“So here are the conclusions that this year tells us:
The first, sad conclusion is that there were a lot of lies this year and it must stop.”
-Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today propagandist
There is still a pretty good chance that Donald Trump may again be the Viceroy for Russian North America, if only because the Republican Party isn’t motivated to stop him from being nominated as their candidate. Even though, weeks after announcing a presidential campaign, he really isn’t doing much with it. Early in December he blasted a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” that some people thought might actually be a major announcement relevant to his political strategy, assuming he had one. Which he doesn’t. Instead he did a video where the big announcement was a new line of NFT virtual trading cards featuring Trump in poses like superhero and astronaut (also, policeman, sailor, construction worker, cowboy, Indian chief…). For $99 each, with no guarantee which one you’d get. This was so ridiculous even Trumpworld felt the need to ridicule it. Steve Bannon, on his “War Room” podcast, said “I can’t do this anymore… We’re at war,” Bannon said. “They oughta be fired today.” Bannon’s guest, Sebastian Gorka, said, “Whoever wrote that pitch should be fired and should never be involved” – as if Gorka and Bannon both didn’t know that Trump isn’t going to do anything he doesn’t want to do.
Around the same time, a Trumpnik with the appropriate alias “Baked Alaska”, who got convicted on misdemeanor earlier this year for participating in the Capitol riot, told reporters, “I can’t believe I’m going to jail for an NFT salesman.”
Poor little Trumpniks. They actually thought he was serious. That he cared about something greater than himself.
They thought Trump was going to be their Hard Man. Their version of Vladimir Putin, or at least Rodrigo Duterte. They thought he was gonna kick ass and take names, and anybody who didn’t march in step was gonna be sent to the Gulag.
What they got was Liddle Donnie Clown Boy. What they got was the guy who sells Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks.
And given that Trump doesn’t drink alcohol, and eats steaks well-done with ketchup, they should have figured that he knows just as much about government as he does about liquor and cooking.
(It kind of raises the question of what Trump would do if he had a Food Network show. ‘Next the recipe calls for a tablespoon of kosher salt, which as everybody knows, is salt that only comes from the front part of the cow.’)
It also doesn’t help Trump’s case going towards the 2024 campaign that the Democrats in Congress finally got access to Trump’s tax returns, with just enough time to release them to the public before Republicans take over the House. Investigative journalist and longtime Trump hunter David Cay Johnston came up with his own take, saying “Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison” even as he also details why that hasn’t happened yet. As Johnston himself says, whatever tax reforms he would recommend are not going to do any good now because they haven’t been enacted yet, and they probably won’t be, because as he says, the people who benefit from the system as it is are also the donor class, and some of the politicians they sponsor in both parties. Of course most of them don’t have the capacity to appoint their own Treasury Secretary and IRS chief, as Trump did.
His usual weasely presentation has been that he did everything legally and he was just working the system and “that makes me smart” and all that. And that may indeed be true. But if so, it just raises the question, if he didn’t do anything wrong, why was he so desperate to hide what he did?
Well, Johnston’s article also points out: “Perhaps most glaring in the tax returns is that they include 26 Trump businesses—or imaginary businesses—with zero revenue and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax deductions for expenses.
“Unless Trump can produce records showing the expenses are real and meet other standards to be deductible, that’s fraud. That Trump did it 26 times as a candidate and as president is powerful evidence that he qualifies for prosecution by the federal government and New York State for criminal tax fraud.”
But again, that assumes that someone’s actually going to enforce the law, and most of the reason things got to this point is that nobody does. When Trump wasn’t a politician, it wasn’t considered a priority to go after him, and even after he used his presidency to make himself a national security risk, for that reason, the political establishment now think he’s too big to fail.
This year, when Saturday Night Live again gave Dave Chappelle a host gig the weekend after an election, he said, among many other politically incorrect things, that Trump is very popular, even loved, among some people at least. Because Trump is “an honest liar.” As in, during his first debate, he said “this whole system is rigged!” And when the moderator asked him to demonstrate why, Trump said, “I know the system is rigged, because I USE it.” He said to Hillary Clinton (according to Chappelle), “if you want me to pay my taxes, change the tax code. But I know you won’t, because your friends and your donors enjoy the same tax breaks that I do.’ …And with that, my friends, a star was born.”
It really brings up the old phrase “Hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue.” Or as I said, a long time ago when this all started: “But when the virtue of honesty is conflated with the vice of rudeness – often by a political class who have good reason to fear honesty – the result is that anyone who wishes to sell rudeness can do so by calling it honesty. And thus a population deprived of the virtue will embrace the vice. It’s like living in the most antiseptic circumstances and then finally being exposed to filth, and your immune system has no experience with it.” We can see simply from the example of Hillary Clinton what hypocrisy leads us to. But if one objects to the vice underlying hypocrisy, obviously the solution is to challenge the vice, not openly embrace it. What we’re seeing is the open embrace of vice, and why it’s not an improvement on hypocrisy. Because when the ruling class can’t even bother to lie anymore, they have no reason to moderate their evil, because they know no one’s going to call them on it.
Much as all those professional Christians that Republicans nominated to the Supreme Court told the Democrats that Roe v. Wade was “settled law” (when it wasn’t), that simply ending Roe wasn’t going to undermine the right to abortion in states that still affirmed it (when it did) and the Dobbs decision didn’t set a precedent on civil rights cases like Obergefell v. Hodges (when it does). We have now reached the dangerous point where the powers that be still feel the need to lie, but can’t even bother to lie WELL.
There is still a need to lie because previous evidence to the contrary, there was still a fear that reactionary forces could have pushed the envelope too far. That maybe, hey, we can’t just admit we’re running an entire country only for the benefit of people who agree with us and fuck everybody else in it. Those other people might get MAD. And, previous evidence to the contrary, this election they actually DID.
The reason a liar continues to lie when lying would be unnecessary or impractical is because to lie is to set up a conflict between what wants to be true and what one knows to be true. Thus, self-deception is the root of any lie. But this means that there are only two ways to resolve the conflict: Either force everyone else to go along with the lie or to give up the lie. And the real problem occurs when the outside world makes it clear it will not be forced.
Ukraine is just a more visceral example. My quote at the beginning was from Margarita Simonyan, a “journalist” for Russia Today, the main media service of the Putin government. It was part of a year-end review of Russia’s performance, or lack thereof, in the “special military operation” against the “Nazi” government of Ukraine. Now, simply because one is a propagandist doesn’t mean one can’t tell the truth. Just because one might prefer to believe the Ukrainian government doesn’t mean they don’t engage in propaganda. But it comes down to the fact that you don’t have to “believe” anything but the facts. If Russia were winning in Ukraine, it would be a lot easier for them to say so. If they had actually managed to take the capital in three days, they could have filmed it. Russia and Ukraine can say anything they want about who’s winning, but I believe Ukraine is winning by simple virtue of the fact that they’re still around. We’ve heard that some people can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but that requires a sow’s ear. Russia doesn’t even have a sow’s ear to work with, which is why even their propaganda ministries are unable to point to victories that haven’t happened and instead point fingers everywhere except where the problem starts.
For a shill like Simonyan to truly stop the lies, she would have to start with the first obvious one: That Ukraine is just a “little Russia”, that it doesn’t really exist as its own nationality and that therefore Russia can just walk in and take it without anybody seriously trying to stop them. But by implication that would mean challenging the greater premise that supports it: That you can have faith in a ruthless leader whose decisions are more wise the more unaccountable he becomes. Ending that belief would challenge her whole world view, and she’s not going to do that. Likewise an American fascist like Steve Bannon might admit that his Leader is capable of error, but he’s going to go back to serving Trump, like he has in the past. Where else is he going to go? What else is he going to do? Be normal???
You cannot expect these people to just evolve or grow out of it. On an individual level, people who aren’t fully invested in the lie may realize it isn’t working out for them and quit supporting it, which is a big part of why Democratic candidates won in 2022, either because of Republicans voting for them or simply not voting at all. But the people who are most invested have the most to lose, and not just in terms of money. The best and brightest of the fascists might be capable of acknowledging the facts against them, but they are too emotional to grasp why the facts are against them, because that would challenge their whole view of reality.
We cannot assume that the bad guys will just see the error of their ways, or just die out. Trump and Putin may be old, but they’re not dying fast enough. And even if they died tomorrow, their proteges would be waiting in the wings, because they’ve been taught to think that bad behavior would be rewarded. The only thing that disincentivizes bad behavior is to quit rewarding it. And that means actively resisting it, either on the battlefield or the ballot box. That does not guarantee success, let alone some utopian future, but for quite some time – a little bit before Brexit and Trump, actually – it seemed as though the forces of regression had the upper hand, and were going to direct the world. This autumn the rest of the world showed they would, and could, fight back. And that might be a turning point, a beginning of the end for “post-liberal” lying and corruption.
That might actually be a Happy New Year.