Trump Is a Wood-Chipper

Imagine you put your arm into a wood-chipper

The chipper does what a chipper does. It takes the arm. You stand there, blood-slick and swaying, and you say to the machine, “that was really low of you to take my arm.” Then you feed it the other one. You say, “well, that was a new low.” Rinse. Repeat. Each remaining limb becomes another entry in the machine’s moral biography. The last thing you say, before the noise stops meaning anything at all, is that the chipper has really outdone itself this time.

That is what commentary about Donald Trump has become. Every week the same sentence: Trump has reached a new low. Every week the columnist stands, blood-slick, marveling at the machine.

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The problem is not that the sentence is wrong. The problem is that the sentence is a category error.

“New low” belongs to a moral universe in which the actor has a floor. It is the vocabulary you use for a friend who lets you down worse than last time, for a politician who breaks a norm you did not know could be broken, for a rival who finds a fresh way to disappoint. The word implies a moral column running downward from ordinary conduct, and the news of the day is where on the column the subject now sits. To say someone has reached a new low is to say that there was, in principle, a lower place they could go, and today is the day they went there. The column presumes a person on it.

A wood-chipper has no column. A wood-chipper has an operating specification. It receives material, and it produces mulch. The machine does not lower itself when it takes your arm, and it does not exceed itself when it takes the other. In each case it is doing the only thing it was designed to do. The distance between the first arm and the second is throughput, not moral distance.

Trump is a wood-chipper. This is not a metaphor about cruelty, though he is cruel. It is a claim about what kind of object he is in the sentence. Nine years of public record — the Access Hollywood tape, the family-separation policy, the mocking of a disabled reporter, the Muslim ban, the pardons, the coup attempt, the second-term deportation operations, the meme-coin grift, the pardoning of the January 6 attackers, the deployment of masked federal agents into American cities, the trade in political prosecutions, the demolition of the East Wing — do not compose a descent. They compose a specification. What the machine does when it is running is what it has always done when it is running. The pattern is not the story. The pattern is the machine.

When a columnist writes that Trump has reached a new low, the columnist is doing something that looks like moral reporting and is not. The columnist is administering the fiction that the object has an interior. The fiction says: somewhere, in there, is a person who could have chosen otherwise, and today he did not, and we register the failure. The sentence keeps the person alive on the page after nine years of evidence that there is no person on the page. The sentence has an author, and the author does not know how to describe a machine, so the author keeps writing about a man.

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The wood-chipper analogy is unfair to wood-chippers in one specific way. A wood-chipper is passive; it waits to be fed and does not seek out arms.

Trump is a wood-chipper that walks. He is fed by a coalition — donors, cable networks, Senate leadership, appellate judges, cabinet officials, a class of Silicon Valley operators who decided the machine was useful — and the coalition’s role in the story is not incidental. The coalition supplies the arms. The “new low” framing is doing worse than describing the wrong object. It is actively load-shifting. It sequesters moral agency in the man and lets the feeders describe themselves as horrified observers of a phenomenon they are, in fact, operating.

Susan Collins is horrified. Mitch McConnell is horrified. Ben Shapiro is disappointed. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is grieved. Every one of these figures spent a decade pushing arms into the intake. Each new low is a fresh delivery from people who profess astonishment at what the machine keeps doing with the material they keep bringing it. The lowness is not the machine’s. The lowness is the delivery route.

The columnist’s phrase serves the coalition. It converts a systemic act into a personal one. It lets the operative class say, in effect, we did not know he would do this, when the specification has been public since 2015. It lets the reader, too, off a hook the reader is on. The reader has been reading these sentences for nine years. The reader is participating in a genre that presumes the object of the sentence is capable of shame, so that the reader can feel, when the shame does not arrive, that the reader is at least the sort of person who noticed it was missing.

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There is a version of moral accounting that does not require the fiction of a floor.

It is the version you use for machines and systems. You do not ask whether a wood-chipper is having a bad week. You ask what the machine is designed to do, who is operating it, what it is being fed, where the mulch is going, and how it gets shut off. The questions are engineering questions and political questions. They are not psychological questions. They do not require, and are actively confused by, the vocabulary of moral descent.

The people around the machine have interiors. The Senator who votes to confirm the Attorney General has an interior. The lawyer who signs the memo has an interior. The billionaire who buys the platform has an interior. The pastor who blesses the rally has an interior. Each of them is on a moral column. Each of them can go lower, and does. The proper subject of a “new low” sentence is any one of them.

That is where the moral vocabulary belongs. Not on the machine. On the operators. What Ted Cruz did this month is a new low, because Ted Cruz has, in the technical sense, a self to lower. What the Journal editorial board did is a new low, because the Journal is composed of persons who have to type the sentences and press send. What the Federalist Society network of appellate judges is doing, right now, in the courts, is a new low, because a judge is a person whose profession is the disciplined exercise of judgment against personal preference, and each of these judges is a member of that profession, and each of them is choosing.

If you want a column that runs downward, run it under those figures. Track their descents. Name what each of them believed in 2015, what each of them has said since, what each of them has ratified. Their columns are the news. They are the ones with floors to hit.

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The columnist who writes that Trump has reached a new low is not lying. The columnist is misidentifying the object of the sentence. The object of the sentence is not Trump. The object of the sentence is the collaborator at whose feet the arm now lies.

This does not mean the machine should be ignored. A running wood-chipper in a room of children is the operative fact in the room. It should be turned off, and the person who plugged it in should be answered to, and the people who kept it fueled should be answered to, and the person who insisted, for years, that it was actually a valuable community appliance should be answered to. The mulch should not be described as evidence of the machine’s growing depravity. The mulch should be described as what a machine of this kind produces when fed at this rate.

The wood-chipper does not need our moral condemnation. It needs a plug pulled. What needs our moral condemnation are the hands that keep plugging it back in, and the columnists who keep describing the noise as if it were an argument.

Nine years in, the sentence Trump has reached a new low is no longer a moral judgment. It is a status report from someone who has not yet accepted that the machine is doing exactly what it says on the tin. The report is written in a vocabulary that flatters the reporter’s sense that a floor exists somewhere. The floor does not exist. The specification does. Read the specification. Ask who is buying, who is running, who is feeding, and whose arms are already gone.

That is where the lows live.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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