Topsy-turvy Trumpworld
July 1, 2020
IN TOPSY-TURVY Trumpworld, Trump-supporting shopkeepers are denying entry to people who wear masks, proving that they are not fighting for liberty, but for their particular gung-ho right-wing brand thereof. They are not demanding their freedom not to wear masks: they are denying others their freedom to wear them. They demand their right to cough in other people’s faces, and deny others their right to protect themselves.
It’s the sort of warped version of “freedom” with which the Catholic church is familiar: I will fight for my freedom to deny your freedom, and in the name of tolerance, you must tolerate my right not to tolerate you.
Today, In the United States, there’s yet another report citing “senior officials” as saying that Trump is unfit for office. This time, the supporting evidence is “hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state,” writes Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein.
The ratbag in chief was abusive, “sadistic”, incoherent, ill-informed to the point of delusion, and a “threat to national security” as he constantly let himself get “outplayed” by powerful alpha males like Putin or Erdogan, from whom he sought praise and validation. Meanwhile, Trump called Theresa May “weak” and Angela Merkel “stupid”, and regularly “bullied and disparaged” the likes of Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and Scott Morrison, Bernstein claims.
But after more than three years of negative coverage of the Trump presidency, we finally read something unexpected:
The sources did cite some instances in which they said Trump acted responsibly and in the national interest during telephone discussions with some foreign leaders.
Of course, no one is surprised by anything any more, not even by the occasional glimpse of Trump’s competence. It is more than Trump Fatigue. It is even more than Trump Incompetence Fatigue or Trump Narcissism Fatigue. What I’m feeling personally can possibly be best described as Trump Fatigue Fatigue, though that doesn’t quite convey the way the bastard’s tedious, enervating ubiquity is now soaked into my very bone marrow. His presence at the apex of global geopolitics is nothing less than an affront to my species.
Susan Glasser in The New Yorker called Trump “the most mendacious president in U.S. history” and says his lies are getting worse.
So many of the things that Trump does and says are inconceivable for an American President, and yet he does and says them anyway.
But normal political discourse doesn’t quite capture Trump’s essence. He has rewritten the laws of political gravity and geometry. Just when you think he can’t go any lower, he plummets face-first into another abyss. Having already exhausted all the superlatives - having already called him the worst, most corrupt, most deceitful, most stupid, most ruthless, most unqualified president in history - the words of the “lamestream media” are no longer capable of adumbrating the squalid new depths he plumbs.
The “lamestream media” cannot motivate him into behaving better because they despised him from the very beginning. He is motivated instead by outraging them still further. It turns out that he can tolerate the throat-shutting stink of his own shit far more than we can. This is the dysfunctional relationship at the heart of politics in the world’s richest and most powerful nation.
Hunter S. Thompson famously wrote that objective journalism allowed “a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal” like Nixon to “slip through the cracks” and become President. Nixon, said Thompson, was “a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President.” The normal rules of political debate simply didn’t know how to handle someone so warped.
But Trump proves that subjective journalism makes no difference either. In fact, the obvious anti-Trump partisanship of the liberal press has reinforced the sense of oppressed victimhood not only among Trump’s supporters, but also of Trump himself.
No one knows what to do with someone so ruthless, so untroubled by even the crudest notion of truth, or by the faintest semblance of decorum. The Founding Fathers thought they had built a system that would protect the country against tyrants. In this age of extremes, in this age of division, it could not withstand a narcissistic sociopath broadcasting his Id to the ignorant, angry masses. And by now, our outrage seems to feed him.
Trailing in the polls and desperate to change the subject from the coronavirus, mid-pandemic Trump has a Twitter feed that is meaner, angrier, and more partisan than ever before, as he amplifies conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and media enemies such as Scarborough while seeking to exacerbate divisions in an already divided country.
A more optimistic op-ed in the Independent says Trump is fucked and his base is fucked and the Republicans are fucked if they stick with this fucker. The polls show he is still leading handsomely among uneducated, ageing white males but getting trounced in almost every other demographic.
All this supports the arguments made in Worm at the Core: such is the pace of cultural change, the ageing white gun-toting Christians of the Mid-West are facing not only their own individual demise but also their symbolic deaths, the end of their way of life, and the end of their particular version or interpretation of society.
Putting it less kindly, the demographics of the United States no longer support their white supremacist privileges. They naturally choose to frame this in the most apocalyptic terms possible, thinking in terms of their communities being “swamped” with immigrants or sinking into godless decadence under the direction of a secret cabal of homosexuals, paedophiles, Jews and freemasons led by George Soros, Hillary Clinton or Bill Gates.
