I was going to write one more liberal column expressing outrage about what Donald Trump has done to the White House this week, but then I thought: Why? What would be the point? The people who would agree with me would agree with me, and the people who wouldn’t wouldn’t, and the world would go on its merry way.

Of course the president’s destruction of the East Wing is beyond outrageous. It’s completely illegal and un-American—not just un-American, but anti-American: the unilateral, I-don’t-give-a-fuck desecration of a civic shrine that belonged to all the people. Democracies have appointed bodies that oversee such things. Dictators, actual and aspiring, ignore all that. Call it overreaction if you must, but I’m sure I’m hardly the only American to google "Albert Speer Germania" this week.

And yet, it’s probably only the third-most-outrageous thing Trump has done since Monday. To place, in horse-racing parlance, I’d put the pardon of Changpeng Zhao, who "invested" in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency start-up and who pleaded guilty in 2023 to allowing his Binance crypto exchange to be used—get this now, and imagine a Democrat issuing a pardon to such a person—by, among other unsavories, Hamas’s military wing (not just plain old Hamas—its military wing!).

And taking the gold medal this week would be the $230 million extortion that the sitting president of the United States demanded from the Department of Justice. (I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence.) A Pahlavi-level tacky ballroom can always be torn down; these other corrupt precedents cannot be undone.

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No—one more outraged liberal column won’t add much this week. The more interesting thing I’ve been thinking about lately is not the leader who perpetrates these acts but the people who allow them and cheer them. Because this is the truly maddening question, from a small-d democratic perspective. Authoritarian-fascist demagogues come along sometimes; that’s the world. But democratic societies stop them. Why hasn’t ours stopped Trump?

We are cursed with four categories of fascism enablers. The interesting question about each group is not merely what they are doing, but why: What motivates them? Let’s go through them.

First, obviously, are the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Call them 1a and 1b, because I believe they have different motivations. The Republicans in the House and the Senate are mostly just tiny cowards who fear Trump, a possible primary challenger from the right, and most of all the MAGA base. The video clips that I hope they play over and over in future high school civics classes, assuming these thugs can’t fully erase our democracy, will be the ones of GOP legislators scurrying for the elevators as they deny having knowledge of Trump’s latest assault. Against stern competition, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the tiniest coward of them all, is the most pathetic exemplar of this: "I’m not gonna comment on something I haven’t read, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about," he told reporters this week when they asked him about the DOJ bribe.

The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in contrast, aren’t cowards. They know what they’re doing, and they have no voters to fear. We must assume that they are consciously creating the America they want. That’s most true of the two deepest reactionaries, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But to varying degrees, it’s true of the other four conservatives, John Roberts very much included. The record they are leaving behind of these terse, barely explained pro-Trump shadow docket decisions will be their legacy—of shame, if we manage to restore democracy after Trump, or of glory, if we descend into a Hunger Games society.

Group two consists of the cowards in the corporate and business worlds who surely know on some level that Trump is dangerous. But they stay silent, for, I think, one of two reasons, or some combination thereof. One, they fear Trumpian retribution. Two, they want their taxes cut. Have a gander at this list of donors to Trump’s razing of the East Wing for his ballroom. Talk about a basket of deplorables. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackrock. The Fanjul brothers, the megarich sugar magnates and welfare queens. Meta (Mark Zuckerberg). Amazon (Jeff Bezos). Palantir (Peter Thiel). Others are less blatantly offensive but obviously covering their corporate behinds. These are not by and large stupid people. On some level, they see what Trump is doing to this country. They just care more about other things.

Third come the right-wing "media" outlets that serve as Trump’s propaganda arms. Among this group again I think we see dual motivations. The first is the kind of cynicism exposed in those publicly released Fox News depositions relating to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit: Trump is good for business, so they lie for him to make money. The second motivation is more genuine: They truly despise liberals and liberalism and think we must be stopped at all costs, even when it involves lying to their audiences for a higher purpose. This mixture of the insincere and the sincere may seem incongruous, but actually the two motivations mesh together perfectly: The insincerity ensures that they defend and minimize every single thing Trump does, while the sincerity drives their coverage of Democrats and liberals, although it too is salted with plenty of cynicism, as when they try to persuade their viewers that some kooky neo-Marxist tenured postmodernist professor stands in for American liberalism.

And finally—the MAGA faithful. Here let’s distinguish between the soft Trump supporters and the true red-hots. Of the 40 or 42 percent of Americans who still say they approve of Trump’s job performance, I’m guessing that a third or so are soft supporters. Some are swing voters. Some are evangelicals for whom a Democratic vote is basically out of the question. Some remember the first Trump economy fondly. There are lots of different motivations there, but what they have in common is that they don’t necessarily consider him America’s savior.

But that other two-thirds … I hesitate to say these are bad human beings. But their rage at certain developments in the United States over these last 30-odd years is so overpowering that their civic and small-d democratic instincts have been buried by the antagonisms Trump has brought to the surface of American politics. They once knew, or they know, or a part of them knows, that no actual leader should be calling human beings "vermin." But that empathic impulse isn’t much match for rage, which can be quite exhilarating and liberating (we all must admit that we know this feeling from personal experience).

How deep does that rage run? We don’t yet know. We have yet to see its bottom. Tearing down part of the White House may lose him a portion of the softs, as polls suggest. But it won’t bother the red-hots, who’ll leap to point out, as I saw some nincompoop do on Newsmax Thursday night, that what Trump did was really no different from Barack Obama ordering the building of his basketball court. The pardon of Zhao is in fact the liberation of the crypto industry from the shackles imposed by Sleepy Joe. The DOJ bribe is money due to Trump fair and square. And so on and so on.

I sometimes wonder what it will take for some of these folks to peel away. What if ICE agents just start shooting people? They already are; but I mean en masse. I doubt even that will change anything. Things will change when the rage stops being exhilarating, and I doubt that happens anytime soon.

It takes all four of these groups to sustain Trumpism. If Republicans in Congress were doing their constitutional job, Trump would still be Trump but the legislative branch would have established the reality of limits. The corporate class could have said to him: We too know that we thrive best under democratic norms, and we cannot tolerate you breaking those. The right-wing media could still be basically pro-Trump while adhering more closely to the principles of conservatism than to genuflection before one man. And finally, his base too could at least from time to time acknowledge error on his part and demand that he adjust course.

But none of these things are happening. And it’s hard to see them happening anytime soon. Bad as this week was, it’s not close to the bottom we’re going to hit.

Last week’s quiz: "They got off with quite a haul …" The Pink Panther was, of course, about a diamond heist. So let’s have a quiz about famous heists (mostly factual) in history.

1. Everybody knows the phrase "The Great Train Robbery." But what country did it occur in, and in what year?

A. Russia, 1899

B. France, 1927

C. The United States, 1946

D. The United Kingdom, 1963

Answer: D, the U.K. in 1963. The bad guys made off with 2.6 million pounds (about £62 million today) from a Royal Mail train traveling from Glasgow to London. The 1978 film The First Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery, was about a different British train robbery, but interestingly, the British film Buster, from 1988, was based on the 1963 robbery and one of its perpetrators, "Buster" Edwards—who was played, weirdly, by Phil Collins!

2. Goodfellas touches on a famous mob heist at JFK airport, when, in December 1978, six men barged into the cargo terminal of what foreign airline and made off with $5 million in cash and jewelry?

A. Swissair

B. Lufthansa

C. Varig

D. KLM

Answer: B, Lufthansa. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta in Goodfellas) helped plan the heist but did not participate.

3. Who famously (if perhaps apocryphally) said, when asked why he robbed banks: "Because that’s where the money is"?

A. Pretty Boy Floyd

B. Jesse James

C. Baby Face Nelson

D. Willie Sutton

Answer: D, Willie Sutton. He was sort of a gentleman robber: He always carried a gun, of course, but he said it was never loaded—and added that he never robbed a bank when a woman screamed or a baby cried.

4. In 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into a museum and strolled off with 13 canvases, a Vermeer among them, worth $500 million. Which museum?

A. The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

B. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

C. The Uffizi, Florence

D. The Whitney, New York

Answer: B, the Gardner. It’s still the biggest in history; the recent Louvre heist was worth only about $100 million.

5. In 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the four accomplices in the planned robbery of a New York no. 6 subway train used pseudonyms that corresponded to colors. Match the actor to the colorful character he played.

Answer: Shaw = Mr. Blue, Balsam = Mr. Green, Elizondo = Mr. Grey, Hindman = Mr. Brown. Which one of them got caught because of a sneeze? Answer below.

6. The words at the top of this quiz—"They got off with quite a haul"—are from a Bob Dylan song that describes, over 15 evocative verses, a bank job pulled off during a festival. What’s the song?

A. "Desolation Row"

B. "Murder Most Foul"

C. "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts"

D. "Highlands"

Answer: C, "Jack of Hearts." Always loved that song. Great lyrics. 

Bonus questions about the song that I asked last week: In the same song, what did Big Jim own, and how was he killed?

Answers: the town’s only diamond mine, and a penknife in the back. 

Answer to bonus question attached to question 5, above: Mr. Green, Martin Balsam. Gezundheit!

This week’s quiz: "It can do what?!" A quiz on twentieth-century household inventions.

1. In what year did the first practical electric home vacuum cleaner appear on the U.S. market?

A. 1908

B. 1914

C. 1920

D. 1923

2. The first freestanding and automatically controlled electric refrigerator appeared in the United States in 1918. Under what brand name did it appear?

A. General Electric

B. Kitchen Aid

C. Kelvinator

D. Frigidaire

3. During what decade did dishwashers become common fixtures in American homes?

A. 1940s

B. 1950s

C. 1960s

D. 1970s

4. When did the touch-tone phone make its debut in the United States?

A. 1960

B. 1963

C. 1972

D. 1977

5. The Amana Radar Range was among the first microwave ovens to come into widespread domestic use, starting in the early 1970s. How much did the Amana RR-4 cost in 1972 (today’s dollars in parentheses)?

A. $199.95 ($1,576)

B. $279.95 ($2,207)

C. $319.95 ($2,522)

D. $469.95 ($3,704)

6. Match the percentage of homes with central air conditioning to the correct European country.

The U.S. figure, incidentally, is 90 percent. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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