The Presidency Part 1: Trump

On the night Donald Trump was elected, I wrote:

“No one knows what will happen to this country after January 21st, 2017. We may get 100% single-payer health care. We may get a blistering fistfight between the White House and the Republican Congressional leadership. We may get a nuclear war.

I don’t know. You don’t know. Donald J Trump doesn’t know. Because he’s not a fascist. He’s not a conservative. He’s a narcissist. He’ll do whatever he thinks benefits him in the short term. Me, you, Donald–no one know what he’ll do.

I am fucking terrified.”

Now, on the last full day of the Trump administration, I can look back and say: Yup, it was pretty damn bad. Started bad and got worse.

The ridiculous bits, like the futile trade spats, or the “Space Force.” Then the sucking up to Putin. The lackadaisical approach to the greatest natural disaster in American history. The sinister unidentified federal agents. The desperate follies of the past two months, culminating in the invasion of the Capitol.

We didn’t get a nuclear war. That’s something. Awfully low bar, though.

Given all this, can we say there was any good that came of the Trump administration?

Author Adrienne Martini saw Trump’s victory in 2016 and decided she had to do something. She got involved. Now she sits on the county board of representatives. (And she wrote a book about it.)

I joke when I say that Donald Trump was God’s way of teaching Americans how their government works, but it’s true that the average civics knowledge has slowly risen over the last four years. How the Electoral College works. What the executive branch can and can’t do. The limits of how political appointments interact with congressional approval. The ins and outs of impeachment. We have a better appreciation of political power, of how real it is. With that, a reawakening of the potential, the threat, of mass political violence.

Democracy is miraculous. Throughout human history, society has generally consisted of an elite living off practically everyone else, and enforcing that power through force. Through the labor of centuries, we have managed to create the expectation that the powerful will obey, and that violence should have no place in politics. This is a thing both marvelous and bizarre. We should cherish, and practice it. It is us, and it cannot survive without us.

There’s no such thing as free will and humans are not beings, but processes. It’s tough to be a pundit when your most basic belief is that nobody can know what’s going to happen. But in that flux, we should remember that the course of society goes as easily in a good direction as a bad one. It has. All the things we like about history are as true as all the horrible ones.

Goodbye, Donald J. Trump. Hope we don’t see you again.

Donald Trump and the Illuminati Eye

Recently, retired Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney informed the WVW Broadcasting network that the seizure, in Frankfurt, of a Scytl server containing proof that President Trump’s re-election was stolen by Chinese, Iranian and Russian forces, was in fact carried out by members of the elite Delta Force, who engaged with the CIA team defending the server. The firefight resulted in five KIA, but the mission was carried out, and soon the truth about the corrupt 2020 presidential election would be revealed.

This clicked right in with an audience primed by “Q” and the great network of conspiracy theory that has developed in tandem. The WVW Broadcasting audience received the information enthusiastically.

Alas, I have to say I find the idea that a full-scale gun battle occurred in the middle of a major German urban area, with all of this successfully scrubbed of nonparticpant notice, to be unlikely. I just can’t tamp down the little voice of skepticism.

This has always been my problem with conspiracy theories.

There was a time in my life, about 1996, when I made serious study of conspiracy theory, delving into sources like Feral House’s Secret and Suppressed and William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse. That time culminated in “The Christmas Conspiracy Caball”! But at no point in that period did I ever think I was receiving actual forbidden knowledge. I found the stories fascinating, but something kept me from embracing them. I could spot the flaws, the jumps in logic, the argument from word association. I could sense the apophenia at work.

Which is not to say that I lacked a healthy appreciation for how weird life can get. I learned a lot of concrete real-world information from that period, about Propaganda Due and Michael Jon Hand and Operation Paperclip. The trick is that events do happen out of the public eye, and evil does exist.

The task of epistemology in our day is to distinguish between weird shit that’s weird enough to be true and shit that’s just a little too weird.

During the 20^th century, the conspiratal urge in America swung from right to left and back to right again. In the 50s, the John Birch Society suspected practically everyone, right up to President Eisenhower, of being a Communist mole. Then as the Sixties turned into the Seventies, the momentum went toward Mae Brussel and The Realist, delving into the Kennedy Assassination. As the Reagan Era closed, the baton passed back, to those who dreaded the Black Helicopters.

It’s hard to believe the guerrilla ontology of Robert Anton Wilson is being enlisted to keep Donald Trump president, but maybe the real message of the Illuminatus ethos is that life will always be weirder than you expect or want it to be. Or perhaps Donald Trump is the ultimate Discordian figure, rejecting all traits of rational thought and embracing all-centering chaos. Personally, I’d like a little rationality and normalcy. In an irrational universe, it may be foolish to be rational, but it can also be a comfort.

Donald Trump: Thoughts After Four Years

When I was young, Donald Trump was in the funny pages, in Bloom County and Doonesbury. He fit right in. He was a comics character, a punchline, a caricature of himself.

So what does a punchline do when he becomes President?

During the interval between Trump’s election and his inauguration, I considered many scenarios. I wondered if Trump might clash with the Congressional GOP leadership, in case that his ego might interfere with what they wanted to get done. That did not happen, because it turned out—after failing to get rid of Obamacare and then cutting taxes—they didn’t really have anything they wanted to get done. They were more than happy to go along with Trump’s whims, because at least that filled the void. The two entities got along just peachy.

Trump busied himself assembling applause lines. From The Wall to the Space Force to his manly dealings with Kim Jong-un and such, Trump’s presidency has always been about images. Cause and effect are not allowed to interfere. Trump leads a whimsical quest for applause.

Any objective observer, the hypothetical Martian anthropologist, would have said that he was not a politician. He was an entertainer with a schtick. If he loses on Election Day as it now looks like he will, it will be because enough people got sick of that shtick.

But here’s the problem: this wasn’t just a shtick. This was power, power to affect people’s lives. Which it did. The children in cages at the border are proof of this.

There was a book titled Amusing Ourselves To Death, published circa 1989, by one Neil Postman. His thesis was that Americans were losing the ability to take things seriously, to engage in rational discussion of rational action. Trump is the ultimate data point in support of this idea.

It all comes back to Reality TV. When “The Real World” began on MTV, the cry went up that it was all fake, all carefully cut away to appear real. But the allure is too strong. We too easily suspend our disbelief. Reality TV rose to popularity, and it gave Trump his natural home.

Trump represents the victory of stories over problem solving, of editing over reality. As a nation, we cannot afford this. Our problems are reaching critical mass.

I don’t want Joe Biden to be president. The Democratic Party overwhelmingly rejected Joe Biden for the presidency, twice, for very good reasons. But I would rather have a mediocre president who is at least pursuing rational action to a man whose entire life negates the very idea.

Gatsbyean Doom

I don’t like what’s about to happen to the United States. I’m scared. But when I look at it, at the great arc of history, I have to admit that there is something deeply on target about Donald Trump coming to the presidency. It is only what could be expected. And a phrase keeps popping to mind: the Gatsbyean Doom. Trump is the Gatsbyean Doom. There could be no other. There are no ifs in history. All of American history has been aimed at this. The Gatsbyean Doom. Like a bobbing styrofoam cup at the brink of Niagara Falls. There could be no other.

I will say this: in 1990, with the ending of the Cold War, America lost a raison d’etre. We have not yet managed to find another one. We have wandered in malaise. In Trump we find a thicker, richer, new & improved malaise.