I like the pessimism of this, and in particular the “eagerness for political violence” thing, though it should be amended to eagerness for violence tout court. Watch any interview with a Trumpist; survey the brainless at play on Jan 6 footage; for that matter, listen to their leader try to form a thought. The power of the movement is that it’s now way past impediments like ideology. Take megaMAGA donor Leonard Leo. As Katherine Stewart points out, “Leo and his cronies have never really cared about ideas, because the one idea they keep repeating is that they care about America’s constitutional government. And yet, they have put their weight and money behind a man, Donald Trump, who attempted a coup, and they are filling our courts with judges who seem keen to enable the MAGA project of destroying the Constitution.”
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Trump has always been little more than a sadist, and he has succeeded in molding the movement entirely into his image. It’s basically just sadism now.
Trump himself has no political convictions, and though various fanatics, like Vance, Vermeule, Deneen, and the rest of the Cathophate Party, attach themselves to him, they will always find their cynicism misplaced — as, for instance, when Trump backtracks on abortion (their paramount issue) because he’s never given a shit about it one way or another and only cares about winning an election.
As with his having most recently set the hounds loose on Springfield, Ohio, Trump represents little more than a goad to violence, most famously on display on Jan 6, but abundantly obvious in other venues. Yet while his followers cleave to their sadism, Trump himself lately displays low-energy sadism/inspiration toward crowd-sadism. It is perhaps a bad sign for his current presidential campaign that the bloody shrieks of lock her up from his first campaign are much less evident in this one, and that his sickening on-stage stalking of Hillary Clinton has been reduced, against Kamala Harris, to surly, staring straight ahead, nihilism.
All of which is to say that even world historical sadists get old. To be sure, second generation Trumpian sadism thrives in his sons, and most notably in La Pasionaria Lara Trump, but Trump himself looks more like Humbert Humbert at the conclusion of Lolita: a washed-up roué who has trouble getting it up even for the debauching of a nation.
The legacy for which he will have to settle is the creation of dread, in half the country, that if he loses this election his followers will set the place on fire. Think of all those guns he has helped put in the hands of all those sadists.