Trump Wrecks America. His “Patriotic” Fans Cheer. Is There Any Bottom?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I was going to write one more liberal column expressing outrage about what Donald Trump has done to the White House this week , but then I thought: Why? What would be the point? The people who would agree with me would agree with me, and the people who wouldn’t wouldn’t, and the world would go on its merry way.
Of course the president’s destruction of the East Wing is beyond outrageous. It’s completely illegal and un-American—not just un -American, but anti -American: the unilateral, I-don’t-give-a-fuck desecration of a civic shrine that belonged to all the people. Democracies have appointed bodies that oversee such things. Dictators, actual and aspiring, ignore all that. Call it overreaction if you must, but I’m sure I’m hardly the only American to google “Albert Speer Germania” this week.
And yet, it’s probably only the third-most-outrageous thing Trump has done since Monday. To place, in horse-racing parlance, I’d put the pardon of Changpeng Zhao , who “invested” in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency start-up and who pleaded guilty in 2023 to allowing his Binance crypto exchange to be used—get this now, and imagine a Democrat issuing a pardon to such a person—by, among other unsavories, Hamas’s military wing (not just plain old Hamas—its military wing !).
And taking the gold medal this week would be the $230 million extortion that the sitting president of the United States demanded from the Department of Justice. (I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence.) A Pahlavi-level tacky ballroom can always be torn down; these other corrupt precedents cannot be undone.
No—one more outraged liberal column won’t add much this week. The more interesting thing I’ve been thinking about lately is not the leader who perpetrates these acts but the people who allow them and cheer them. Because this is the truly maddening question, from a small- d democratic perspective. Authoritarian-fascist demagogues come along sometimes; that’s the world. But democratic societies stop them. Why hasn’t ours stopped Trump?
We are cursed with four categories of fascism enablers. The interesting question about each group is not merely what they are doing, but why : What motivates them? Let’s go through them.
First, obviously, are the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Call them 1a and 1b, because I believe they have different motivations. The Republicans in the House and the Senate are mostly just tiny cowards who fear Trump, a possible primary challenger from the right, and most of all the MAGA base. The video clips that I hope they play over and over in future high school civics classes, assuming these thugs can’t fully erase our democracy, will be the ones of GOP legislators scurrying for the elevators as they deny having knowledge of Trump’s latest assault. Against stern competition, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the tiniest coward of them all, is the most pathetic exemplar of this: “I’m not gonna comment on something I haven’t read, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he told reporters this week when they asked him about the DOJ bribe.
The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in contrast, aren’t cowards. They know what they’re doing, and they have no voters to fear. We must assume that they are consciously creating the America they want. That’s most true of the two deepest reactionaries, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But to varying degrees, it’s true of the other four conservatives, John Roberts very much included. The record they are leaving behind of these terse, barely explained pro-Trump shadow docket decisions will be their legacy—of shame, if we manage to restore democracy after Trump, or of glory, if we descend into a Hunger Games society.
Group two consists of the cowards in the corporate and business worlds who surely know on some level that Trump is dangerous. But they stay silent, for, I think, one of two reasons, or some combination thereof. One, they fear Trumpian retribution. Two, they want their taxes cut. Have a gander at this list of donors to Trump’s razing of the East Wing for his ballroom. Talk about a basket of deplorables. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackrock. The Fanjul brothers, the megarich sugar magnates and welfare queens . Meta (Mark Zuckerberg). Amazon (Jeff Bezos). Palantir (Peter Thiel). Others are less blatantly offensive but obviously covering their corporate behinds. These are not by and large stupid people. On some level, they see what Trump is doing to this country. They just care more about other things.
Third come the right-wing “media” outlets that serve as Trump’s propaganda arms. Among this group again I think we see dual motivations. The first is the kind of cynicism exposed in those publicly released Fox News depositions relating to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit: Trump is good for business, so they lie for him to make money. The second motivation is more genuine: They truly despise liberals and liberalism and think we must be stopped at all costs, even when it involves lying to their audiences for a higher purpose. This mixture of the insincere and the sincere may seem incongruous, but actually the two motivations mesh together perfectly: The insincerity ensures that they defend and minimize every single thing Trump does, while the sincerity drives their coverage of Democrats and liberals, although it too is salted with plenty of cynicism, as when they try to persuade their viewers that some kooky neo-Marxist tenured postmodernist professor stands in for American liberalism.
And finally—the MAGA faithful. Here let’s distinguish between the soft Trump supporters and the true red-hots. Of the 40 or 42 percent of Americans who still say they approve of Trump’s job performance, I’m guessing that a third or so are soft supporters. Some are swing voters. Some are evangelicals for whom a Democratic vote is basically out of the question. Some remember the first Trump economy fondly. There are lots of different motivations there, but what they have in common is that they don’t necessarily consider him America’s savior.
But that other two-thirds … I hesitate to say these are bad human beings. But their rage at certain developments in the United States over these last 30-odd years is so overpowering that their civic and small- d democratic instincts have been buried by the antagonisms Trump has brought to the surface of American politics. They once knew, or they know, or a part of them knows, that no actual leader should be calling human beings “vermin.” But that empathic impulse isn’t much match for rage, which can be quite exhilarating and liberating (we all must admit that we know this feeling from personal experience).
How deep does that rage run? We don’t yet know. We have yet to see its bottom. Tearing down part of the White House may lose him a portion of the softs, as polls suggest . But it won’t bother the red-hots, who’ll leap to point out, as I saw some nincompoop do on Newsmax Thursday night, that what Trump did was really no different from Barack Obama ordering the building of his basketball court. The pardon of Zhao is in fact the liberation of the crypto industry from the shackles imposed by Sleepy Joe. The DOJ bribe is money due to Trump fair and square. And so on and so on.
I sometimes wonder what it will take for some of these folks to peel away. What if ICE agents just start shooting people? They already are; but I mean en masse. I doubt even that will change anything. Things will change when the rage stops being exhilarating, and I doubt that happens anytime soon.
It takes all four of these groups to sustain Trumpism. If Republicans in Congress were doing their constitutional job, Trump would still be Trump but the legislative branch would have established the reality of limits. The corporate class could have said to him: We too know that we thrive best under democratic norms, and we cannot tolerate you breaking those. The right-wing media could still be basically pro-Trump while adhering more closely to the principles of conservatism than to genuflection before one man. And finally, his base too could at least from time to time acknowledge error on his part and demand that he adjust course.
But none of these things are happening. And it’s hard to see them happening anytime soon. Bad as this week was, it’s not close to the bottom we’re going to hit.
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Let's give the MAGAs a shot - what would be Trumps bottom?
Well it is definitely lower than pedophilia. Not sure what's below that however.
... those that knowingly enable pedophilia, by denying it.
[✘]
I'd say that that would be about 1/2 step above actually doing the deed.
The place where MAGAites most like having their heads shoved?
Must be time for another protest.
The problem with all these whiny liberal rants is the expectation that Republicans should fix the problem. These empty headed, looney-tune liberals are waiting for Republicans to become Democrats. Hey, Bubba, that's not very smart.
As we've heard over and over, protesters storming the Capitol and shutting down government is insurrection punishable by prison time. But these elected fuckers can hold the country hostage, shut down government and expect to be rewarded next election. What's wrong with that picture?
The elected officials who have chosen party over people are getting paid for not doing their job. And the people we depend on to do their work are not getting paid. What's wrong with that picture?
Don't make sacrifices so your elected officials don't have to. Flood their inboxes. Tie up their phone lines. Visit their offices. We demand more service from the kid waiting tables than we do from those we elect. What's wrong with that picture?
Get a clue folks. Donald Trump doesn't care dribbley shit about the polls. Trump can lie the polls away. Trying Donald Trump in the court of public opinion won't change anything. And Trump knows it.