Brief remarks, because the week’s events led to a situation that requires me to go into more detail, which will require more time for me to work on the following post.
Saturday October 18, the No Kings movement organized protests across the country against the Trump occupation government, reaching nationwide numbers of at least 7 million people, including considerable turnouts in ‘red’ states. There were also protests in European capitals, including London, where the event was called ‘No Tyrants Day’ because their king isn’t a senile fascist moron.
And in response, Trump confirmed not only that he does think of himself as a king, but that he is literally full of shit.
Specifically, he put out a video of himself in a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP”, wearing a crown over his flight helmet, and flying over a No Kings protest in a major city to fly over the protesters and bomb them with an industrial-scale volume of liquid excrement. I mean, Trump can feel proud. He made all that shit himself.
No seriously, Trump may be so much of an asshole that he consists of only that one body part, but even his colon cannot produce such a volume of crap on command. He needed AI to do that. But really, isn’t that what AI is for?
It’s yet another example of how Trump and his cult, rather than discrediting their opponents, actually justify them by becoming more ridiculous.
Another factor in this is the deliberate approach of non-violence taken by protestors throughout the country, like dressing up in inflatable frog and dinosaur costumes. A lot of critics say this makes the protestors themselves ridiculous, but that’s the point. We had riots and shit when George Floyd was killed – around the time of the 2020 Republican National Convention – and that’s the sort of thing the Trumpniks use to motivate their base. Whereas when you spray mace at a guy in a frog costume or have to send 30 police to follow a team in a wiener dog outfit, the average person who isn’t invested in the culture war issues has to ask what the regime is scared of when they’re the ones with all the guns.
The key here is that we have government because we agree to it. We have had questionable and authoritarian government in the past, and have gone along with its questionable decisions because we saw it as legitimate. The key is that the government is undermined if it is no longer seen as legitimate, and in this case it is the Republican Party as much as the Left that is doing that.
Trump did get elected, but a lot of his voters, including non-whites and Roganbros, naively believed that Trump would actually run the government as a public concern instead of just another part of his business portfolio. And a lot of them are speaking out. Maybe not enough to vote Democrat, but enough to doubt. We didn’t vote for Elon Musk to run the bureaucracy. We didn’t vote for Stephen Miller to run the country. And most Republicans voted to get a handle on illegal immigration, but most people didn’t vote to give ICE a bigger budget than the military of Turkey.
See, in Ireland, and India, and, well damn near every place the British Empire conquered, the native population was like ‘okay, the country was previously ruled by a local warlord who took over by force and expected absolute obedience just because, so this isn’t any different.’ It was after the American and French revolutions that the premise of overthrowing imperialists became feasible. That is how Spain lost most of its empire. And that is how Britain lost India. The occupation was not seen as legitimate, and the imperial power, no matter how much weapons it had, could not clamp down on an entire population. And yes, that is just what happened to the US in Vietnam and to both Russia and the US in Afghanistan. The Trump regime is starting at the point that was the end stage for Britain in India. It’s just a matter of what it takes to mobilize the majority. India had religious traditions of non-violence. We have naked bicyclists and inflatable animal costumes. Whatever works.
So because this government is increasingly seen, even in the center, as illegitimate, the No Kings protest last week gave me more room for hope than ever, because it confirms that the country in general is on the right page. In the long run we will win. In the short term however Trump is doing tremendous amounts of damage to the country.
The most prominent example of Trump shitting on the country physically and not just virtually occurred Tuesday when his planned ballroom expansion of the White House started tearing down the East Wing, which fits the architecture of the rest of the structure, in order to build a giant annex that will be bigger than the main building.
This is both a symbolic and literal step in permanently deforming the country.
If Trump died tomorrow and Vance took over, presumably he would keep construction going on the ballroom. I’m sure he’s a really good dancer. But if not, we are going to need to repair the damage.
And again, that damage is both literal and symbolic. For one thing, this is another clue, as if we needed one, that Trump is not leaving in 2028 if he can help it. As Seth Meyers put it this week, “if I had only three years left on my lease, I wouldn’t be renovating anything.”
The simple fact that Trump can do this, with no permits, against the law, because everybody lets him, just confirms that he thinks of the government, by extension the country, as his personal property. And the Republican Party is quite fine with this.
The symbolism should make it clear to the rest of the country: The American republic is dead. It has been wrecked just as surely as the East Wing. You might be able to rebuild it once the criminals are purged, but you cannot pretend it’s still there.
Which is why we need to decide first, how the criminals are to be purged, and second, what kind of government is going to replace them.