No, I Will Not Pay Tribute
And neither should you
There is a strange posture that many people who would define themselves as center-right take, even to this day. In order to be taken seriously on the subject of Donald Trump, one must first satisfy two preconditions: acknowledge Trump’s policy success on “securing the border,” and sufficiently criticize the left and its excesses — before any pointed critique directed at Trump will be heard.
Some people I call friends insist on this stance.
I do not know what they are talking about. And I have decided to stop pretending otherwise.
The precondition structure is the tell. When someone says you must acknowledge X before they will take your Y seriously, they are not setting an epistemic standard. They are administering a loyalty test. The preconditions are not logical prerequisites for the critique to be valid. They are signals — proof that you are on the team, or at least not on the other team — before you are permitted to speak.
The border success precondition is particularly revealing. Whether Trump’s policies “secured the border” depends entirely on how you define securing, and what costs you are willing to count. If you count only the metric of reduced crossings, there is a partial case to be made. If you count the legal costs, the humanitarian costs, the gutting of asylum law, the administrative apparatus built to implement family separation, the diplomatic damage — the case becomes considerably more complicated. The demand that you concede the success before being heard is a demand that you accept a framing that has already done most of the argumentative work. Concede the frame and you have already lost the argument before it begins.
The “criticize the left first” precondition is even more naked. It is whataboutism elevated to a methodological principle. The logical structure is: the validity of a critique of X depends on whether you have also critiqued Y. This is not how arguments work. It is how tribal allegiance works. It is the epistemology of the fan club, not the citizen.
What my friends are actually saying, without knowing they are saying it, is this: I have organized my identity around a set of positions, and criticism of those positions feels like an attack on me, and I need you to demonstrate that you are not my enemy before I can hear what you are saying.
That is a human response. It is not a serious epistemic standard.
And there is a deeper problem. The demand for these preconditions already concedes that Trump requires special handling — that normal standards of criticism do not apply, that the argument must be pre-approved before delivery. That concession is itself a form of acknowledging that something has gone wrong. You do not require tribute before hearing criticism of normal politicians. You do not demand that someone first praise Reagan’s tax policy before you will engage their concerns about Iran-Contra.
The tribute requirement exists because the critic’s interlocutor already knows, at some level, that the critique is coming from a place that cannot be easily dismissed. If it were easily dismissed, no tribute would be required. You only demand obeisance from those whose words carry weight.
I will not pay the tribute. Not because I am unwilling to acknowledge complexity — I am willing, and I do, and the complexity is real. But because the tribute is not being asked for in the service of complexity. It is being asked for in the service of silence.
The Socratic tradition does not require a loyalty oath before the question is permitted. The question is the point. The question cannot be killed by killing the questioner, and it cannot be deferred by demanding that the questioner first prove their allegiance to the team.
By what right do you demand the tribute?
I ask the question genuinely. I will wait for the answer.
It will not come. It never does. Because the answer — by the right of those who cannot bear to hear the question — is not one anyone will say out loud.
You might eventually need different friends. This becomes very evident when one no longer pays the tribute demanded to carry on a conversation or a relationship. If you don't move on in order to have genuine conversations about the complexity, they will let you go. 90% of my family are strangers to me because they were always trying to extract some sort of tribute that they themselves adamantly refused to pay even when the facts were CLEARLY on display, one such example of this was the murder of Alex Pretti.
I got a surprise phone call from a MAGA brother who happens to be in law enforcement a few weeks ago. The conversation turned to the events in MSP which were fairly fresh. He tried to talk all around the issue to extract tribute to give his talking points an edge but I wasn't having it and shut it all down with facts. No straw men, no red herrings, no goal post moving no both sides tolerated. Frankly the conversation went a bit better after he had to admit that it absolutely WAS murder, morally reprehensible, extralegal and unprovoked by Mr. Pretti. The high-fiving afterward by CBP was the final straw.
It will probably be another two years before I hear from him again. Not because I was harsh or mean but I was uncompromising of my values and the rule of law and people with power agendas tend to not forgive that.
When the "border" is mentioned in a discussion, a gentle reminder that 47 rallied Republicans to put off a bipartisan deal because he wanted to run on the topic generally shuts them up. Using a topic that could have been improved (with cooperation) as an example of accomplishment just doesn't cut it.
You stopped an improvement because of selfish politics and now you want to take credit? No.