Gavin Newsom posted the “Trump as Marie Antoinette” image a few weeks ago. It seems even more fitting now.
While Trump sides with King Louis XIV’s “L’état, c’est moi” — I am the state — in many ways he’s really more of a Marie Antoinette. Or, at least Marie Antoinette as the French public came to view her before they beheaded her. Note that Marie Antoinette may have gotten a bad rap about some things. She probably never really said “let them eat cake,” for example.
Anyway, Marie Antoinette came to be robustly disliked because she was said to have spent the people’s money like a drunken sailor on her own extravagances. She was rumored to have plastered the walls of her personal chateau with gold and diamonds. She did spent a ton of money on clothes, jewelry, and other luxuries as well as gambling. This was while France was facing a grave financial crisis and the people were suffering. And Marie’s bed chamber really did look like this:
This was probably normal for an 18th century French queen, of course.
Her husband, Louis XVI, was the French king who officially recognized American independence and gave military and financial support to the American colonists. Without his help, the American Revolution might not have succeeded. But that spending brought France to the brink of bankruptcy, and along with crop failures and some other calamities the French got fed up and started their own Revolution. You probably heard how that turned out.
Marie Antoinette was probably not a bad person, but she was a lifelong royal and appears to have been utterly oblivious to how the people viewed her lifestyle. And that takes me back to Trump, who actually is a bad person but who likewise seems to be living in his own alternative reality bubble. His public statements and decisions suggest he thinks he’s doing a great job and everybody loves him except for those No Kings losers. Yesterday I linked to a Paul Krugman post headlined Donald Trump Has Lost Touch With Reality. Do read that if you haven’t already. But Krugman was hardly the first person to come to the same conclusion. There were warnings last year before the election. More recently many people have noted that Trump really does seem to believe the lies he tells (example). Lawrence O’Donnell has been calling Trump “insane” for weeks. Months, even.
Trump’s decision to throw what could be as much as $40 billion in aid to Argentina because he likes Argentina’s president does not seem to be sitting well with people, at least those people who know about it. I have no idea if this is being reported on Fox News or OAN. Do see As Trump’s Argentina bailout gets worse, so do his excuses by Ja’han Jones at MSNBC. Trump had a screaming fit when a reporter told him that U.S. farmers “feel that the deal is benefiting Argentina more than it is them.”
I’m reading that the farmers are not happy about Argentina. Especially since Argentina is now poised to become a major soybean producer to China. This stuff gets reported in agriculture journals if not on Fox News. Trump’s plan to import more beef from Argentina isn’t making beef cattle ranchers happy, either, and probably won’t do much to bring down the price of beef. But at least he’s dimly aware that beef has gotten expensive.
Trump’s cease fire deal in Gaza doesn’t appear to have helped him in the polls. And he’s way underwater on the economy. And he doesn’t appear to be paying all that much attention to the economy. Instead, his attention is all on his retribution tour and his fancy gilded ballroom à la Marie Antoinette. (A ballroom? What kind of manly man cares about a ballroom?) I don’t know how the destruction of the East Wing is playing in the heartland, but building a fancy ballroom while people are losing their health insurance isn’t a good look.
It’s being paid for by private donations, Trump says. The BBC reports that Trump basically sold access to him to get the donations. The list of known donors includes Microsoft, Amazon, CBS, and Google. (Did the execs know Trump was going to demolish the East Wing? If not, some of them may be having second thoughts.)
And now he’s essentially ordered the Department of Justice to pay him $230 million in compensation because he was investigated for crimes he was bleeping committing. That’s $230 million taxpayer dollars to go directly into his own pocket. On his say-so. Whether Trump will get his money will be up to the DOJ Deputy Attorney General, or the Associate Attorney General who oversees the agency’s civil division. And that would be Todd Blanche, who represented Trump on the Mar-a-Lago case, and Stanley Woodward, who represented a Trump co-defendant in that case. I can’t see a universe in which those two would refuse him.
Of course MAGA true believers will rationalize all this somehow. But there are all kinds of news reports about Trump losing support among independent voters. It’s pretty clear that if we held a snap election today, Trump would lose. Hugely.
As Marie Antoinette might have said, when you’re hot, you’re hot. When you’re not, you’re not.
Update: Josh Marshall, Trump Moves Into Full Twilight Zone ‘Anthony’ Phase
Hahahaha, thanks for the giggle. I spent 6 months in Argentina on a work gig and, while it was a fantastic country to visit… very developed, nice people, excellent food, good infrastructure for a Latin American country, (opinion warning!) the mindset of the locals was that of a spendthrift. Debt was just free party money. Plus, the Americans on my crew got into the office at 8AM sharp and the locals rolled in at 10 or 10:30AM or so, if at all, and that was the work culture. Their favorite pastime, besides soccer, is striking and getting free money from the government: we watched multiple strikes go past us under our office window in downtown BA in the short time we were there.
The point is that the money Trump is bribing them with is just gonna go down a rat-hole of corruption, free party-money, and paying off the last free-money party (look at their financial history). The bars and clubs will boom! Drinks on Diaper Don!
And, I am in the Ag biz and my colleagues will, like zombies, vote for orange man and git their guns out for him, so the harmful policy issue, to me, is a dry hole for hope. They are all so scared of the woke and believe that Pentecostalism will save them from the gettin' the gay disease from the Democrats. Corruption is just something the government does, by golly, they figure, and the last guy was just as corrupt so they may as well be more corrupt… as long as they don't have to momentarily encounter a trans person, all is ok.
Also, …
https://neuburger.substack.com/p/the-augean-stables-how-corruption
I wonder how things have changed under Millei. If you have a country that prints money the way you explain, then someday you're going to get an austerity freak like Millei, kind of like day follows night.
Of course he's corrupt also, but he struck me as someone who was determined to end the free money party.
IIRC, Argentina got a US$20 billion loan from the IMF about 4-5 months ago and has burned through most/all of that. One assumes the next 20B will go the same.
I am not sure if Millei is crazy, corrupt, or both—tend to thik both— but his austerity measures hit the "widows and orphans" not the elites.
It is similar to medicad cuts to finance tax cuts in the USA.
I am not sure if Millei is crazy, corrupt, or both—tend to think both— but his austerity measures hit the "widows and orphans" not the elites.
And that's why Trump likes him. He's his new BFF. Trump even had him up front at the Charlie Kirk "memorial."
"A ballroom? What kind of manly man cares about a ballroom?"
The kind of manly man what wears makeup (lots of makeup) and dyes his hair. As far as Stump losing touch with reality I agree but he has always been that way, nothing has changed, he's been a delusional twit his entire life!
I suspect that it will be more of a throne room where the aristocracy and oligarchs can meet and make side deals with the government and bribe the Trump family.
I got so tired of people looking for a woman to blame, I read up on Marie. Her power-hungry mother traded her to Louis when she was 12.
What princess doesn't like to party? It's been claimed that the "let them eat cake" line was spoken by Madame de Pompadour, the chief official mistress of Louis XV. The French court certainly led the way for us, as well as their mobs. The more things change, the more it's the same thing.
Of course, there's nothing worse for a man than to be called a woman, other than to be unable to find one to take the blame for him.
It's most likely nobody said it. All kinds of untrue rumors were circulated about Marie Antoinette. That was one of the milder of them.
It was almost surely not her. There seems to be some evidence that her mother-in-law may have said it however is is quite likely just something Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote as a comment on the rich versus the poor.
To be really pedantic the phrase is "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche". A brioche is not a cake but more a very sweet bun or roll.
A ballroom? What kind of manly man cares about a ballroom?
It's just how he rolls. The one in Mar-a-Lago is where he receives people, makes deals, holds parties etc. It's not about balls, it's just what those large spaces are called.
Trump is a crook who fancies himself a businessman. Trump also thinks government should be run like a business, the way he does business. It's bothered Trump that people with decades in government insist on intruding on his genius with trivia like numbers, facts, analysis, history, etc.
Within the WH and in offices surrounding the WH, people indulge in (to Trump) pointless and costly research, which they always expect Trump to care about. In his own mind, and nowhere else, Trump is gifted, and he openly attributes his superior genes and to a gut instinct that's far superior to thinking. I don't think I'm exaggerating.
The Oval Office and the design of the White House run counter to Trump's MO. Trump knows that Putin is his kind of guy. Go down the list, Rocket Man, Orban (strongman ruler of Hungary), Duterte (former President PI on trial for extrajudicial murders by his orders), Bolsonaro (former president Brazil, convicted of coup attempt after election failure), Santos, (former NY congressman, COVID fraud, credit card fraud, plus small-time cons)… The list goes on.
Under Trump, the Ballroom will get plenty of use. This is where, how, Trump thinks business should be done. Food, women, booze, and endless opportunities for rich people to kowtow to Trump with offerings of cash and promises of loyalty. The rest of it is all boring details for clerks and lawyers to work out.
The ballroom is the prime example of the classic adage – "Either you have a seat at the table or you're on the menu." Nobody in the Trump administration is holding a chair for you or me, but they're debating the different ways to cook Democrats.
As I keep pointing out, Trump has no personal experience working within a large multi-level organization with multiple functions or product lines. Big corporations develop all kinds of procedures and rules about who needs to sign off on what in order to avoid costly mistakes, like having packaging manufactured that the product can't fit into. Those who come up through the ranks in engineering or R&D or production/manufacturing learn to respect the procedures. (The problem with a lot of corporations is that the people at the top usually get there from finance, or sales/marketing and have only a rudimentary idea of how their products get made and put on shelves. If they're smart, they leave the systems in place alone.) But Trump's only model for running a business is that the guy who owns the business makes all the decisions, and everybody in the company just does what he says. And so that's how he thinks the presidency is supposed to work.
Exactly right Maha. From my 38 year career in the corporate world at a large company. I can confirm exactly what you said. And I'll reinforce the notion that the the closely held family company concept of how to run a company is guaranteed to fail big time in a large complex enterprise.
And on a side note, I think there's something else going on here that exacerbates the problem: the grotesque over-financialization of the corporate world; the greed of the 80's leading to the M&A plague and the casino-ization of the stock market.
Also: What D.O.G.E and Bannon’s “deconstruct the adminstrative state!” crusades are simply an expansion of the corporate raider mentality into the government sector.
You are right Maha, nobody said the sentence attributed to Marie-Antoinette. Jean-Jacques Rousseau included it in his “Confessions” written in 1765 (when Marie-Antoinette was 10 years old and not in France.) This book was published in 1782. In it he talks about some unknown princess who had said “s’ils n’ont pas de pain? Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” (Translated as if they don’t have bread let them eat cake..) Historians think that J-J Rousseau made it up as they couldn’t trace that princess. Although in the mémoires of Madame de Boigne she said it was Madame Victoire, a daughter of Louis XV. But Mme Victoire didn’t mention cake but pâté, she said “S’ils n’ont pas de pain, mon Dieu, s’ils pouvaient manger du pate!” (If they don’t have bread, my God, if they could eat pate.)
I’d like you to notice is that France for all its faults make politicians obey our laws. See how ex president Sarkozy entered jail yesterday for a 5 years prison sentence after being convicted of campaign finance fraud. Hasn’t your dear leader been convicted several times already? So what happens here? Anything?
I vaguely remember learning in school that the "cake" she meant was "ash cake," which was the rising batter spilling out of the pan as it baked and charring on the oven floor. A starving populace could get essential nutrition from it, but it tasted like ash.
The original quote in French was "let them eat brioche" ("Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"), so I don't think the "ash" story holds water. I understand it wasn't attributed to Marie Antoinette until about 50 years after she died. It's just one of those things that somehow caught on and got repeated but never happened.
Nothing supercharges crazy like sycophancy and fearless leader is riding a wave of flattery. So, expect even higher levels of crazy.
It is quite possible this will not end well. The bubble cannot expand forever. Fearless leader is in a really big one that is on a growth spurt.
The review of PBS's Marie Antionette, which I recently enjoyed, claimed it also had problems with historical accuracy. Rather than casting her as insensitive to the plight of the people, it more presented her dealing with her public persona and her conflicts with other royalty, who were also losing status with those of lessor means. Fiscal problems and the excesses of the elites of the day were presented as ongoing challenges for Louis and her, as were ambitions of other elites. No where was the line let them eat cake used, and the bitter end of the story was left to history.
As I understand, the revolution led not to a democracy, but to the rise of Nepoleon and wars. Let them eat cannon balls and musket shot was what the needy ended up with rather than a more nutritious outcome that was probably more their plan.
We seem to be getting both the Marie Antionette and the Nepoleon Bonapart at the same time. History repeating itself in a more condensed version and at a faster rate. Now I hear the rich will be getting the beef from Argentina, as it is healthier and more grass fed than ours. Us low life will only be able to afford (at best) our artery plugging variety we specialize in producing or just used up dairy cows. With proper advertising we will be convinced we are the real royalty, as we get it with bacon and cheese. Do not forget the seeded bun that even the mold won't eat.
Think of it this way. It would be a better outcome than a diet of cannon balls and bayonets. Only a true pessimist would see that in their crystal ball.
Great is what we are promised and grated is what we will get. So far, I've got that parmesan feeling from head to toe on most days.
. . . a little gallows humor is always appreciated. Things are likely to get worse before they get better.
No it's all about making meaning. Look:
Marie Antoinette: Let them eat cake.
D Trump: Let them eat shit.
Of course it’s about making meaning. We’re just noting that Marie Antoinette got a bad rap over something she never actually said.