No wonder Donald Trump is such an admirer of Kim Jong Un: This would never happen in North Korea.
No wonder Donald Trump is such an admirer of Kim Jong Un: This would never happen in North Korea.
Mr Smith goes to… Oh, who cares.
Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable, I mean it was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways. Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.
No surprise here. One of the most degenerate Trumpian fanatics, up there with Lara Trump, Eastman will soon lose the law license he used in order to devise the vile and traitorous Jan. 6 plot. The judge who presided over his disbarment trial said Eastman’s “lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.” UD thinks he can still lead a meaningful life hawking sixty dollar a pop Trump bibles.
To paraphrase Lady Macbeth.
American political rhetoric on the right is gushing blood. Katie Britt’s excited smile when she described the country as “steeped in the blood of patriots” has weirded out lots of commentators, as has candidate Trump’s recent enthusiastic prediction, at a rally, that if he loses, “there’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”
Trump is always going on about blood – not, like Britt, that of patriots, but of the streets.
Yet who would have thought the Grand Old Party had so much blood in it? Republican red flows literally now; the MAGA GOP is the party of plasma, with vampirish Trump vamping about the crimson hellscape the USA already is, and certainly will be, should he fall short of victory.
Politicians almost always invoke blood in the context of fallen patriots, although in MAGA world, as in the case of Britt, there’s often a heavy blood of the lamb overlay. Britt and much of her Evangelical audience is used to singing lyrics like these every Sunday:
There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.
Evangelical music directors draw on a … flood of this redeeming gore in their programming, and no one in church says boo about it.
But Trump’s arterial oratory is something else again. His audiences are perfectly prepared to hear God and country, and even Revelation/Armageddon, in his thundering; but some seem taken aback by the angry sense of meaninglessness coursing through his veins. They’re not being washed in Trump’s bloodiness; they’re choking to death on it.
***********************
In fact they are watching, in real time, as a lifelong nihilist reckons with old age and death, not to mention likely electoral defeat, and it ain’t pretty. And it certainly ain’t religious.
Trump’s evangelicals long ago made their peace with his stark godlessness; he represents their flawed but elected transformer of the Supreme Court and other heathen elements. What they hadn’t reckoned with is what people like Donald Trump – see Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism – turn into toward the end.
One of my acquaintances – a high-profile architect/artist – told me on his deathbed that he was convinced the world was coming to an end along with him. He took bitter pleasure in the thought that if he had to endure the insult of death, at least all other living beings did too, in one big wipeout. Trump’s delectation of the bloody death of America is exactly this cold comfort – if he has to go, he’s going to take everything down with him. Death is for losers.
As is age and debility. Already he paints himself, an aging coquette, like Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice”; already he insists his aphasic moments are intentional satire. But no cover story, no makeup, can hide his predicament: He is a human being like the rest of us, which means he gets the same tragic life we do. Most of us grapple with that – philosophically, spiritually – in an effort to come to terms with it. But people like Trump do not do this, and his audiences have the dubious privilege of observing his gaping existential wound as he is forced to glimpse the reality of the end of life.
At its best, nihilism produces Samuel Beckett. It produces Charles Baudelaire (‘Nothing in nature now remains unblooded. / I used to hope that wine could bring me ease, / Could lull asleep my deeply gnawing mind. / I was a fool: the senses clear with wine. / I looked to Love to cure my old disease. / Love led me to a thicket of IVs / Where bristling needles thirsted for each vein.’); it produces Sylvia Plath (‘The world is blood-hot and personal / Dawn says, with its blood-flush.’). At its worst, in the current Republican presidential candidate, it brings to mind the earth-killing fantasies of Trump’s predecessor, the French reactionary Joseph De Maistre: “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things … until the death of death.”
197,000 people, or 17.8 percent, voted for either Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis [in the Florida Republican primary], despite both candidates having dropped out of the race. The results suggest the former president is losing support in Florida compared with the previous election in 2020.
The former president now enjoys an unprecedented level of control over the Republican national apparatus. He can freely raid the RNC’s dwindling campaign coffers for legal defense money and appoint family members to key positions while personally directing House Republicans’ disastrous investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump’s total dominance of the Republican Party is a remarkable thing to behold.
But Republicans’ willingness to bow to Trump on nearly every issue is making their party staggeringly unpopular with voters — and not just the rank and file. Colorado Rep. Ken Buck stunned Capitol Hill on Tuesday by announcing that he’d simply had enough of Trumpism (“This place keeps going downhill and I don’t need to spend more time here.”) and would resign in just about a week. In an interview with CNN, Buck slammed Congress as “dysfunctional” and remarked that many of his constituents were sick of Trump.
Und so weiter. Title: TRUMP’S GOP IS ALREADY DYING.
*************************
Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the ways of capitalism you and UD hold so dear.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It’s not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms... [S]ociety … is being continuously transformed by market forces … Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Everything that is solid melts into air”... The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead... This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism …
For UD, the most powerful, most poignant, current example of this truth is the contrast between Madonna — exhausted, barely gyrating, surgeried-up, a real living deadster — and her replacement, Taylor Swift… Capitalist society demands constant newness, incessant novelty, fresh gyrations, and it demands it mercilessly.
Trump intuits all of this, and has done his bit by generating stupendous levels of personal and political drama, sustaining that ever-changing drama over decades. But like his iconic has-been shadow, he too is beginning to lose his restless audience. His latest mavericky move – appointing Kim Yo Jong to run the Republican National Committee – snapped his increasingly bored followers to attention yet again, but isn’t going as planned. Lara’s “purge of the unfaithful” has creeped people out rather than excited them. And that’s because even his routine – even his – is becoming subject to capitalism’s iron law – all that is solid melts into air.
We can expect Trump’s novelty-desperation to become more radical even as it loses its effectiveness. Watch for him and Lara to divorce their partners, marry each other in a joint ceremony with 93 year old Rupert Murdoch and his fifth, and immediately announce Lara’s pregnancy. Gotta keep up!
Trump simply exploited what people were already feeling—feelings that, according to the data, are rooted in authoritarianism, racism, and social dominance orientation. He was always about a “vibe,” and that vibe was to hurt the people his audience thought should be hurt... [T]here is a strong, underlying desire for an authoritarian fascist to rule the country and … even those who aren’t true believers [will] simply go along with it, or disbelieve it altogether. These perfectly nice, ordinary, generous, pleasant people are no different from any German in 1933–1945… Trump [is] merely the invitation. He [is] an outlet for an unspoken desire to seize control and remake the nation, hurting the people who [need] it along the way.
Hurt, hurt, hurt. Yet the author titles this piece NICE ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN BE FASCISTS.
Which is it, babe? Is it nice to be a sadist? Me no think so.
I’d put it this way: Sadists can behave themselves a lot of the time, but they’re still sadists; and non-sadists, even in ‘nice’ dealings with sadists, may well sense the sadism.
There’s plenty of evidence, for instance, that the daughter in law of the nation’s sadist-in-chief, perky pleasant Lara Trump, is an extreme sadist, deriving real pleasure from the spectacle of hurt and humiliated people.
She will soon chair the Republican National Committee. Put her name in my search engine.
Indeed so intimately, so thrillingly attuned is her sadism to that of her father in law that UD feels sure we will eventually learn she and he have been going at it hammer and tongs and zip ties for years. I’ve seen and heard enough of Lara Trump to identify her as a pervert who, like Trump himself, shouldn’t be broadcast during family hours. But most people still see the perky mask.
************************
Edward Albee once wrote that his plays condemn “complacency, cruelty, emasculation and vacuity; [they are] a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” His hyper-sadistic masterwork, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, considered by many the greatest American play of the later twentieth century, describes Americans (he names his two main characters George and Martha) as rage-filled self-loathers, pacifying their disgust at their stupid existence – everyone’s stupid existence – with alcohol, and, when that fails, attacking one another with a viciousness that definitely intends to destroy. Donald Trump is a kind of savior for these (tens of millions of) people – He’s doing their dirty work for them every day, eviscerating the world at a much higher level than they ever could.
************************
Like many of the most fervent evangelicals, these people just want the fucking shitty world to end, and they correctly identify Trump as the one who will get them there.
A former Bush advisor who specializes in communications breaks the asshole barrier when referring to Trump, and he does it bigtime: On CNN’s State of the Union.
But he is quick to say the other thing: Millions of Americans like assholes, and the more their political assholes smell of shit the better.
Millions of Russians, as we speak, are pining for Stalin; millions of Italians for Mussolini, millions of Spaniards for Franco. It ain’t just Americans.
If some clever boots (Adam Phillips?) could figure out why millions of people absolutely adore assholes and follow their stench to the ends of the earth, it might be useful/interesting.
UD‘s congress guy/hero, Jamie Raskin, gets it said.