This news was circulating last night on political Twitter and gave me a laugh.

“There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Never Trump just gained a prominent new member.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“Uh…”

White supremacist leader Richard Spencer, welcome to the #Resistance pic.twitter.com/CLlENfMJIG

— Siraj Hashmi in Gitmo (@SirajAHashmi) January 8, 2020

You don’t celebrate when Richard Spencer joins your team.

…unless you’re as crazed with antipathy to Trump as Joy here, in which case any anecdotal evidence of the president losing supporters is cause for celebration even when they’re objectively bad people.

The clip is so weird that when I first saw it I thought maybe they were applauding Trump for having done something sufficiently virtuous to have finally scared away the Spencers of the world. But no, of course that’s not what they’re doing. Behar’s congratulating Spencer for having had the good sense to break with the president over Iran. He and she share the belief that aggression towards Iran is a terrible idea, albeit for different reasons: Behar is anti-war, Spencer is anti-war towards Israel’s enemies. But being anti-war and now anti-Trump is enough in common apparently that she’s willing to provoke some approving Pavlovian noises from the crowd by telling them that someone new had joined the Resistance.

We’re only eight days into the new year, but as a next-level example of the stupidity of American politics in 2020, “The View” audience clapping for Richard Spencer’s sound moral judgment will be hard to top. There’s Trump Derangement Syndrome and then there’s squealing “take that, Drumpf” because a well-known racist is mad that he took out one of the world’s worst terrorists. Next week they should bring on O.J. and Ghislaine Maxwell and ask them how much they hate the Orange Man too. After all, how else can we know whether they belong in polite company or not?

https://twitter.com/johnrobertgage/status/1214947709146275843