Dispatch writer Kevin Williamson has little patience for conservative friends who “hurl themselves headlong at an opportunity to find something good to say" about President Donald Trump.Recently the staff of the hyper conservative National Review even knocked together a recent staff editorial — premature, he says — on the subject of Trump’s reflecting pool beautification project before it went straight-up swampy. Of course, the Trump administration awarded the no-bid contract to a firm linked to a Trump crony, so Williamson said of course the thing became a “fiasco” with algae and ducks “keeling over dead.”But what should people who believe Trump expect if not another head dip in embarrassment? There’s a pattern here, after all.“The president himself, and virtually every senior member of his administration, lies almost all the time about almost everything. J.D. Vance, out there flogging his book about becoming a Christian, uses the Eighth Commandment like it came out of a package that says ‘Charmin’ on it. Federal judges no longer accept as given that DOJ lawyers will not simply lie to them. A federal court has just thrown out a nakedly political and legally laughable attempt to prosecute Trump’s political opponents in Minnesota,” said Williamson.“Given a choice between the word of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the attorney general, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the Republican leader in the Senate, the speaker of the House, Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Lindsey Graham, et al., and the word of some utterly unknown party, the only rational assumption is that the unknown party starts from a higher degree of presumptive credibility, inasmuch as one does not know for a fact that he has already lied repeatedly about important public matters or served as an active collaborator with such lies,” Williamson added. “Maybe there has been [Reflecting Pool] vandalism. But whose word can we take on that? Trump’s? Vance’s? Jeanine Pirro’s? Are you kidding me?”Williamson made a reference to another historical cad with an administration that had great talent at building highways.“’It cannot be the case that literally everything the man did is wrong,’” Williamson quoted the National Review, speaking of Trump’s beautification efforts. “I suppose those words might have occurred to contented motorists speeding down Germany’s magnificent autobahn from time to time. But, at some point, one might legitimately ask why anybody would grasp at such a straw.”“Half the problem with Trumpism is Trumpism. And the other half of the problem with Trumpism is Trump,” Williamson argued. “Trump will always betray those who trust him. And he will always force his underlings to go out in public and defend indefensibly stupid things. Ask Larry Kudlow or Kevin Hassett. And, contra National Review’s social-media intern, Trump will reliably make everything he gets his hands on ugly: His Caligula-by-way-of-Liberace aesthetic is not only — or even mainly — the result of bad taste but the result of bad character. There is a reason vanity is numbered among the seven deadly sins. “To assume that the reflecting pool work would be done incompetently and corruptly is far from absurd. If you happen to be among those who believe that character is destiny, then it is, at the very least, a reasonable assumption even if it is something short of an existential certainty,” Williamson concluded.
