Useful Fools

Trump, his enablers, and the oldest miscalculation in modern history

The Useful Fools

On Saturday afternoon, while the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed to tanker traffic, while 1,600 ships sat bottled up in the Persian Gulf, while six people were reported missing after an overnight American strike on an Iranian port, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself standing on a Navy carrier deck watching ships explode.

He also posted “Bye Bye, Drones” above a graphic of a destroyer firing laser beams. He posted a before-and-after comparison: 159 Iranian ships sailing under Obama and Biden, 159 Iranian ships on the ocean floor under Trump. He posted “Drones Dropping Like Butterflies” alongside an AI rendering of Iranian drones falling into the sea. He posted a fat caricature of the Governor of Illinois eating a comically oversized meal. He did all of this from his golf course in Florida, where he was watching a tournament, between approximately 3:51 and 5:36 in the afternoon.

These timestamped posts are now part of the permanent record. Xi Jinping’s intelligence services don’t need to hack anything, they can scroll Truth Social. The IRGC’s strategic planners, whose missile capability remains largely intact despite the cartoon ocean floor imagery, are drawing their own conclusions about who they’re dealing with. Every adversary with an internet connection received, for free, on Saturday afternoon, a precise and detailed picture of the American president’s relationship with reality.

Thus far, Congress has said nothing. The GOP caucus, which controls the levers of oversight, which has access to classified damage assessments that reportedly contradict everything Pete Hegseth has told the public, which is constitutionally empowered to demand answers, said nothing. This is where the story stops being darkly comic and becomes something that requires a different kind of language.

History offers a useful framework, if we’re willing to use it honestly. When conservative German politicians handed Franz von Papen’s coalition the chancellorship in January 1933, they believed they were making a controlled transaction. Hitler was useful, a battering ram against the left, a mass mobilizer they could aim and redirect. Papen said the quiet part out loud: within two months, he assured his colleagues, they would have pushed Hitler into a corner so tight he’d squeak. The conservative establishment’s fatal miscalculation was not that they failed to see Hitler clearly, but that they saw him clearly enough to use him and believed that the same qualities that made him useful also made him manageable. They were wrong about the second part in ways that consumed them.

The Republican establishment has spent a decade making the same calculation. Trump was useful, a base mobilizer, a culture war instrument, a wrecking ball aimed at institutions they found inconvenient. They swallowed their private assessments and made their accommodations. What they failed to account for, as Papen failed to account for it, is that a man without genuine institutional loyalty, without consistent ideological commitments, without the normal political self-preservation instincts that make actors predictable, such a man cannot be contained by rational strategy. You cannot negotiate with someone who doesn’t experience consequences the way you do. The containment strategy contains nothing. It does, however, make the containers complicit.

The Night of the Long Knives, June 30 to July 2, 1934, is instructive here. Ernst Röhm had been Hitler’s oldest ally, one of the very few people who addressed him informally, a man who had been indispensable to the Nazi rise. He led the SA, the Brownshirts, the street muscle that had made everything possible. By 1934 Röhm had ambitions that made him inconvenient to the industrialists and military establishment whose support Hitler now needed more than he needed the SA. Over one weekend, Hitler had him murdered, along with the broader SA leadership and anyone else who had become inconvenient, rivals, witnesses, old enemies, Papen’s own secretary. Papen survived only because he was still momentarily useful. He was placed under house arrest and thoroughly terrified. Perhaps most chillingly, the German cabinet retroactively legalized the murders. The judiciary concurred, and the military, relieved that the SA threat to their institutional prerogatives had been eliminated, said nothing.

They got what they wanted in the short term. Then they lost everything on the longer timeline.

Consider the current roster of the useful and the spent.

Jeff Sessions was Attorney General. Mike Pence was Vice President. Bill Barr provided the juridical cover. James Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, the adults in the room, as they were briefly and hopefully called, each made their calculation that their presence was moderating, stabilizing, essential. Each was consumed.

Consider Pam Bondi, the recently fired Attorney General, installed with a specific mandate to manage the Justice Department as a protective instrument. She is already caught between congressional pressure over the Epstein files and the demands of the man she serves, with no exit from that corridor that doesn’t damage her. Kristi Noem dismantled a carefully constructed political identity, the presidential-adjacent brand, the Mount Rushmore backdrop, and received in return the kind of casual dismissal reserved for people who’ve already been squeezed. Lori Chavez-DeRemer surrendered the independence that was her political identity for a cabinet position that has made her radioactive in exactly the districts she’d need to survive. Kash Patel is running the FBI on a mandate of retribution and loyalty, leaving a paper trail of his own that will outlast whatever protection he currently enjoys.

Protection is always conditional. It is always, eventually, withdrawn. Röhm knew Hitler from the very beginning and it did not save him.

After the collapse came Nuremberg. The trials established something legally new: that institutional complicity is its own category of crime, that the lawyers who wrote the opinions and the judges who signed the orders and the bureaucrats who processed the paperwork bore individual responsibility for what the machinery produced. “I was following orders” was not a defense. The Judges’ Trial prosecuted men who had simply done law, and found them guilty of the law they had done.

The American situation will not end in Nuremberg trials. The analog does not extend that far and it would be both inaccurate and hysterical to suggest it does. But the people who have used legal and institutional instruments to shield one man from accountability while dismantling the mechanisms designed to protect everyone else are creating a record. History has a longer memory than a news cycle. Some of Hitler’s enablers hanged. Some fled to South America. Some lived out quiet lives under assumed names. Eichmann made it to Buenos Aires. The Mossad found him in 1960.

The pursuit, when it comes, tends to be longer and more determined than the pursued expect.

On Saturday afternoon, the President of the United States posted AI images of naval warfare from his golf course while an actual naval conflict closed one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes. World leaders and adversaries watched in real time. The Republican Congress, with its classified briefings and its constitutional obligations, said nothing.

These posts are timestamped. They will sit in the archive alongside the Cuban Missile Crisis cables, the Eisenhower memos, the Roosevelt correspondence, the record of how American power was exercised at its most serious moments.

“Bye Bye, Drones.”

The record is the indictment. Everyone who had the power to intervene and chose silence is also in it.