Empire of Vice

Congresswoman and MAGA acolyte turned antagonist Marjorie Taylor Greene let something revealing slip in a recent interview with the New York Times: “Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong.”

The Trump administration has indeed been marked by a combination of shamelessness and intransigence that is perhaps just as well likened to the public relations strategies of mafiosos as to those of politicians. But taken at face value, Greene’s statement says more than this. It’s one thing to point out that Trump and his lackeys defy norms of common decency and accountability. It’s another to claim that they are spreading these habits and threatening to establish them as a new normal in American politics. And I suspect that claim is right: the Trump administration really is training American elites and its broader political culture as a whole.

Vice signals are not just cultural messages or aesthetic poses. They also come with a body count.

It’s not that Trump outright tells people to cultivate shamelessness. He’s not exactly a life coach—beyond The Art of the Deal, Trump’s never been much of one for communicating explicit principles. Which isn’t to say he’s above explicitness: as chronicled in a biopic about Trump, the admonition that “no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat”was among the rules Trump himself learned as dark apprentice to the late lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn. But lack of open acknowledgment notwithstanding, the sense in which Trump has actively “trained” Greene’s side of politics is not especially subtle.

The president spent Christmas Day posting on Truth Social about “Radical Left Scum” and launching missile strikes in Nigeria as a “Christmas present.” If legacy media failed to dwell on these moments, it is likely in part because Trump has seldom deviated from the script of insults toward his opponents and disregard for the worth of other people’s lives. What’s new? Trump’s open cruelty toward the tragically murdered Reiner family was less surprising than some Republicans’ opposition to it—given the open hostility of many of the aforementioned toward the no less tragic attacks on Minnesota House Democrat Melissa Hortman, State Senator John Hoffman, and their spouses.

These statements and actions are the training. There has been much discussion in recent years about the supposed scourge of “virtue signaling,” the accusation that someone has made a virtuous-seeming public statement or acted in the service of their own social standing rather than for whatever good their act might really be worth. But we could stand to spend more time discussing a related and increasingly pervasive phenomenon: vice signaling. A candid photograph that went viral on social media paints the picture vividly—Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem laughing in front of the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center hastily built to advance the administration’s mass deportation campaign. The casual aesthetic of cruelty is the point. It’s a way of giving viewers permission. It says, we know what kind of person would find this monstrous: watch us laugh it up anyway to own the libs. This is vice signaling par excellence.

At first glance, virtue signaling and vice signaling might appear to be opposites, with virtue signalers associated with do-gooders and vice signaling with more cartoonish villainy. And indeed, vice signaling is related to cruelty, schadenfreude, and evil generally. A virtue signaler is trying to look good and a vice signaler is trying to look bad—but not to everyone. A vice signaler typically violates moral or other standards of an out-group precisely in order to look good to the fellow members of some in-group. Vice signaling, then, is typically a version of virtue signaling rather than an alternative to it.

But there’s an important catch. When we virtue signal, we are appealing to our tribe’s own values, however shallow or hypocritical such appeals might be: it is the fact that our in-group treats supporting this charity or using those pronouns as a demonstration of kindness and respect that allows one to try to gain clout by adhering to the rules despite having less savory motivations in one’s secret heart. But when one vice signals, the out-group’s values take center stage—in order to be shirked rather than lived up to. The moral commitments of the in-group are basically irrelevant: all that matters is owning the enemy, in Trump’s case the libs. And the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior.

The case is pretty good that we are seeing this play out in U.S. politics writ large today. Part of Trump’s initial sales pitch to voters was that “America First” meant avoiding foreign interventions and entanglements. The claim was always pretty easy to see through, but following the Christmas Day strikes in Nigeria, the abduction of a foreign leader in Venezuela, and renewed calls for the colonization of Greenland, the idea that Trump is a foreign policy “dove” might finally be a dead letter. Years ago, the idea of “states’ rights” was supposedly making a revival as GOP governors engaged in open defiance of the federal government under President Joe Biden. Last year, one of these revolting governors, Greg Abbott, volunteered his own state’s National Guard to help curtail the rights of other states in service of Trump’s broader attempt to fashion a makeshift federal police force. All this is to say nothing of the ongoing saga of child trafficking and assault lurking behind the Epstein files, representing exactly the kind of elite swamp Trump promised to drain. There’s more here than garden-variety opportunism and hypocrisy. Whether or not the individual actors are being hypocritical can’t explain the tepid condemnation and resistance from the rest of the party. The sheer brazenness with which the administration defies norms of truth-telling and decency is a clear message about what matters—crushing the administration’s personal opponents—and an equally clear message about what doesn’t: anything else, including whatever values, principles, or ideals that Trump or his party claim to stand for. As these examples demonstrate, vice signals are not just cultural messages or aesthetic poses. The anonymous banker who wanted to say “retard” and “pussy” in mixed company wants to live in the world the caters to the kind of person who likes saying those words—which is why he experienced that permissiveness as feeling “liberated.” The especially online members of the administration may be in it for the “ReTruths” and comment numbers in response to public chronicles of their various misadventures, but these messages also come with body counts: at least 115 in the various murders throughout the Caribbean and Pacific; at least 40 in the attack on Venezuela that culminated in the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro; and a still unknown number in the Nigeria bombings.

Performative cruelty may have started with the Trump administration, but it did not and will not end there.

These strikes are completely unintelligible as tactical maneuvers: the drug-trafficking routes supposedly targeted by the military strikes have little or nothing to do with drug use in the United States; the oil reserves in Venezuela are on the other side of a multibillion-dollar infrastructure investment that U.S. oil giants have thus far demonstrated little appetite for; and Nigeria’s own government officials directly contradict the White House narrative about the strike on its borders, despite collaborating with the operation itself. But all of these nevertheless make grim sense interpreted as political actions taken primarily for the sake of vice signaling and raw power projection: communicating a certain aesthetic posture to the MAGA base and its various ideological co-conspirators, training us all to allow it, and threatening all those who might disobey with the specter that the bombs will come for them next. The message says, I can do what I want, when I want, for whatever reason I want, and you have to take it. Unlike complex strategic objectives that involve prioritizing and maintaining strong diplomatic relations, the thrill of vice signaling—and the training—is heightened by saying the quiet part out loud. That is exactly what Stephen Miller, now White House deputy chief of staff, did on CNN earlier this week. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world,” he told Jake Tapper, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

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We have an elite impunity problem—a global one, with the United States the worst and leading offender. As Robert Reich reminds us, twenty years ago the United States invaded a country on pretenses now widely acknowledged to be basically fraudulent. This fact barely merits an “oops” from the many actors, elected and otherwise, who promoted it—most of all George W. Bush, watercoloring into the sunset to this day. More recently, the richest man in the world helped lead mass firings of federal workers. Meanwhile, state agents regularly kidnap immigrants and detain citizens alike in ways that are blatantly illegal. In its statement responding to the recent murder of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent in Minneapolis—caught on video and attested to by eyewitnesses, less than a mile from the site of George Floyd’s own murder by a Minneapolis police officer—the Department of Homeland Security makes a set of bald-faced lies. Negative consequences for any of the aforementioned are few and far between. In the United States, political power has long meant never having to say you’re sorry. It may have started with Greene’s side of the aisle, but it did not and will not end there. Michelle Obama’s advice for her side of politics—to “go high” when “they go low”—has sounded more and more quaint with every passing year (a perspective she recently attempted to clarify as a call for the decidedly more combative-sounding goal of “finding purpose in your rage”). In response, upstarts like California Governor Gavin Newsom have pinned their hopes on beating Trump and the GOP at their own game, doubling down on a communications strategy of trolling and insults that Steve Bannon praised as an “energized” response to the way Trump “has changed modern politics.”

It is probably no coincidence that Newsom gravitated to this strategy, having demonstrated his own taste for performative cruelty through personally helping to destroy homeless people’s belongings. Moreover, if the chilling case of the British Labour Party’s embrace of open hostility to immigration and immigrants is any indication, we should not expect different results from center-left parties especially when the center-left copies the right in designating the egalitarian, pro-immigration segments of its own base as the out-group to flout the moral standards of. Far more promising is the course charted out by Zohran Mamdani: one that does not shy away from conflict, but does not shy away from virtue either. Vices are best left for the vicious. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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