Well of course Trump's Project 2025 allies are garbage human beings

When it comes to this viral BlueSky post about Project 2025's John McEntee, it feels like it'd be a sin to avoid piling on.

This foisted-on-us-by-Trump weirdo runs a "conservative" dating site now, because of course he does. It probably has tips like "Take your date to an orphanage and pretend you're going to adopt one of the kids. When the kid walks out to your car with a bag of their belongings, drive off laughing."

It's still almost amazing how Trump manages to find seemingly every one of the worst sociopathic freaks in America—except that, of course, it works the other way around. The Heritage Foundation and other pseudo-conservative think tanks and pretty much any other "conservative" circle you can name have been stewing in guys like this for a very long time now, and Trump doesn't "find" people like McEntee, they show up on his doorstep because if you're furiously ambitious, malevolently indifferent to the welfare of others, and don't have a problem with bending the law, dumping yourself on the doorstep of Mar-a-Lago like an abandoned baby in the hopes that Dear Dumbass Leader will take you in is likely to be one of your most promising career moves.

People with basic human morals don't show up in Trump's orbit because nobody with a bit of decency in their head wants to be in Trump's orbit. It's just the ambitious malevolents like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and pining-for-revolution freaks like the Heritage dude who cling to Trump, and Trump will let anyone cling to him so long as he finds them useful and properly obsequious.

This goes back to my own foundational rule of politics, which is that the people who either seek power or seek to attach themselves to power should not be automatically granted dignity or respect that they do not earn, and that doing so is in large part responsible for the nation's current anti-democratic backsliding. Our press is horrific on this front; the moment someone new appears in politics, from Moms for Liberty weirdos to the far-right unreformed confederates whose names keep peppering red state ballots to this grinning sadist, the new person is treated as automatically qualified for Serious Person status and journalists put them on television as a genuine Voice o'da People, no questions asked.

It's only later that we find out that they're tied to a neo-Nazi group or have been arrested multiple times for domestic violence or couldn't pass background checks for a needed security clearance. (And have you met some of the people who skated through their security clearance background checks? It's not a f'kin high bar.)

My own rule of politics is that you should treat political figures with respect if and only if you would feel comfortable inviting them to your house. I'm not saying "if you would enjoy them coming to your house," I'm saying any of these human burrs clinging to the carpets of power should be treated to at least the same scrutiny you'd use when hiring a babysitter. Would you trust Donald Trump or John McEntee with watching your kids? Could you feel pretty secure in the belief that they wouldn't immediately wander into your bathroom and start stealing pills? Do you think, based on what you know of them, you could trust them to not commit crimes in your living room?

No?

Well then there ya go, this is not someone who deserves to be called "sir" in a public setting, much less be granted a gauzy-lensed television interview so that they can expound upon their frequently abominable and amoral worldviews. If journalists felt freer to not grant dignity to people who they know damn well don't deserve it, we would have a lot fewer unhinged crackpots gracing our television sets these days and could, perhaps, even discuss an actual national "issue" or two.

I will still maintain, as I have for 20 years now, that it's political observers like The Rude Pundit who have true pulse of Washington and its enormous flocks of migratory hacks, not the damnable New York Times. Stop handing the reins of power to people who can't be trusted to babysit your kids. Stop calling them sir and start calling them something else. "The defendant," maybe, I don't know.