This Tuesday, Sean Hannity had Donald Trump on a town hall show for Fox, and Hannity interviews with Trump are always amusing because for once Sean has to be the smart one in the room. But he had one of those by now predictable comedy moments where Hannity would try to reassure the straights that Trump isn’t going to do anything rash or stupid and then Trump doubled down on the stupid. Specifically: “I want to go back to this one issue though, because the media has been focused on this and attacking you. Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight you would never abuse power for retribution against anybody-“
Trump: “Except for Day One.” Aside to the audience, “Look, he’s going crazy.” He then went, “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” Lots of cheering at that. But not only is that all stuff you would need more than one day to implement even if you were God-Emperor, it’s just more red meat to the audience that doesn’t care about anything but being played to, which is exactly why he said that.
Of course the real reason Trump would only need to be dictator “for Day One” is that on that day, he’d sell the country to Vladimir Putin and then we wouldn’t have America anymore.
The Atlantic devoted its entire December issue to a set of articles called “A Warning.” I can’t quote The Atlantic directly cause there’s a paywall, but one essay was reprinted on MSN. Money quote: “A good pitchman identifies a problem and sells a solution. A great one creates the problem to be solved. Trump, having lived his life as an endless ad, has mastered the art of problem-making. He churns out shock and amusement and outrage and absurdity with factory efficiency. He makes the world seem hard. And then he offers himself up as the person who will make America easy again.”
Which is exactly why Trump did not solve any problems in office, why he did not keep (most of) his promises and why he would not do so if elected again. If we solved the border problem, we would no longer have a border problem and then Republicans wouldn’t have any motivation. Trump, and his Party, have to keep making things worse and then offer themselves as the solution to the problems they create. If they solved the problems, people wouldn’t need them anymore. But that’s if you’re thinking logically. The point of Trumpism is not thinking logically. The point is the emotional indulgence of finding an enemy and getting mad at them.
All these Lamestream Media types are so fucking scared of Trump like he’s some invincible Dark Lord, but he’s not. He’s the guy who stares at the can of orange juice for five minutes cause it says “CONCENTRATE”. He’s so dumb he thinks he should’ve gotten a five cent coupon on his Nickleback album. The main differences between Trump and the ratty old bum at the gas station who begs you for change while screaming conspiracy theories are a few million dollars and no excuse for that haircut.
The problem is not Trump, it’s the liberals who think he’s a Dark Lord, and thereby give him credibility in the eyes of the people who hate them. But more than that, it’s those people, who are alienated from “normie” liberal culture and take Trump seriously because he’s the only politician who thinks and acts and talks like them.
Certainly leftists don’t need an excuse to hate this country, and its freedom, and its capitalism, but there is a problem here. Lenin may have been a little early in predicting it, but we are selling ourselves the rope by which we hang ourselves. This is why we have a dysfunctional “gun culture” in this country: Not because of an evil Second Amendment that was NOT causing mass shooters to pop up every fuckin’ day prior to the late 20th Century, but because it serves the profits of gun manufacturers. This is why we have networks and radio hosts who appeal to rage more than reason, because rage sells. That is how Trump got to be a thing. And because of the way the Electoral College works, state by state, that is the reason why the mechanism the Founders intended to prevent a demagogue from using the vulgar mob to take power became the only reason that result occurred. Because if it had been a simple majority vote in 2016, Trump would not have been president.
Because while there may be a critical mass of gullible people who could swing the margin in limited circumstances, the simple majority is not fooled. Because, for now, most people have enough of a value system to put one foot in front of the other every day and pay their bills and not cause problems for others, as opposed to making the world worse and blaming everyone else.
Indeed, this general observation moves me to make it an axiom: Freedom promises emotional indulgence, but sustaining it requires emotional discipline. When you don’t have discipline, you get manipulated by people who want to put you under their control. Or worse, they don’t, and you just cast about making things worse for yourself and the world around you.
If you want to know what a second Trump term would look like, we don’t need to speculate. We have it now in the House of Representatives. Which is, for now, under a Republican majority. Because they only had a five seat majority to begin with, making it that much more difficult to rule unilaterally without input from the other side, as the Republicans are obliging both parties to do now. But they lost one of those votes last week when they got rid of George Santos (BR.-New York). Who’d never actually been convicted or even charged with a crime, as his defenders pointed out. Not like you need to be charged with an actual crime to be impeached though. Still, it was a mystery. This is a party of moralists defending an openly gay drag queen. This is a party that rails against the corruption of the “Biden Crime Family” while Santos won an election with fraudulent claims and used campaign money on personal expenses, a party that defends a man who engages in so much pathological lying that he actually exceeds Trump. But yet enough Republicans voted with the two-thirds majority necessary to expel him, despite the fact that Santos exemplifies all their demonstrated virtues. For example, hypocrisy. Like, acting like Santos’ mendacity is a dealbreaker when they still worship Trump. Of course, Santos doesn’t have a fan club of wannabe murderers who will storm the Capitol for calling him to account, so that’s one thing.
Then this week, former House Speaker (In Name Only) Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California) announced that he was not only not running for re-election next year, he is leaving Congress at the end of the year, which will drop the majority of the House GOP (Grabbing Our Pudenda) to three. The governor of California would then have to call a special election, and of course, Gavin Newsom is a Democrat. And he has a little bit of leeway as to how long he can wait to do so…
Which is just the latest example of why McCarthy lost his position even though Mike Johnson is obliged to do the same things that he did to work with the rest of the government: It’s not so much that hardliners disagreed with McCarthy’s policies, it’s that he’s a petty drip of a human being and nobody likes him.
To the extent that this taxpayer-funded Trump Fan Club does any work, it’s mainly in obstructing the actual process of government. Like, before the end of the year, the House is supposed to provide funding for the government. And Speaker Johnson is holding up both Ukraine AND Israel aid over various beefs and shifting goalposts. Right now, the pretext seems to be a demand for increased border security. In principle, I would be going along with this.
Yes. Lest my other posts make me seem like a flaming liberal, I direct you to recall the great Jeff Daniels quote from the pilot episode of The Newsroom: “I’m a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I think hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.”
Really, we need to crack down on illegal immigration and trade imbalance. We need a strong border policy. I mean, the Iroquois didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.
The problem is that the words “principle” and “Republican” not only don’t go together as well as they might have once, now they’re actually opposed magnetic poles. This applies to pretty much everything, but in this particular case, we have the bogus immigration system that we do because both parties want it that way, for reasons I have already gone over. That being the case, border policy, again, is just a lame pretext for obstruction, because the Republicans’ Master’s Master thinks it’s more fun to kill Ukrainians if they can’t shoot back. Killing Jews is less a priority, but Putin is Russian, so it frequently comes down to that anyway. Besides, Iran is Putin’s friend, and Iran funds Hamas. It was only recently pointed out to me that the October 7 raids over Israel’s border took place on Putin’s birthday. Suddenly it made a lot more sense.
And as we can see, it’s all Republicans can do even to accomplish a negative and obstructive agenda. They can’t actually be FOR anything, because while there may be a “silent plurality” of Republicans who remember when it was still politically correct to speak at a high-school level, they won’t have a majority without the dedicated Trumpniks, so that obliges them to be Trumpniks too. What else are you going to do, let the DEMONRATS win and take credit for everything??
But shutting the Democrats out in order to rule unilaterally requires everybody to be on the same page (especially with such a small majority), and that’s impossible when the purpose of your party is to indulge your emotions and petty grievances at taxpayer expense, as opposed to running a government. So these guys end up fighting each other at least as much as the Democrats.
They can’t control the process, because they can’t control themselves. At the same time, they will not acknowledge this and step aside to let the grownups take over. So the result is just extended displays of bullshit and grandstanding.
There are a whole bunch of comparisons that could be made here; I’ve referred to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I could also refer to the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. For the sake of their own self-image, Republicans want to think they’re well-behaved, Good Christians ™ like Mike Johnson, but like Dr. Jekyll, they want the freedom to indulge the Id. So they have Trump. The knuckle-dragging, rapist Mr. Hyde who doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he gets what he wants. They’ve said it themselves. They like Trump cause “he fights.” They think that actual Christianity is “weak“. Their only complaint is “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be“.
And as Adam Serwer said, “the cruelty is the point.”
Of course, in the story, as with real cases of drug use, Dr. Jekyll built up a tolerance to his formula, such that the Hyde persona became his default and he needed more and more drugs to get back to “normal.” This led to cascading liabilities, culminating in Hyde killing someone, so Jekyll ended up killing himself to escape justice.
The Republican Party used to have it both ways, having Trump be their “fighter” while still having the cultural memory of being one of America’s two “real” parties, but the longer they are addicted to Trump, the more they become Trump, and the harder and harder it will be to pose as civilized humans. Only the Trump will remain. At that point they will indeed die, either because voters see that they’re not a “real” party anymore, or their increasing disdain for the republic and active opposition to it will oblige various levels of law enforcement to put them down. In this case it would be more “suicide by cop.”
It’s either them or us.