Trump is trying on “fascist state” like he’s donning one of his absurd business suits

Trump's popularity is underwater, on all policy topics. ALL POLICIES! Every indicator says things are going to get worse, the only questions being "How bad?" and "How fast?"

So... he needs a BIG distraction. Soldiers shooting civilians would be great for the fascists.

So Trump will keep pushing until it happens.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Summer of 2020 in Lafayette Park: Associate Press

In 1960, the great writer and public intellectual Paul Goodman published his masterpiece, “Growing Up Absurd,” a book which set out to be a meditation on the then burgeoning problem of juvenile delinquency and ended up becoming the bible of the counterculture. Examining the growth of crime among youthful Americans, Goodman concluded that antisocial behavior, primarily of young men, was a logical reaction to growing up in a society that denied to its young a way to live a fulfilling life of purpose, meaningful connections, a good job, and a chance at more than the dull, lifeless present they could see all around them.

I just read a story online about disaffected young people who sit staring at their phones swiping left and right, desperately seeking connection with one another and finding nothing more meaningful than what used to be called zipless fucks that now go by the moniker, hook-ups. There aren’t any jobs for recent college graduates, who are being forced to settle for slots behind the expresso machine at Starbucks or driving DoorDash deliveries to people who don’t tip them in cars for which they can’t afford the payments. And now they are told if they don’t pay their college loans on time, their wages will be garnished. They face a future in which they won’t be able to get married because they can’t find a mate, and they couldn’t afford it anyway, and they’ll never be able to buy a house because real estate is too expensive, and missing payments on their student loans tanked their credit.

It's a desperate world out there, empty of meaning and riven by crime. Trump just unleashed 120 FBI agents and 800 National Guard Troops on our nation’s capital because a 19-year-old man who once worked in his absurd “Department of Government Efficiency” that was not a governmental department and had nothing to do with governmental efficiency was carjacked and mugged by a gang of juvenile delinquents.

So, we’re still living in a society that fails to offer its young people a decent way to make a living, meaningful connections with others, and the alternative, as it was in Paul Goodman’s day, is dropping out, drugs, disaffection, and destitution. Donald Trump’s solution is tariffs and cutting government spending and screaming for lower interest rates so his billionaire buddies can make even more money scamming suckers with get-rich-quick crypto schemes and television ads selling supplements that will take the place of the vaccines that RFK Jr. has unilaterally decided to make more expensive or completely unavailable.

Oh, I almost forgot. Trump also has a plan to fill in the potholes and repave the streets and fix the cracked marble and put anyone in jail who even touches one of the monuments in Washington D.C., because…preserving history, or something.

Do you remember the scene in “The Graduate” when Dustin Hoffman was at a party at his parent’s house in Pasadena and one of his father’s friends walked by and asked him how his summer was going and gave him a piece of advice when he went out looking for a job? “Plastics,” he said sagely. Buck Henry wrote the line in the screenplay, but the words and the look on Hoffman’s face were right out of Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd.” The world is an unknowably shitty place. You’re the only person who understands how bad the world really is. The people who run the world, like your parents and their friends, not only don’t understand you, they don’t understand that they are the ones who are making the world so depressing and unlivable that you just feel like giving up.

What was true in 1960 is still true, but in Donald Trump’s America, it’s worse. We grew up absurd, now we’re growing old absurd. Read your newsfeed on your phone. Turn on MSNBC. Hell, don’t bother reading anything. Just wake up in the morning knowing that masked ICE agents are terrorizing mothers and fathers and children and throwing them in cages, and back in Washington D.C., Trump is picking new gold medallions for the walls of his bathroom and meeting with people like Hegseth and Bondi about their upcoming police state, and how do you feel? You feel like giving up.

The Washington Post reported today that Trump and Hegseth are planning a so-called “quick reaction force” of 600 National Guard soldiers who will be ready within an hour’s notice to deploy to “American cities facing protests or other unrest.” What is going on in our country? Which stormtroopers are the SS and which are the Gestapo? When is a 19-year-old National Guard soldier going to accidentally or under orders fire his M-4 automatic rifle and kill a protester or an immigrant fleeing an arrest? What’s going to happen when that hits the airwaves? Will there be mass protests the way there were after panicked National Guard soldiers killed four students at Kent State?

If mass protests break out, will Trump deploy his “reaction force” of armed soldiers to put down the “unrest,” and more people will be killed?

We are staring straight into the eye of an absurd yet inevitable doom-loop. The next thing you know, Oath Keeper types will be on the streets to “back-up” the National Guard, and they’ll kill one person, or five, or 10. The Trump Department of Justice will refuse to indict them because…loyalty or January 6 or some other bullshit. A state like Illinois or California will arrest some right-wing Trump supporters who have committed state crimes, and the Trump DOJ will demand they be released, and they’ll go into court to quash indictments and subpoenas, and state courts will rule one way and one of Trump’s pet federal judges will rule the other way.

It would be a Constitutional crisis if it weren’t happening in the streets with American civilians facing American soldiers aiming rifles at them, which is something else entirely, something much, much worse.

Trump held an 80-minute press conference yesterday and surrounded himself with his hirelings in heels and ill-fitting suits and bad neckties and he said he’s taking over Washington D.C. The only positive thing I can see in this entire scenario is that what Donald Trump wants to do is way, way more difficult than he thinks it is. His deployment of National Guard units to Los Angeles was a disaster. Morale plummeted because the mission was stupid and unfocused and every soldier knew it. Then there was nothing to do but stand around, and soldiers got bored. The Pentagon hides from the public what was happening behind the scenes, but I can guarantee you that there were soldiers who went AWOL, fights between soldiers, drunkenness, DUI’s. Court martials resulted from that stupid, meaningless, absurd use of military force in Los Angeles. Recruitment suffered. The number of soldiers who re-enlisted dropped precipitously.

Uniformed leaders at the Pentagon know all this. They know that having 300 soldiers on standby in Alabama and 300 more in Arizona is meaningless and absurd. If any serious “unrest” were to occur, it’s not enough soldiers to put down a lunchtime riot at a junior high school. The absurd reaction force gambit will cost tens of millions and accomplish nothing, and it might lead to death and disaster on the streets of the United States.

Donald Trump is trying on his fascist state as if it’s one of his tent-like business suits. He’s listening to ravings of Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. They don’t know what they’re doing. None of this is going to end well. People are going to die. The only question at this moment is, how soon and how many before the sheer incompetence and criminality of these fools brings them down. This is not Nazi Germany, it is the United States of America. We know it. They’re going to learn it.