The ‘Jimmy Clean Hands’ Election

Criticizing Trump without trying to stop him is meaningless.

Latest Jun 14, 2024 0 17 Add to Reading List

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Some of the people who once supported Donald Trump seem to want him to win, but without the moral stain of voting for him themselves.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Floating Above the Fray

In the director Sergio Leone’s final movie, the 1984 crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, a group of Jewish gangsters in early-20th-century New York City goes from rags to riches and then to disaster. Along the way, they serve as muscle for the labor movement against cops and strikebreakers, which is fine with everyone except Jimmy O’Donnell, a rising and idealistic union organizer. O’Donnell—a small role played to perfection by the late Treat Williams—eventually comes to rely on the guns of the gangsters as he rises through the union ranks. But despite being up to his neck in the corruption around him, he keeps his distance from the thugs, who cynically nickname him “Jimmy Clean Hands.”

The Republican Party now has an entire subculture of Jimmy Clean Hands types, who claim to recognize that Trump is completely unfit for office and have said that they will not vote for him—yet will not vote to stop him.

Some Republicans have gone the full distance back to Trump, criticizing him but also now pledging to vote for him. Bill Barr comes to mind, as does Nikki Haley. Barr is a true believer, and Haley is a shallow opportunist, but both are pillars of courage next to Republicans such as Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and John Bolton, the supposed guardians of the guardrails who have made the case against Trump but have also vowed not to vote for either Trump or Joe Biden. (Bolton has said that he will write in Dick Cheney.) Even former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a more moderate Republican now running for a Senate seat, has said that he will write in a “symbolic vote that states my dissatisfaction with where the party is.”

To his credit, Ryan went on Fox News (he sits on the board of the Fox Corporation) to make his case, an environment in which it takes nerve even to criticize Trump, much less offer people a permission structure to abandon him. Fear could be an influence among the Clean Hands folks; some Republican members of Congress reportedly told Liz Cheney that they would have voted to impeach Trump, but they literally feared for their safety. (Senator Mitt Romney voted in 2021 to convict Trump. He told my colleague McKay Coppins that, after January 6, he spent $5,000 a day on security for himself and his family because of violent threats.)

Members of Congress might use the excuse that their career is at stake, but Ryan isn’t running for anything, and neither are most of the others. Mike Pence has been coy about whom he will choose, other than to say that he won’t endorse Trump. But Pence should realize that he is finished in politics and has nothing to lose—beyond the social ostracization that might come from Trump-supporting friends—by taking a stronger stand against the president who didn’t seem to care if a mob strung him up in front of the Capitol.

Arguments from onetime insiders such as Pence and former National Security Adviser Bolton are especially tinny, because they were “in the room” and know how dangerous Trump really is. Bolton even says so: On Tuesday night, he told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle that a second Trump term would be a disaster, especially because it would be staffed by people who—as Bolton admits—would be vetted to ensure they would never try to emulate Pence’s last-minute defense of the Constitution over Trump. Bolton said that an Oval Office full of such loyalists would be “a very dangerous circumstance.”

I am aware of all the arguments people make in favor of protest votes, and about how no one should have to mark the box for a candidate they don’t like. In a normal political year, I might even buy some of them. If you genuinely think that Trump and Biden are exact political isomers of each other—symmetrical in their badness and differing only in style—then not voting for either of them makes sense at least in theory, because you are in effect saying that you don’t think anything will really change either way.

In 2024, however, overwrought comparisons between Trump and Biden make no sense at all, and people like Bolton and Ryan know it. This realization is why, when they go on about Trump, they list chapter and verse about why they can’t support him, but when they get to Biden, they retreat to stock “He’s been a disaster” phrases: They know that to draw too much of an equivalence between Biden and Trump would be inane. Biden is a typical (and relatively moderate center-left) American president, and the Jimmy Clean Hands Republicans know that outside MAGA world, they would sound pusillanimous if they started mumbling about egg prices and diversity training programs while Trump is threatening to attack the Constitution, release insurrectionists from prison, and use the government to get revenge on his personal enemies.

In the end, the Clean Hands position encourages people to think that their vote really does not matter, other than as a solipsistic expression of personal dissatisfaction. It indulges the narcissistic fantasy that on Election Day, a town crier will say, “1 million votes for Biden, 1 million and one votes for Trump, and one admirable vote for Ronald Reagan. We all want to thank you for your deeply principled stand. And it’s not your fault that Trump won the state.”

Most of these ostensible Trump opponents, of course, will be happy no matter what happens in 2024. If Trump wins, they can push their Jimmy Clean Hands image, noting that no matter how much they hated Trump, they didn’t betray the party. If Trump loses, they can say that they warned their fellow Republicans. Either way, they can float above the fray. Because they care only about their own viability, both options work out: The Clean Hands Republicans believe that they will stay influential, moving and shaking, as if the Republican Party and the conservatism they once knew still existed.

I have sometimes been asked whether I would prefer that people vote for Trump or not vote at all. I think it is every American’s right not to vote, or to write in Marvin the Martian if they so choose. But I find it deeply mendacious for Republican leaders who know exactly how voting works—and especially how protest votes can affect the Electoral College—to make the simultaneous cases that Trump is completely unfit for office and that the election should not be regarded as a binary choice. The reality is that only one of two men will emerge with the codes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. These prominent Republicans know better, which suggests to me that what they are really saying is that they hope Trump will win—but that they hope he wins with the votes of others, so that they themselves may avoid the moral stain of voting for a racist, misogynist felon who egged on rioting seditionists.

Personally, I vote as if my vote is the deciding ballot. I know it isn’t, of course, but it focuses my mind and makes me take the civic duty of voting seriously. People have given their lives for my right to stand in that booth, and when American democracy is facing a clear and existential threat, their sacrifice deserves something more than the selfish calculations of the Jimmy Clean Hands caucus.

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Evening Read

Illustration of streakers with colorful blots covering them — Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: SSPL / Getty.

The Decline of Streaking

By Michael Waters

Fifty years ago, you couldn’t watch a live televised event without the possibility that a nude person might beeline past the camera. Streaking burst onto the scene in the 1970s, when media outlets began writing about college fraternities embracing the practice, and it quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon. Streakers crashed the Oscars, the Olympics, Wimbledon, a handful of rugby games, a Pan Am flight, and a plaza on Wall Street …
These days, I’m willing to bet there are few if any rogue nudists blazing across your phone or computer screen. “It seems like a dying art,” Cara Snyder, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Louisville, told me … Where did all the naked dashers go?

Read the full article.