at war with Eurasia, that it had always been at war with Eastasia, another Never-Trump right-winger who has, unlike Hewitt, never wavered, made this observation:
My chief worry, among many, is that Trump would be worse in the long term because he threatens to destroy modern American conservatism.
We can already see how Trump is basically refashioning conservatism (I would say “corrupting”). If Trump comes out for X, within minutes people who’ve spent decades opposed to X suddenly turn on a dime and start cheerleading for X. (See, e.g. Gingrich on NAFTA and NATO, Mike Pence on everything.)
A bunch of very smart conservatives have allowed themselves to be seduced by a very dumb idea.
Nothing so eloquently proves Goldberg’s point as Hewitt’s Sunday Post column, “How the Navy could be torpedoing Trump’s chances in 2020”.
Yes, really. And it’s downhill from there.
Hewitt starts by talking dry politics. He doesn’t think Trump needs to worry about losing Florida or Ohio, but at the same time isn’t going to flip Colorado or New Hampshire back to red. OK, debatable propositions there, and if he had stuck with that it’d be just another one of those handicapping columns that pundits write when they’re stuck with nothing to say and a deadline to make on summer vacation.
Unfortunately, Hewitt had something to say.
He believes this election will come down to three states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio—that Trump won but where that result is not guaranteed this time around. I don’t think anyone here disagrees.
From there, however, Hewitt jumps off the cliff.
This starts with one of the quainter 2016 Republican campaign promises, the 355-ship Navy, the idea being that Obama had let us have too few ships, because naval history of course teaches us that navies with the most ships always win, even if, say, you send 200 Napoleonic-era schooners up against a modern nuclear submarine, because you still have more ships and why should any of us dare think that it’s about having the best ships.
But, his column isn’t about how not fulfilling that promise, alone, is going to cost Trump the election. He could have stopped there and still written just another mediocre column.
Nope. He advocates for … basically, turning defense procurement into a politically motivated jobs program:
Every time the Navy awards a contract for a new ship, the president or vice president should be at one of these facilities talking about the jobs the contracts will provide. But the Navy hasn’t been issuing those contracts, so the president can’t make those announcements.
Incredibly, Michigan ranks near the bottom of all the states when defense spending is calculated as a percentage of a state’s GDP — 47th out of 50 in fiscal year 2017 for what was once the arsenal of democracy. Per-resident defense spending in Michigan that year was a paltry $386, compared with $1,554 in Oklahoma.
[…]
When the Air Force decided in 2017 not to base F-35A fighter aircraft at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan, it missed an easy way to achieve some equity in the distribution of defense-industry dollars in the states. Trump could direct the Pentagon to reverse that decision.
[…]
Navy’s plans for a new “large unmanned surface vessel” calls for a ship which could be built at a Great Lakes facility; near Detroit makes sense, if only out of fairness to a state that has been largely ignored in the Trump military rebuild. Given the likely long-term need for many of these ships in the future, a new facility could be planted and grown along with the program. It pains this Buckeye to say so, but somewhere along the Michigan coast next door to Ohio would be equitable.
Yet, it is really the Navy’s utter failure to deliver even a bare-bones plan to realize the president’s promise of a 355-ship Navy that ought to rankle the commander in chief. A new chief of naval operations will arrive soon. The president ought to have waiting on his desk copies of the speeches in which he promised, and then promised again, a 355-ship Navy, along with the slogan famously used by Winston Churchill scrawled with the black Sharpie that Trump likes to use: “Action this day!”
Wow.
Since I’ve been a kid, Republicans and conservatives have put the military on a pedestal, directing tons of empty yet respectful rhetoric in the direction of Those Who Serve while they bask in the reflected glow of stony uniformed faces all in a row as the sun shines on them through a fluttering flag.
But at least their reverence included pious pledges to defer to the military and its leaders on how to make their decisions on what their services needed and where to get the things it needed made. Congressmembers might certainly vie to have those made in their districts, but administrations never, at least not publicly, insisted those choices be made with electoral votes in mind.
I can’t imagine anyone who worked for, much less supported, Ronald Reagan putting their names to something like this. They would have been smacked down hard, not least by the conservatives of that era.
But today, in the Age of Trump, only one writer on the right, Quin Hillyer of the Washington Examiner, took the time to take Hewitt to task for this:
[This] amounts to political cynicism writ very large … As it is, military-construction battles are already too heavily politicized in Congress. The president, who serves the whole country, should provide a fail-safe against over-politicization, rather than joining the scrum. The president’s job is to find the best way to protect the United States and its just common interests, period. To suggest otherwise is to suggest a mutiny against that solemn obligation.
What to me is most stunning about Hewitt’s column is that, as Hillyer notes without comment, Hewitt writes as if this sort of thinking were perfectly normal and rational. There is no allowance or admission that the idea of overriding military procurement decisions for the president’s political needs is something that has historically been held so far beyond the scope of legitimate political discussion as to not even need to be denounced. That Hewitt does not seem to recognize that such an objection even exists shows that Goldberg was righter than he knew two years ago.