Benjamin Eric Sasse, junior Senator from Nebraska, Republican, peeked his head above ground last week, and American journalists apparently get six more weeks of sunshine. One of America’s most prominent “Never Trump” Republicans, Sasse garnered attention for criticizing the outgoing President’s spate of lame-duck pardons. In a terse, internet-friendly one-liner, Sasse said: “This is rotten to the core.”
Beginning in 2016, Sasse took point in the “Never Trump” movement when he preemptively announced his refusal to back Trump for President. This, and a handful of speeches from the Senate rostrum, made him an early darling of left-leaning social media, which dutifully retweets anything he says critical of the President. Despite being a junior senator from a sparsely populated state, he’s accumulated significant media airtime for his stated opinions.
Except his actions don’t follow his words. He votes strictly party line nearly 95% of the time (which, in fairness, is less strict than most Republican Senators). Given the opportunity to support the impeachment measures in 2020 and remove the supposedly corrupt President, he again voted party line, protecting the President he supposedly disdains. Facing a serious primary challenge, he ran radio ads boasting of protecting Trump’s judicial nominees.
This gap between words and actions prompts an important question: What does Ben Sasse want?
Sasse enjoys issuing media reports and press releases. He loves giving national interviews, and publishing books and articles in venues with a national reach. In short, he loves jockeying for attention, and getting the world's eyes upon him. He wants to be seen, because being seen is necessary for national office. It’s an open secret that he plans to eventually run for President.
Maybe not everything Sasse does is necessarily intended for a presidential run. Maybe he only wants a hand in swaying the national conversation and setting the agenda. But it sure seems at least possible that he has national ambitions. His demands to stay in office, embodied in his primary campaign double-talk, mean he needs to maintain his position and be seen. He isn’t interested in truth, he’s interested in attention.
That answers a lot. Sasse has little interest in truth, as evidenced by his repetition of internet memes in his books. He amplifies notional ideas carried in national and global media, because it’s easier than building a platform based on evidence. Truth, for him, is moral, not factual. Therefore he feels free to insert whatever pseudo-facts he desires, as long as they serve his capital-T Truth.
Sasse’s books, particularly The Vanishing American Adult, are littered with internet memes, to the exclusion of facts. He laments a storied Christian past of stay-at-home mothers and prayer in schools—a past which, as a Doctorate-holder in history, he should realize never actually existed. Many of Sasse’s anecdotes of supposed Millennial and Zoomer entitlement have been widely debunked; even the conservative National Review considered his book specious.
Unburdened by facts, Sasse builds a moral code which he thinks Americans will honor, by paradoxically putting Americans down. He seeks to sway our behavior, not by appealing to our better angels, but by shaming and humiliating us for wanting better. His morality works toward themes of work, service, and self-abnegation. Good people, in Sasse’s morality, subordinate themselves to leaders, who subordinate themselves to God.
His accusations of President Trump being “rotten to the core” derive, not from devotion to facts, but from a moral code in which certain people must serve. Trump’s pardons were not delivered to bad people, in Sasse’s opinion, but to people who strayed from their place: crooked businessmen, political insiders, and insubordinate soldiers. He doesn’t want these people pardoned, not because they are criminals, but because they aren’t correctly subordinate.
He’d never say so to the media, but Sasse has an Ayn Randian worldview, that life rewards certain people remuneratively (including himself) because they’re simply better than the mass. Therefore whatever keeps the mass subordinate is appropriate. Law, in Sasse’s mind, exists for lesser people. Trump is lesser because he churns up emotions in the plebian class, making rowdy White people think they own the country rather than being subordinate.
That, therefore, is what he means by “rotten to the core.” Sasse wants a world where people are appropriately subordinate. His opposition to Trump comes from Trump getting above himself, and not subordinating himself to the hierarchy. It isn’t that Sasse has strong convictions that keep him from supporting a criminal president, it’s that Sasse wants Trump to recognize his place in the hierarchy and stay there.
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