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Item one: The Michigan GOP and the Holocaust

The Republican Party of Michigan, as you may know, is among the weakest and weirdest in the country. The Democrats, led by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, swept last year’s elections as the GOP nominated a bunch of loons. The party responded by electing a new chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, who is a hard-right extremist who has asserted that January 6 was “completely antifa posing as Trump supporters” and refused to concede an election she lost last year by 14 points.

This week, we learned a little more about Karamo. Michigan Democrats are passing a package of 11 reasonable gun-safety bills, having to do with safe storage of guns and creating a red-flag law and other measures. This is a state, remember, where the recent mass shooting on the campus of Michigan State University took three lives. The state GOP responded with this tweet:

Those rings, of course, were taken by Nazis from Jewish Holocaust victims before they were sent to the gas chambers. In other words—Michigan Democrats trying to pass some gun laws are basically kinda like Nazis who exterminated six million human beings.

The tweet came under intense criticism that was to an extent bipartisan. Did the Michigan GOP take it down? Now why would you even ask such a question?! Karamo doubled down on it: “What amazes me is that people are troubled by drawing comparisons between historical events and current events. We love the phrase that history repeats itself. But yet when we point to history, somehow that’s controversial. I will not tolerate that. I will not apologize for that.”

The right-wing argument the tweet invokes, that the Jews of Nazi Germany could have defended themselves against slaughter if only they’d had guns, which they did not have because the Nazis passed strict gun control laws, is one of the more grotesquely cynical perversions of history by the contemporary right. It started in the 1990s and is now an article of faith in certain circles. The Nazis did pass gun control laws, but independent scholars have found that such laws existed in Weimar Germany as well. The Nazis did ban Jews from gun ownership in the late 1930s. But they banned Jews from virtually any form of participation in civic and public life. The idea that Germany’s Jews could somehow have prevented the Holocaust if they’d been armed is, to put it politely, utterly unprovable and is not an argument made for the sake of history or the slaughtered six million but for the sake of the present—that is, preserving unfettered gun rights in America and defending a set of laws that are producing death on a mass scale (though obviously not the scale of the Holocaust). It’s sick.

Keep at it, Michigan GOP. There are millions more voters to alienate.

Item two: The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

Everybody seems to agree that just as Norma Desmond was ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille, Donald Trump is ready for his perp walk. I’m not so sure.

The argument for is that he wants that photo of himself surrounded by deep-state thugs, preferably in handcuffs, because he’ll be able to raise millions off it. As we’ve learned over and over, the grift is always Trump’s first motivation for anything.

The argument against, however, centers around his vanity and his hair, and it’s a strong one. What if it’s a particularly windy day? In that case, Trump risks photos like this one, or even worse. I’m not sure he’d be willing to risk that.

I’ve often thought—OK, I’ve occasionally thought—about what his hair looks like when he gets out of bed in the morning. The best guess of the experts I’ve read on the topic is that his hair is real but it exists in splotches, a sort of Robert Motherwell painting of the human scalp—a splat here, a blotch there, blankness elsewhere. I wonder how long he allows this mess to rest on his head each morning before he goes to the bathroom to style it. Or does he even do it himself? Is there a nervous stylist on the payroll, who must be constantly on call, like Stalin’s projectionist, ready to leap from his bed at 3 a.m. whenever the Man of Steel felt the urge to screen City Lights one more time? (Chaplin was one of Koba’s favorites.)

I was once getting my makeup done at MSNBC. I was chatting with the stylist, whom I’d gotten to know pretty well. This person worked mostly at MSNBC but occasionally got in a little extra weekend work at Fox News. I asked how different things were at the two networks, in terms of the amount of time she was required to spend on the hosts’ hair and such. The answer was just as you’d expect. She spent far, far more time on the Fox hosts’ hair than on MSNBC hosts’. She dished a little very funny gossip. I begged her to write this up for me, but she understandably demurred.

Trump provides more living proof of the obsession on the right with a certain kind of cultivated—one might say, obviously, flauntingly overcultivated—public persona. His appearance, of course, is a metaphor for the complete phoniness of his persona and indeed self. His hair, that orange stuff he piles on his face (and how long does that take every morning?), the way he wears those red ties so long in the apparent belief that they somehow hide his girth—everything about the man is superficial and false. If a man with liberal politics were this plastic, the New York Post would have gotten to the bottom of the hair routine ages ago and made sure that Americans understood that it proved what a phony he was. But liberals by and large don’t know how to play that kind of offense.

This week’s quiz: The evil that lurks in the hearts of men … Really amazingly cruel shit done by some of history’s most notorious dictators. Don’t ask me how I came up with this one.

These are not nice people. Answers next week. Feedback to [email protected].

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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