Radio talk show host and columnist Hugh Hewitt is the ultimate in human equanimity. Perhaps he owns real estate through an LLC. Whatever the reason for Hewitt's calm (which I'll further speculate on in a moment), he hasn't always been so composed. For instance in June of last year he yelped on his radio show that Republicans' impending acceptance of Donald Trump's presidential nomination was "like ignoring stage-four cancer. You can’t do it, you gotta go attack it." The professional yapper and juris doctor had been rocked by Trump's "University" lawsuits and his unwavering belief that the conspicuous fraudster would lose to Hillary Clinton. Like most other Republicans, however, Hewitt soon became a pod person: Trump's nomination and subsequent election were just peachy.
Hewitt has been quite tranquil ever since.
Because, quite simply, he was part of the "winning" team. No matter how despicable his party's nominee might have been, and no matter how contemptible his party's leader is, and no matter how catastrophic that leader's presidency shall remain, Clinton lost, hence converted Trumpeteers, such as Hewitt, won. Their mission now? To assure all others that Trump isn't nearly so catastrophic.
This may sound like a herculean and even impossible task, given that Trump is indisputably, manifestly, almost inexpressibly ruinous. But the job is not nearly as arduous as we might imagine. For Hewitt & Co. has a little trick up its four-flushing sleeve: Belittle, with copasetic superiority, everyone who is properly outraged at this limitless atrocity of a criminal presidency. It's an old gambit of political gaslighting: persuade the perfectly sanely outraged that their fury is nothing more than snowflaked hysteria, in which the women have the vapors and the men are unmanly.
As Hewitt puts it: "Addiction is the story of 2017," but not an addiction to opioids or sex and not to "President Trump, either on the part of his adoring legions [which include Hewitt, so that doesn't count] or his self-anointed 'worst enemies,' whose ritual condemnations of Trump seem just as calculated to oblige notice of the virtue of the condemners themselves…. No, the centerpiece addiction of this year, widespread and growing, is to outrage itself — to the state of being perpetually offended, to the need not only to be angry at someone or something, or many people and issues, but also to always and everywhere be, well, hating." What's bleedingly obvious in this passage is that its writer does in fact mean a woeful addiction to anti-Trump outrage.
Hewitt is calm and clean and sober and loving, you see. Wouldn't you rather be Hugh Hewitt than your outraged, perpetually offended, intoxicated, angry, self-righteously hating self? Even if your outrage is not only justified, but principled and valorous? Principles and valor are easily ridiculed and subordinated, you can further see, if proper Outrage is transmogrified by calm, superior personalities into mere, effeminate hysteria.
The hidden objective of Hewitt's puffed-up crusade is, of course, the "normalization" of Trump — that the crimes, profound unAmericanism and unforgivable offenses of this reptilian con artist be greeted as presidential practices no different from the policy initiatives of a Reagan, Clinton, Bush or Obama. In short, the nation's Hewitts would have you believe that Trump is just the 45th in the historic line of presidential normality. Nothing to get outraged about. And if you are, there is something deeply misguided in you.
Don't fall for Hewitt's Trumpian scam. What he calls hysterical outrage is but honorable vigilance; the watchfulness of truly republican citizens who prefer that America not be led by a tinpot authoritarian and not be dragged into the lawlessness of a vertiginous banana republic. To be calm, Hewittian-style, in the midst of our national storm means only that you're deceiving both yourself and all others.