Yeah, like I said, the dude is tough. He seems to have good/bad days/weeks.
More resistance. Watching him like a hawk. If things get worse in Palestine, you better believe there will be 3x as many protests from Democrats… I didn’t hear the term “wealth disparity” once in the last 4 years. Universal Health Care. Minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.
Oh it can be bad though it can’t all be instantaneous. Even if he EO’s Schedule F on Day One, it does not mean that everyone will be fired-and-replaced by the end of Week One. Because the guys behind Project 2025 know they need to onboard their lackeys so they know what to do and to identify possible ones already inside. And try to not crash the market before midterms.
As I said in the Vance thread in P&E, Trump isn’t going to make it to the end of 2025. Either he dies or deteriorates so much he gets 25th Amendmented and hauled off to some private memory-care facility. Thiel and his ilk I believe would prefer to keep up a facade of normalcy in Vance’s presidency as being less trouble than trying to overthrow the whole system, especially since the Right will have put in place all sorts of skulduggery to maintain their minority control of multiple levels of government. Yes, it will suck majorly, especially for the culture war targets, but I think (for whatever it’s worth) the oligarchs would prefer a Constitutional shell remain in place.
I hope I and @Aeschines are right.
I see these things as possible positives:
- America can get Trump out of its system. You want a chaotic evil President except this time he has a literal kill list? Well now you have him and you get to see what he does with that power.
- Because Trump has basically corrupted every institution, America may end up with new institutions once all is said and done.
- Even though Trump won’t accept responsibility for anything, things will still be his fault. Natural disasters, mass shootings, foreign policy crises, et cetera. Trump can and will blame them on everyone else but at the end of the day POTUS is expected to do things and he will fail to do them. If he is candidate Trump, he can ascribe this to sabotage. If he is President Trump, his failures belong to him whether he wants them or not.
- Trump in the White House is basically Trump in jail. His movements are controlled and armed guards are watching him at all hours of the day.
- Useless Merrick Garland won’t be around any longer. If Trump is still alive in 2028 and a Democrat is elected (along with a Dem Congress and Senate hopefully), prosecuting Trump for his fresh crimes shouldn’t take three fucking years.
Yes, but what they will do is bankrupt both so then these “have to fail” and “not my fault”. In line with the shenanigans around USPS having to pre-fund retirements. Or in line with venture capitalists taking over companies, reverse engineering the already owned property and leasing back plus other “management fees” so that they go bankrupt in a few years. Hello Red Lobster and TGIF.
Crony capitalism and Amerikan oligarchs are here.
Right, this stuff is not easy to do.
Good post!
Right. Are these people smart enough to play their hand well? I don’t think so! Arrest a single Democrat for political reasons, and we will have a constitutional crisis.
I noticed what Gavin Newsom said today:
“California will seek to work with the incoming president — but let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law.”
It’s easy to imagine Newsom inviting those on the kill/arrest list to California for protection. Then what does Trump do, send in the military? Hot civil war 2.0. Trump is not smart enough to play this game. Even if the advisors around him are evil, they may be smart enough to tell their boss not to FAAFO.
Yes. Modern-day governments are a joke. So is our economic system. Incremental change will accomplish very little. Trump has no vision for any kind of change, even bad change.
Yes. A key point. Plus, no pandemic to cloud the water this time.
Yes, he didn’t actually seem to like this aspect of being president the first time.
Indeed. What a joke.
Does this mean you think major upheaval of some kind is the only way forward?
An upheaval to what? is the problem. We don’t have any off-the-shelf solution. Late-stage capitalism and communism have failed, and there has been nothing to take their place.
What we pretend in our elections (US and everywhere, really) is that either party can effect real change. They can’t.
The lure of Trumpism is that it promises to at least do something, even if it won’t make people’s lives better. And so it goes with right-wing parties around the world.
I do think that there are changes we can make that will make a difference, such as eliminating homelessness. That’s economically feasible and will probably even save society money. But it won’t change the basics of the economic system, which nearly everyone hates, even if they don’t know it.
That assumes that the game is going to stay the same, and the Republicans will face the consequences of their failure to improve the situation across the board. But the fascist playbook—which they are very well prepared to follow—is to find somebody to blame, some ‘them’ that’s the reason for why things are bad. That way, that things aren’t going to improve is just going to solidify their base. So the plan is not to lift the burden of the masses, it’s to sow anger, fear, hate, and frustration—and by painting themselves as the ones to answer to these grievances, becoming the only viable political alternative. Their success won’t be measured by actual improvements to the current situation, but by their ability to keep the torches and pitchforks waving.
On both these issues, what Trump has proposed to do—essentially give carte blanche to Russia and Israel—will, perhaps, help these conflicts to come to a quicker resolution, but at the cost of massive loss of life, and suffering for those left.
I don’t think the greatest threats really come from Trump himself—at least not those on a domestic policy level. There, he cares about his vendettas, and perhaps whatever earns him the greatest cheer at some rally or whatnot, but he doesn’t really have a larger plan. Others around him, however, very much do, this time around. And as some other poster put it, he essentially operates on a Mafia rule: a made man can more or less do what they want, if they don’t interfere with him.
I think that’s a mistake. Vance’s closeness to both Curtis Yarwin’s neo-monarchistic ideas and the integralism movement that openly calls for a revocation of the separation of church and state, not to mention men getting the vote for their household (in proportion of the number of children they have), makes him a much more direct threat to core democratic values than an orange narcissist whose vision barely exceeds his own circumference.
Now, you may be right in that he’s ineffectual in accomplishing these goals. But there is also far more of an infrastructure behind them than there was for Trump, at least initially.
All that said, hopelessness also isn’t an option. Hopelessness is a self-reinforcing belief: if enough people loose hope, losing hope is all that’s left. But it’s the same for being hopeful—if those that believe in the possibility of a kinder, more egalitarian, more just future keep to that hope, even in the face of all that’s going wrong today, that hope might just come true. Some things you have to believe in order to make belief in them reasonable—because that belief is the first condition of making them happen. It’s a Kierkegaardian, a Jamesian notion of belief, a leap you have to take even against grim realities.
I think if we can foster that sort of hope, rather than the ‘maybe nothing too bad will happen’ hope that is just too open to disappointment, there’s a real chance. Because there’s a fallacy in the hope that ‘nothing too bad will happen’: the bad thing has already happened. It’s not what Trump will or might do, it’s the fact that one of the oldest, most mature democracies in the world entrusted its highest office to a lying, cheating, incompetent charlatan that’s the bad thing. It’s the fact that it did so again that’s the bad thing. It’s the fact that the public failed to act in its own best interest, calling into question the assumptions behind the idea of democracy, that’s the bad thing.
And it’s against this that we have to foster hope wherever we can. Hope not that maybe it won’t be so bad, but that we’ll be better. Not that evil might crumble under its own malice, but that tolerance and dignity prevail on their own strength. Hope not that the cheaters are punished for cheating, but that the kind and generous can triumph without it. Hope for hope’s sake.
Well, I might’ve been carried away by my own pathos there a little. But it’s been a weird couple of days, so I’ll just let it stand like that. Maybe it’s of use to someone.
Good pathos.
Which, to be honest, we’re due for a downturn. Part of me is hoping, in a spiteful way, that Trump implements tariffs and deportations, triggering a real bout of inflation. If that happens, I will be pointing and laughing to all my MAGA friends and family. The funny things is, I can afford the inflation. They cannot.
sidenote/ I’ve been there. I understand, It’s very rough./sn
Thank you!
I liked your post! I haven’t read enough Søren myself, though I’ve studied the ideas a bit. Any particular book you recommend?
One general response off the top: I agree that bad has already happened. The GOP has given up on being a normal party; it’s now a fascist, counterrevolutionary insurgency. The media has normalized Trump to the point where has his own little lane to run in without rules or standards. Americans are fools, voting for the Orange Man, ignoring or even celebrating his flaws just to send a thumbs down emoji to a System that, admittedly, sucks hard.
The upside to all that, however, is that the disease is on the surface, unhidden. We know what we’re dealing with. The bad guys have lost the ability to hide their intentions (cf: Project 2025). If I may adduce a slightly comforting fact, it’s that this is a global phenomenon and not a unique American sickness. It’s not so much that we suck as a people; the whole world sucks, and people don’t know what to do.
OK, onto some replies:
MAGA doesn’t have a very good bogeyman for this purpose, however. Hitler had the Jews. Now that was more effective because, even though their number in Germany was small (only about 522,000) he tied them to “International Bolshevism” and the threat, perceived or real, from the USSR and the Comintern, as well as to “finance capital” impoverishing the Folk. Scapegoating the Jews thus was evil and factually baseless, but the conspiracies were believable (Communism was a real thing at least, and we ourselves today complain about corporations and oligarchs).
Trump has immigrants, of course, but if he “gets control of the border” and maybe deports a few thousand people per month above the current baseline (mass deportations are neither feasible nor desirable to the GOP donor class), then he’s “solved the problem” and has no one left to demonize or blame for problems.
If Trump imposes a tariff (but not too big of one–again, donors), and that makes the economy a fucked mess, then, again, there’s really no escaping the cause/effect relationship.
Trump is very good at short-form, gut-level propaganda (“They’re eating the dawgs!” lol), but he is no Goebbels, doesn’t have a Goebbels, and is poor at running a long con. He is more like a child, preferring to proclaim, “I did it! I fixed it!” prematurely than to craft, pace, and place his messages with care (cf: everything he said about covid).
The thing is, Trump really didn’t seem to do this in his first term. Of course, it’s very much in his nature to blame, insult, deflect, etc., as it suits him in the moment, but he had obnoxious but fairly normal press people and not much of a propaganda game. Compare to the nazis, who had a multilayered and sophisticated propaganda system already in place when Hitler took power.
Has he said anything concrete? Or is it just things he has hinted at?
I think he can negotiate something in Ukraine. It really comes down to how much of their territory they get back. If he gives carte blanche to Israel, then that’s pretty much the same as what Biden has been doing and would hardly look like a “solution” to anyone. Again, Trump likes to say, “I solved it!” so he would have to do something different there.
I don’t think the greatest threats really come from Trump himself—at least not those on a domestic policy level. There, he cares about his vendettas, and perhaps whatever earns him the greatest cheer at some rally or whatnot, but he doesn’t really have a larger plan.
Agreed.
The “overplaying one’s hand” risk applies here, however.
I think that’s a mistake. Vance’s closeness to both Curtis Yarwin’s neo-monarchistic ideas and the integralism movement that openly calls for a revocation of the separation of church and state, not to mention men getting the vote for their household (in proportion of the number of children they have), makes him a much more direct threat to core democratic values than an orange narcissist whose vision barely exceeds his own circumference.
I see that stuff more as Vance being like a high-IQ teen really into Ayn Rand and objectivism. Further, these ideas are pretty baroque and hard to put into law. Vance is a chameleon and, in my perception, a people-pleaser to the core. Once he is president, he will want to be liked by Washington as a whole and Americans in general. That’s just my gut on him, however, but his past does give some strong clues as to his nature.
I agree with what you said, and I also cite game theory and history. Hope has the potential to win the game; hopelessness does not. Further, a system out of equilibrium (i.e.,a government hated by the people) will eventually be brought down. The US, like many/most countries now, is in disequilibrium; that’s why we have Trump in the first place. The ultimate solution is not just to get rid of Trump and return to “normalcy” but to create a government that actually works.
I agree with all of the bad things you cite, but I would mitigate this final point a bit. Yes, voting for Trump is evil and/or stupid. We’ve talked about this a lot on the Dope. But the thing is, we didn’t have a functional democracy anyway. We don’t have a just and rational and non-exploitative economic system. Throw in all of the massive social changes that have happened over the past 50 years. People are deeply pissed, despondent, and bewildered. Voting for Trump is a bad move, but voting is a blunt instrument, and it’s all people have.* I can blame people for voting for Trump, but I can’t blame them for throwing up their hands and crying out, “Fuck this shit!”
*Unless they get into actual political engagement and organization, but that’s a big ask for the average person. And if the Democratic party is the only thing on the shelf, it’s hard to get inspired.
TCBY?
Agreed.
Yes, it’s hacking government/companies instead of building long-term success.
One fundamental problem, however, is that, aside from petrostates and a few outliers, no modern government has figured out how to fund social programs with a balanced budget. This gets back to my point of figuring out a government/economic system that really works for the people and is sustainable.
I strongly disagree. Per your figures, Hitler had a half-million Jews in Germany to demonize. Of course he also went after Communists, Catholics, Roma, homosexuals, etc.
Trump has tens of millions of undocumented immigrants to blame for the country’s problems. He will never be able to deport that many people, and will cause a massive humanitarian crisis just in the effort to do so. If he runs out of undocumented immigrants he will go after the legal ones, like the Haitians in Springfield, and the asylum-seekers. Or anyone he deems to be from a “shithole country.”
Then there is the so-called “Deep State” and the “enemy within.”
Trump will never run out of people to blame.
You’re not wrong, but my point was more that Trump has already proposed a solution–mass deportations–to this problem. He either does it or he doesn’t. Trump is very unsophisticated on matters like this. He’s incapable of thinking, “Let’s sort of half-implement the deportations just enough to appear partially successful while milking Hate of the Other over the long term.”
A very concrete example of this was “build the wall.” He failed. Either couldn’t build the whole thing, or he lost interest. Most importantly, he stopped talking about it. He probably could have milked that project and messaging for a much longer time, but he lacked the discipline.
“Drain the swamp,” etc. He just doesn’t have the discipline to do it, IMO. He can hire someone who does–maybe he will. But he is also not good at managing his minions. He’s too dumb and disinterested. And then are 20 other major things he says he wants to do that go against deeply ingrained US government and society culture and practice. Hitler was good at this kind of thing and had a running start in 1933, but it took a lot of time and effort to nazify Germany.