Trump’s political shamelessness may be his greatest strength with MAGA

Every politician operates with a certain degree of shamelessness. It’s practically in the job description.

As they try to navigate in howling political winds, they regularly have to justify changing their positions. Maybe the country’s mood has shifted. Maybe it’s a matter of party loyalty. Maybe they’re bowing to pressure from big donors.

And maybe they’re being hypocritical because something they opposed during the Biden administration is now perfectly fine in the Trump administration.

WE ARE STILL NOT GETTING THE ‘STRAIGHT STORY’ ABOUT ALLEGED BIDEN DECLINE: KURTZ

Whatever the circumstances, it’s shameless to offer an explanation that everyone knows is garbage. 

And they have to do it with a straight face. They can’t very well say, Donald Trump is going to make sure I’m primaried if I don’t go along on this one. So they offer the transparently bogus explanation.

That, you could argue, is the nature of politics. You need to have some flexibility, some wiggle room. 

In one of my two interviews with President Trump last year, he tried to explain why he had totally flipped on TikTok. After all, he had spent his first term trying to ban the Chinese-owned company on national security grounds, only to be blocked by the courts. Now, suddenly, he had done a 180 and was trying to save the app, despite a congressional ban.

President-elect Trump is pictured in front of the TikTok logo. (Getty Images)

Trump told me he changed his mind because outlawing TikTok would help Facebook, which he considered a greater threat. 

I didn’t buy it. He had concluded that TikTok was incredibly popular, especially with younger people, and wanted to position himself as its savior. This, of course, was before Mark Zuckerberg began cozying up to Trump, such as by making a million-dollar donation to his inaugural.

Trump may have the biggest shameless gene of them all–and that’s part of why he’s successful. 

TRUMP RATTLED BY ‘NASTY’ ‘TACO’ QUESTION FROM REPORTER

He doesn’t get hung up on what he said the day before or an hour before. He can go from expressing sympathy for Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis to saying he doesn’t feel sorry for Biden at all. He can go from blaming the Ukraine war impasse on Volodomyr Zelenskyy to finally condemning Vladimir Putin to calling it Biden’s war.

Ross Douthat has a smart take on this in his New York Times column:

“The willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters — reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits (on policy, on power) but also generally willing to pull back.”

So MAGA voters trust Trump to go pretty far–but not too far?

Supporters of President Elect Donald Trump attend a rally at Capital One Arena in Washington DC, Sunday January 19th, 2025, the…