A Disgraceful Pardon

If Democrats want to understand one of the reasons the Republican Party is ascendant, they can look to President Biden’s pardon on Sunday for his son Hunter. In its rank mendacity, political hypocrisy, naked self-dealing and wretched example, it typifies so much of what so many Americans have come to detest about what the MAGA world calls “the swamp.”

Start with the mendacity. Last December, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, insisted, “I’ve been very clear: The president is not going to pardon his son.” The president reiterated the point in early June, when he told ABC’s David Muir that he would not pardon Hunter if his son was convicted, as he later was, of three felony charges related to his purchase of a gun while he was addicted to drugs. The younger Biden also faced separate criminal tax charges.

It was always a good bet that the president would break his word as soon as it was politically safe to do so. But he doubled down on dishonesty in his statement about the pardon, claiming Hunter’s prosecution was a result of “political pressure” on the judicial process. Nonsense. The charges stem from Hunter’s reckless lifestyle, abetted and financed by his willingness to trade shamelessly on the family name. A previous plea agreement between Hunter and federal prosecutors fell apart last year under scrutiny from a federal judge.

More obnoxious is the hypocrisy. Every year, federal prosecutors file hundreds of cases against persons charged with lying on the Firearms Transaction Record, or Form 4473, which is required from anyone buying a firearm from a licensed gun dealer. In 1993, then-Senator Biden made that form a key part of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. How is it that the same president who made both gun control and stricter tax enforcement key parts of his political message suddenly sees his own son’s transgressions as nuisance offenses?

As for the self-dealing, it’s touching that the president invoked his feelings as “a father” in letting his son off the legal hook. Too bad that luxury isn’t available to so many other parents who watch helplessly as their children run afoul of the law — and pay the legal consequence.

After the news of the pardon broke, a liberal friend wrote to say that perhaps it wasn’t such a big deal, at least when considering Donald Trump’s choices for attorney general and F.B.I. director. OK. But when a Democratic president behaves as Biden just did, it fuels the corrosive public cynicism that helped elect Trump yet again while licensing and excusing whatever plans the president-elect may have for politicizing justice and using it for the benefit of friends, family, and self.

What a degrading finale for Biden’s feeble, forgettable, frequently foolish presidency.

The perfect expression of the authoritarian approach to the rule of law comes from a former Peruvian president, Óscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” The truly corrupted legal system combines impunity for the ruling class with punitive repression of political dissent.

When Jack Smith moved to dismiss his federal cases against Donald Trump, that clearly signaled Trump’s impunity. It was a representation of the adage that might makes right. He won, so he now enjoys a privilege from prosecution.

The selection of Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I. — a move that would require firing or forcing the resignation of Christopher Wray, the current F.B.I. director, well before the end of his 10-year term — demonstrates Trump’s commitment to repression and revenge.

Patel is the ultimate Trump loyalist. I strongly recommend reading Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile of Patel in The Atlantic. Much of her reporting was based on interviews with Patel’s former colleagues in the first Trump administration.

“Patel was dangerous,” Calabro wrote, summarizing their thoughts, “not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the C.I.A. or F.B.I., but because he appeared to have no plan at all — his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow.”

Patel is so absurdly devoted to Trump that he wrote a children’s book about Trump, called “The Plot Against the King,” in which he describes the Russia investigation as a plot by “Hillary Queenton” against “King Donald.”

In December 2023, he told Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

“We’re going to come after you,” he continued, “whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out.”

To be clear, this isn’t conventional tough-on-crime language. He’s not telling criminals that he’s coming after them. Instead, he’s clearly targeting people who blocked Trump’s illegal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Biden did not rig a presidential election. Trump lost.

The danger to the rule of law is magnified by the circumstances. Wray is a Trump appointee, and his term doesn’t end until 2027. The only reason to replace him is to find someone who is more responsive to Trump.

Trump has clearly learned the lessons of his first term. When he nominates establishment Republicans, they’ll often (but not always) resist his worst and most unconstitutional impulses. Even Bill Barr, his second hand-picked attorney general, drew the line when Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.

But now he’s nominating people who possess few, if any, moral lines at all. The danger of Patel isn’t primarily his ideology; it’s his loyalty. He is, as Calabro wrote, “the man who will do anything for Donald Trump.”

When it was announced on Tuesday that Bravo’s hit reality television show “Vanderpump Rules” would not return with its original cast, it felt like the end of an era of reality television.

The show, based on the lives of the servers and other staff members at the West Hollywood restaurant Sur, started out essentially as a workplace drama. The cast’s personal and work lives blend into a mishmash of top-tier H.R. violations and a web of unending grudges. It was the cast, made up of some of the most irredeemable characters on television, that has made “Vanderpump” one of the most exhilarating watches of the genre.

In the show’s early days, the cast members were seemingly unconcerned about how the public might perceive them. They fought in the alleyway behind the restaurant, cheated on each other, got arrested, drank copiously and generally acted in ways that society deems inappropriate. Their narcissism and self-importance were so extreme that they rarely paused when normal people would stop to consider how their actions might make them look to others.

As the success of the show brought them fame, the show’s cast members began monetizing their notoriety with T-shirts and beauty lines and restaurants and bars where fans (including me) could drink and dine in the hopes of seeing cast members in person. West Hollywood became a Disneyland for Bravo adults, except Mickey and Minnie were James Kennedy and Lala Kent.

By then, though, the cast had something to lose, and they began to act like it. Over time, their interpersonal drama became more brand-safe, predictable and tame, and the show suffered for it. What once was an exhilarating show stuffed with vicariously appealing misbehavior had become a dreary weeknight watch.

The last two seasons of “Vanderpump Rules” momentarily changed that downward spiral. A cheating scandal — nicknamed the Scandoval — roiled the group when it was revealed that the cast member Tom Sandoval had cheated on his long-term girlfriend, Ariana Madix, with their friend and castmate Raquel Leviss. The show became a national phenomenon, and Season 10’s reunion became Bravo’s most-watched episode of all time, with 5.9 million viewers. The season even earned the show an Emmy nomination. The intensity of the real-life drama broke through whatever learned self-restraint the cast had begun to employ as their businesses grew; it harked back to the glory days of “Vanderpump,” when they acted like genuine fools on our television screens.

But it was the last gasp of the soap opera. The last season of “Vanderpump,” the final with its original cast, became the denouement of the decade-long reality show. The wounds of the Scandoval have proved too deep to heal: reportedly cast members remained fractured as a result of it. It’s unlikely a new cast in this day and age could ever fulfill what the original had, thanks to the rise of the influencer celebrity. Today how could anyone cast young people so unaware of their self-image that they’d be willing to behave as terribly as the cast of “Vanderpump Rules” did in 2013, when the first season aired?

With the show’s original cast gone, we may never see unvarnished, truly chaotic reality TV of its ilk again.

It has been popular in conservative circles lately to denounce the International Criminal Court for issuing an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, accusing him of war crimes in Gaza. But whatever you think of that arrest warrant, a new case underscores why the court is essential.

The chief prosecutor of the court on Wednesday requested an arrest warrant for the acting president of Myanmar, Min Aung Hlaing, accusing him of crimes against humanity against that country’s Rohingya minority.

I covered the mistreatment of the Rohingya in repeated trips to Myanmar and Bangladesh, where many of the Rohingya fled. “Genocide” is a strong word, but it may be that the world will eventually recognize the 2017 systematic slaughter of the Rohingya as a genocide.

One Rohingya woman, Dilbar Begum, told me how soldiers came to her village and separated the men and boys from the women and girls. “Then they shot the men and boys,” she said, including her husband and 4-year-old son. The troops cut the throat of Dilbar’s baby and chopped her 10-year-old daughter, Noor, with a machete, then raped Dilbar beside the bodies of her children before setting fire to the hut. Dilbar escaped with Noor, who survived with grievous head wounds.

Another woman told me how troops had grabbed her baby from her arms and thrown him onto a bonfire. A 15-year-old girl, the only known survivor in her family, told me how soldiers had tried to burn her alive.

There wasn’t nearly enough outrage at Myanmar’s campaign of murder and rape, and the Rohingya survivors today aren’t getting nearly enough support. So thank goodness for the International Criminal Court for reminding other leaders that there may be consequences for mass murder.

I’m sympathetic to the court’s effort to hold Netanyahu accountable for what is happening in Gaza, and I hope it will prompt reflection in the United States about our own policies. But whatever one’s opinion about the jurisdiction or substance of that case, the latest move to bring justice to the Rohingya should underscore that in a world of ongoing savagery, the International Criminal Court remains a pillar of a rules-based international order. It is a force for civilization and humanity that deserves our backing.

It’s a welcome sign that, unlike many of Donald Trump’s picks to lead parts of the nation’s health system, his pick for director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, is actually qualified. Though his record during the Covid-19 pandemic includes making catastrophically wrong predictions, he was also correct, especially later, on the need to consider the societal cost of prolonging early pandemic measures, including closures, hospital rules limiting visits, extended mask and vaccine mandates and social distancing rules.

Here’s some of what Bhattacharya got wrong about Covid-19:

• In the early days of the pandemic, Bhattacharya repeatedly predicted that the virus would likely kill about 20,000 to 40,000 Americans. (The death toll turned out to be about 1.2 million.)

• He co-wrote an influential early study that grossly overestimated how many people had already been infected and recovered from the disease, implying, incorrectly, that immunity was much more widespread than known and the disease was much less deadly than many assumed.

• In October 2020, he co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for “focused protection” measures only for older people and the vulnerable while the virus swept through the rest of the then-unvaccinated population to supposedly grant herd immunity. But protecting older people alone while everyone else, including their caregivers, got infected was never going to be feasible. Additionally, those who were not older or obviously vulnerable could still be harmed from infections.

• In early 2021, with no evidence, Bhattacharya declared that a “majority of Indians have natural immunity” to Covid-19, claimed “vaccinating the whole population can cause great harm” and predicted his preferred approach would “reduce death rates from Covid infection to nearly zero.” Shortly afterward, India suffered a deadly wave that killed millions of people in just a few months — among the highest, fastest death rates of any country.

But Bhattacharya also has some valid points. He has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak and whether infections induced immunity. Public health authorities dismissed him and his allies as fringe and did not sufficiently address their views and assertions, many of which were demonstrably wrong. He also correctly wanted the societal costs of pandemic measures to be considered more strongly; Francis Collins, a former head of the N.I.H., agrees with that point.

If his many incorrect predictions had been correct, even the early pandemic isolation measures might have been excessive. But at the time Bhattacharya was making these predictions, it made sense to be cautious because we knew so little about Covid-19. Even he conceded then that a virus that could kill millions of people would need stricter policies, and we got just that.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, the course of Bhattacharya’s tenure will depend on whether he can concede what he got so wrong while remembering that now he will be the one who needs to keep an open mind and listen to his critics, even when what they’re saying is uncomfortable.

As it turns out, it’s possible to make peace in the Middle East as well as war: President Biden has announced that Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a cease-fire, and Israel’s cabinet members have approved the plan. A truce seems tantalizingly close.

A cease-fire would be a triumph for Biden and his foreign policy aides, who worked for months to avert an all-out war between Israel and Lebanon and then, once it began, labored to end it. Biden said that the deal should lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah and that he hoped it would be a prelude to an end to the war in Gaza.

That will be the crucial test: Can the cease-fire change the political and security landscape in Lebanon so that peace is durable, and can it in turn lead to an end to the horrific war and starvation in Gaza? I’m skeptical on both fronts, especially the latter.

Israel’s war in Lebanon was largely successful militarily. Israel badly degraded Hezbollah, the militia that had attacked Israel’s north, a major setback to Iran. After past wars, Hezbollah rebuilt its capacity and ignored cease-fire restrictions, so it’s unclear if the calm will truly be permanent.

Then, there’s Gaza. While the destruction and loss of life in Lebanon were terrible, they have been far worse in Gaza. More than 3,000 children under the age of 5 have been killed in Gaza, according to Save the Children, and the seasonal rains are now making everything worse.

“Winter in Gaza means people will not only die because of airstrikes, diseases or hunger,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the Swiss-Italian humanitarian official who runs UNRWA, the United Nations agency that is a lifeline for the Palestinian territories. “Winter in Gaza means more people will die shivering because of the cold, especially among the most vulnerable.”

It’s still unclear what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to achieve by continuing the war in Gaza or what his postwar plans are, all of which makes it difficult to negotiate an end to fighting. For now, Netanyahu seems willing to let the suffering continue indefinitely for Gazans and Israeli hostages alike.

So bravo to Biden and his team for apparently achieving a deal in Lebanon. May they now use every bit of leverage they have — including holding back transfers of certain offensive weapons to Israel, as some Democratic senators have sought — to end the humanitarian nightmare in Gaza.

It seems perverse that Donald Trump would single out Canada and Mexico, two of the United States’ closest allies, for higher tariffs. But on Monday, he said that on his first day in office he would impose 25 percent tariffs on imports from the two countries that would remain in place until illegal drugs and migrants stopped coming over the borders.

Canada and Mexico are critical trading partners, whose economies are interconnected with America’s nearly as closely as Ohio’s is with Pennsylvania’s. The world is moving toward “nearshoring” (importing from close-by countries) and “friendshoring” (importing from friendly countries), to avoid supply disruptions caused by distance or political conflict. It makes little sense to set off a tariff tit-for-tat with two countries that are both near and friends.

Trump also vowed higher tariffs on China, citing its production of precursor chemicals for fentanyl. China is neither near nor very friendly, so it’s a more complicated story.

The United States gets 60 percent of its imported oil from Canada, along with cars, machinery and wood products. Mexico supplies manufactured goods, including cars, along with agricultural products. Prices of those items would go up for U.S. companies and consumers, even if the exporting nations swallowed part of the cost of the tariffs to preserve market share in the United States. And the United States would lose exports if those nations retaliated with tariffs of their own.

The inflow of illegal drugs that Trump cited to justify the tariffs are a huge problem, but it’s far from clear that imposing tariffs on the United States’ three most important trading partners is an effective way of fighting it. Yet however perverse it may be, Trump’s move is fairly predictable for a man who said while campaigning that “tariff” was the most beautiful word in the English language.

The real verdict on Donald Trump will be issued by the American people.

That was the familiar rejoinder to those frustrated by the inability of the legal system to hold Trump accountable for the crimes he was charged with, against the American government and against its people. Instead of facing a jury of 12, Trump would face a jury of 160 million, give or take. It was the most democratic manner in which to handle this unique and imminent threat to democracy.

Well, the jury has spoken. Trump will spend the next four years (at least) as the most powerful man in the world and without fear of a federal indictment while in office.

This was clear by around 11 p.m. on the night of Nov. 5, of course, but it began to take formal legal shape on Monday, when the special counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss both of his cases against Trump, one involving his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election and the other involving his hoarding of and refusal to return highly classified documents to the government after leaving office.

“The department and the country have never faced the circumstance here, where a federal indictment against a private citizen has been returned by a grand jury and a criminal prosecution is already underway when the defendant is elected president,” Smith wrote in his motion.

He made sure to add that this has nothing to do with the gravity of the charges or the merits of the government’s Jan. 6 case, which Smith has already described in great detail in his indictment, as did the House Jan. 6 committee — and that was generally regarded as the less solid of the two cases. Rather, under Justice Department rules, sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted. That’s the beginning and the end of it. Trump broke the rules that others play by, but as has been the case so often in his career, he will pay no price for doing so.

So what is left to say? It’s hard enough to accept a profound collapse of the rule of law and the work of multiple grand juries; it’s even harder to accept that this outcome was created by a plurality (but not a majority!) of American voters — more precisely, about 230,000 across three key swing states.

The people, given as much information as possible about Trump’s multifarious plots and crimes, chose nevertheless to bestow on him the ultimate power once again; it’s a democratic outcome, but not one supported by the Constitution’s insistence on the primacy of law.

The entire point of democratic self-government, after all, is the absence of kings; its leaders are bound by the same laws, and subject to the same punishment for violating them, as everyone else. Once that goes out the window, it requires years of painstaking work to restore.

It might be the most shocking news yet to come out of this roller-coaster of a transition: After weeks of choosing cabinet secretaries who seem determined to destroy the agencies they will lead, Donald Trump announced the choice of a secretary of labor whom many American workers actually like.

His pick, Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, who just lost her bid for re-election, was one of only three Republicans to cosponsor the PRO Act, which protects workers’ right to organize. She also cosponsored the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which requires all states to recognize public-sector unions.

In fact, Chavez-DeRemer, the daughter of a Teamster, has such a pro-union record that some Republicans are in a full-blown panic about her nomination.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana wrote on X that he plans to question her about her support for “Democrat legislation in Congress that would strip Louisiana’s ability to be a right to work state, and if that will be her position going forward.” The New York Post ran a headline quoting conservatives calling her “toxic” and “unserious.”

Her nomination puts the economic populist wing of the Republican Party on a collision course with more traditional Republicans, who have always been on the side of company bosses. She embodies the contradiction that is the Trump coalition. It won political power with widespread support from blue-collar workers but has up until this point looked poised to hand the federal government over to business-friendly billionaires.

A central question for this next administration is whether economic populists in Trump’s camp will be swept aside by the likes of Elon Musk or Trump will actually spend political capital standing up for the blue-collar people who elected him.

History doesn’t inspire optimism on this front. The labor secretaries of Trump’s first term weren’t labor-friendly at all. One of them in particular, Eugene Scalia, was called a union buster by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which opposed his nomination.

So why did Trump risk alienating the right wing by choosing Chavez-DeRemer? Maybe he felt the need to throw a bone to labor. President Biden, the most union-friendly president in living memory, is a tough act to follow.

More likely, he wants to publicly reward the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, who is said to have pushed personally for Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination. O’Brien stunned the world of organized labor when he traveled to Mar-a-Lago, spoke at the Republican National Convention and declined to endorse a candidate in the presidential election instead of reflexively backing the Democrat.

If Trump wants to prove that he is really on the side of American workers, however, he’s going to have to do more than one cabinet nomination. The real test will be his pick for the National Labor Relations Board, a less sexy but highly consequential position. If he follows this unexpected cabinet pick with a sign of support for the re-confirmation of the current N.L.R.B. chair, Lauren McFerran, that would be a sign that economist populists who stand on the side of workers actually have some influence.

Even Donald Trump is afraid of the bond markets.

That’s one big takeaway from Trump’s selection of Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary. Much has changed since President Bill Clinton’s chief strategist, James Carville, memorably observed in the mid-1990s that he’d like to be reincarnated as the bond markets because “you can intimidate everybody,” but that much has not.

Trump’s taste in cabinet secretaries generally tends toward iconoclasts. He likes to break things, and he’s looking for people who can help. But there are limits that bind even him, and perhaps just as important, the choice of Bessent is a demonstration that Trump knows it.

Bessent, 62, is a fairly conventional Wall Street billionaire. He went to Yale. He runs a hedge fund. And he has a long history of working with liberals when that was the profitable thing to do. He got his big break overseeing George Soros’s investments, and it was Soros who staked Bessent to start his own hedge fund in 2015.

He got Trump’s attention in the traditional manner, by loudly defending Trump’s ideas on cable television. Bessent is, in particular, unusual among his Wall Street peers in publicly backing Trump’s plans to hike tariffs on imports.

But Bessent has already begun to sound notes of caution about Trump’s economic plans. He has pointed out that tax cuts will need to be negotiated with Congress. He has suggested that tariff increases should be phased in gradually.

“President Trump has some very good ideas,” Bessent said on CNBC after Trump’s victory. “But I guarantee you the last thing he wants is to cause inflation.”

Americans worried about Trump’s declared ambitions can take a measure of comfort from the choice of Bessent. It’s a reminder that Trump may sound like a revolutionary but he remains primarily interested in protecting his own interests.

Donald Trump recently asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head what he called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an unofficial initiative for reducing the size of the federal government. It’s not going to be a real department, but its informal advice could guide the budget-cutters at the White House and in Congress.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that one of the key items in the DOGE plan would be to eliminate some federal programs that are funded by Congress but where spending authorization has lapsed. It’s a little preposterous, since the programs without long-term authorization include the entire State Department and veterans’ health care. But one such program is a particularly interesting candidate for the chopping block: NASA.

For over a decade, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has been the recipient of billions of dollars’ worth of NASA contracts. SpaceX would almost certainly not be where it is today without the federal funding that allowed it to pour so many resources into the development and testing of its rockets. NASA helped bankroll the company through its precarious infancy and adolescence — even when those rockets blew up. Thanks to this support, Musk has become one of the space industry’s most prominent leaders and perhaps the world’s most well-known evangelist for colonizing other planets.

With all that the agency has done for SpaceX, what would it mean for Musk’s business were he to eliminate, or even simply shrink, NASA?

Arguably, he’d be protecting SpaceX’s interests — and making it harder for more companies to emulate its blueprint for success. Since the turn of the century, every new administration in the White House has urged NASA’s leadership to nurture a commercial space industry. SpaceX is the poster child for that effort, but now a large number of space startups are vying for a NASA contract that could help them get off the ground (in some cases, literally).

SpaceX is on top right now, and presumably Musk wants to keep it that way. Were NASA programs to be cut, there would be fewer opportunities to award more money to a wider group of SpaceX competitors. Slashing spending might also force the agency to hand off more of its operations to already reliable contractors — such as, you guessed it, SpaceX.

The DOGE plan for efficiency, if fully realized, might just happen to benefit one of its architect’s biggest business interests.

Talk about a quick and humiliating smackdown. Florida Man Matt Gaetz was announced as Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general on a Wednesday. Eight days later, his complete unfitness for the job had become so undeniable and insurmountable that he withdrew from consideration. The nomination didn’t last even a full Scaramucci.

This could not have happened to a more deserving guy.

For those who care about checks and balances, Gaetzgate was about so much more than the political fate of a proud poster boy for arrested development who has the morals of a coked-up bonobo. Trump’s decision to put him forward was an early, gross test for the president-elect’s entire Senate team.

Republican lawmakers were being asked to lash themselves to the personification of Trump’s morally bankrupt impulses, to choke down their bile and prove just how low they were willing to go. How they handled this challenge was going to be an early signpost of, as well as a building block in, their relationship with the second Trump administration.

No one knew this better than the president-elect himself. By now, the Republican House conference has been pretty thoroughly MAGAfied. And while the Senate has been trending Trumpier as well, the transformation is not yet complete. There are still some Republican senators who value the chamber’s role as an independent power center. With Gaetz, the MAGA king was watching to see if there was a line that his Senate subjects would not yet cross.

Make no mistake. This is just the beginning of Trump’s efforts to bring the upper chamber to heel. His M.O. is to relentlessly pressure-test people and institutions. Those who don’t crumble at first are hit again. And again. The goal is to shatter the resisters’ spines, one vertebra at a time if necessary, so that they don’t just bow before him but rather collapse in a gelatinous blob. Like, say, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

But for now, Gaetz’s implosion is cause for a tiny moment of celebration — and for a hat tip to the Senate Republicans who made it happen.

It only took two weeks after Election Day for House Republicans to bully Representative-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, who will become the first openly transgender member of Congress in January.

On Monday an exhausting Republican from South Carolina, Representative Nancy Mace, announced plans to introduce a measure that would bar McBride and any other trans women working in the Capitol from using women’s restrooms there. On Wednesday in response, Speaker Mike Johnson announced a move that would prohibit transgender people from using “single-sex facilities” on the House side of the Capitol and in House office buildings, including restrooms, changing rooms and locker rooms, that match their gender identity.

While abhorrent, this move is straight out of a longtime reactionary playbook. A decade ago, after their attempts to exclude gay people from public life finally failed, Republicans began to use bathroom bills to stir up a culture war targeting transgender Americans, a smaller group with fewer legal protections. Their attempt succeeded; now debates over trans existence have become a feature of everyday political discourse.

Provocateurs like Mace build political capital by tying the juvenile urge to gossip about people’s privates to the assumption that “men” set loose in women’s bathrooms will commit sexual violence. Demagogues prey on many Americans’ inexperience with transgender identity and women’s very real fears about being assaulted, cynically casting trans women as others who invade otherwise safe spaces.

That approach was evident in Johnson’s explanation of his decision: “Women deserve women’s-only spaces.” It evidently does not matter to him that one woman — McBride — will be excluded from them.

By casting McBride and women like her as others instead of targeting the men (say, those poised to lead the executive branch) who have been credibly accused of perpetrating sexual violence, women of the right can drape themselves in pseudofeminist cloth while sidestepping any work of true feminism that would make them too left-leaning for their conservative audiences.

There is no evidence that suggests that trans women perpetrate sexual violence when they use the women’s restroom. But these sorts of policies aren’t about reality; they are about cultural posturing and fomenting division between cisgender straight women and L.G.B.T.Q. people (who otherwise would be natural allies).

Today’s patriarchal systems need amateur Phyllis Schlaflys to spread traditional ideas about gender that distract women from their relentless pursuit of dignity, equality and freedom. In exchange for loudly playing that role, legislators like Mace and Johnson get to break through a noisy political environment and capture a cascade of public attention; one need only look at Mace’s latest dog-whistle-filled social media tirade and the scrutiny it has provoked to see this particular culture warrior’s grift in action.

A climate of fear that targets trans people may be electorally expedient, but Mace should consider the slippery slope she treads. The enforcement of biological essentialism when it comes to sex was long used as a justification to exclude women from public spaces, professions and full citizenship. Once the right has successfully excluded trans women (and, presumably, all other queer people) from public life, they will need new fuel for their outrage fire. I suspect whichever women are left will be high on their list of targets.