I think it’s worth dwelling on a small comment made by a small man who thought it was a good idea to sacrifice his dignity as a man, on live TV, for the sake of a dictatorial president and his dictatorial ambitions.
I’m talking about Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. In a side comment in an interview this morning CNN’s John Berger, he said: “You don’t want to go out on the streets at night in Washington, DC. … That’s one of the reasons I live in my office at night. … It is too dadgum dangerous, brother. It’s too dangerous and everybody knows it.”
Burchett’s goal is convincing us that crime in Washington, DC, is so bad that Donald Trump is completely justified in taking over the duties of the city’s police department, and in ordering the National Guard, the FBI and the Secret Service to commandeer the enforcement of law.
To be believable, however, we must ignore the fact that Washington, as well as every other major city in America, is seeing historically low rates of crime. “Homicides, robberies and burglaries [in DC] are down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall, violent crime is down 26 percent compared with this time a year ago,” per the AP.
“A recent Department of Justice report shows that violent crime is down 35 percent since 2023, returning to the previous trend of decreasing crime that puts the district’s violent crime rate at its lowest in 30 years. That report shows that when compared to 2023 numbers, homicides are down 32 percent, armed carjackings are down 53 percent and assaults with a dangerous weapon are down 27 percent.”
So when Burchett says everybody knows it’s too dangerous to walk the streets at night, clearly, not everybody knows. If asked, however, I’d imagine the congressman would suggest we can’t believe what we’re told by the DC police, or even by the president’s Department of Justice.
After all, if “the deep state” can conspire with America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, to cover up evidence of the secret conspiracies contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop, it can conspire to cover up a crime wave so massive that Trump has no choice but become a dictator.
In asking us for our trust, Burchett is tapping into his carefully cultivated image as a man of honor in a city without it. He illustrated that two years ago when recalling a time when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy came up from behind Burchett while he was talking to a reporter and allegedly elbowed him with “a clean shot” to the kidney.
Never one to let a sucker punch go unanswered, Burchett gave chase, but failed to catch his assailant. He later suggested, however, that the episode was a lesson: A real man looks you in the eye and tells you straight up. If there must be violence, so be it. He doesn’t hit and run.
“[McCarthy] is a bully with $17 million and a security detail,” Burchett said. “He’s the type of guy that, when you’re a kid, would throw a rock over the fence, and run home and hide behind his mama’s skirt.”
I think Burchett understands the situation he’s in.
On the one hand, he wants us to believe he’s a man who lives by his own rules, circumstances be damned, and that those rules stand against rich men like McCarthy, who is too chicken to say what he means and who need other men (“a security detail”) to defend him.
On the other hand, however, he wants us to believe that normal life in Washington is so riven with violence and crime – is so dangerous and “everybody knows it” – he’s justified in never leaving the safety of his office, and in hoping the president of the United States will save him.
And I think he understands that he can’t have it both ways on account of using that little word: “It is too dadgum dangerous, brother.”
That’s a word men sometimes use in solidarity with other men, especially men so similar in appearance and background that it justifies using the word “brother,” which, in this case, is another white man, who on hearing the word might decide to play along, for selfish reasons, in a game in which one man tells the other, you’re still a real man even though you’re admitting you’re too scared to go out at night.
And in using the word “brother,” Tim Burchett suggests what’s really important to him is not manliness, but the appearance of manliness, and, in the context in which he has used the word, he suggest what’s more important than that is the price of that appearance, which is to say, he’s happy to sell off his “code of honor” in exchange for power.
You might say Burchett didn’t hate Kevin McCarthy so much as envy him, as Burchett is indeed the type of guy who would throw a rock over the fence, then hide behind his president’s suit. He just hadn’t yet figured out how to be a bully with $17 million and a security detail.
All this smallness is worth dwelling on because authoritarianism depends on whiny little brats like Tim Burchett getting together with other whiny little brats to convince themselves they are big and strong when they are actually small and weak, in the hope their whiny little complaining grows large enough and loud enough they won’t ever have to do the hard work of looking for the inner courage to be men.
When we stop tolerating their cowardice, things might change.