Do see Paul Krugman, The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities. He addresses the phenomenon of Trump worship; the hard core base who even now can’t see what a loser Trump is.
Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6
extremistsRepublicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?
The comment was followed by a photo of Bush looking studly in a flight suit. I’ll spare you. Krugman continues, “And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.”
During the Watergate scandal there was a lot of wagon-circling around Richard Nixon, as I recall, but nothing like the adoration offered to Reagan or the deification of Trump. So I’m going to postulate that this need to find a heroic figure who will save us from [fill in the blank — scary minorities? libtards? vegetarians who do yoga?] is something coming from the U.S. Right that I don’t think was around so intensely in earlier times. McCarthyism came pretty close, though.
The social psychologists tell us that conservatives value party loyalty more than liberals do, and that’s a factor, but what’s going on with Trump is not just loyalty. It really is a cult of personality with no basis in objective reality.
And then beyond the base we have the elected officials and Supreme Court judges who bend the Constitution and sometimes their own prior opinions to give Trump more power and more protection from the consequences of his incompetence. Whether they do this because they are in the cult, or because they are afraid of the cult, or because John Roberts’ head lives in an alternative universe, I do not know.
The recent pushback from some Republicans against the slush fund and tax money for the ballroom gives me hope that a few are beginning to break away. And today the South Carolina Senate killed the redistricting attempt that would have eliminated Rep. James Clyburn’s seat. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.
Krugman concludes,
The point is that the dire state we’re in — the leader of the free world has turned against freedom, the greatest power the world has ever known is self-immolating before our eyes — isn’t just a matter of Donald Trump’s personal failings. It’s the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made American great.
That much is certainly true, and IMO this has roots in the “pseudo conservatives” Richard Hofstadter used to write about. I’m not sure what to do about it, though.
Other good stuff to read – see Tax Me If You Can by Jeffrey Winters at Mother Jones, about the growing oligarchy in the U.S. and Paul Waldman at The Cross Section, Trump is Haunted by Barack Obama. I especially recommend The Hard Truth My Party Needs to Face by Sen. Chris Van Hollen at the New York Times. the Hard Truth is that “The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” And this has to stop.
I’m not seeing anything new about Iran since this morning’s performative strikes by Trump. The word for the day, boys and girls, is quagmire.
The hard core base will never come around. It has zero to do with Trump, it's just how this set of people are and always have been. In the meantime, we get almost no real news about the state of things, how many casualties, how much equipment lost, how many enemies we've made. On Fox News, Trump says the war will be over "soon".
In short, it's not bad enough yet for these people. They're not that important to focus on anyway.
I believe it was Orwell who said, it's not the constant lying that's important, it's when people no longer care they're being lied to.
Crow is best eaten with its head left on. That way, as was the way of fine noble English tables, I read, assured the guests of the true source and freshness of the game served.
Why is this relevant? Because we now expect deception. Corruption too, as Texas republicans have doubled down on sorting and selecting candidates that show proof of and a history of deception and corruption,
Thomas Freidman waxes quite critically in the NYT today:
It is food for thought. A bit tough though. Chew away.
Opinion | It’s Crow, Mr. Trump, Not Lobster – The New York Times
A few random thoughts…
The TX Senate seat is in play. The Trumpists selected the criminally plagued TX A/G over the incumbent, based on Trump's endorsement. Talrico polls well against Paxon – this is one to watch. The endorsement underlines the cult following – all of MAGA is following Trump but not many others.
The question I am not hearing is "WHY does Trump want a 1.8B slush fund to pay anyone he wants?" It could be a grift just for the fun of it, but I'm cynically pessimistic. Has the 2026 election planning reached the point that Trump plans to raise a private army in his personal employ to disrupt the 2026 election? I'm pretty sure the Army won't deploy to the blue-state polls. Some National Guard would (TX) and some would not. The vast majority of commissioned officers will not obey illegal orders to interfere in elections. State and federal courts will prohibit intimidation tactics by the feds. So Trump has somebody gaming out how to prevent Democrats from voting – are mercenary MAGA militias that answer personally to Trump the final solution?
The ploy of satisfying an imaginary grievance against Trump by transferring huge sums from the Treasury WITHOUT approval of Congress makes the legislature irrelevant. Shades of Emperador Palpatine. Is that what caused some in the Senate to balk? They realized their dog is completely off the leash if Trump can raise and spend funds without Congress.
Trump is demanding that other Gulf States sign the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel as part of the peace farce. Iran won't sign it – it's SA and UAE that Israel wants to keep out of a wider war. (That's my interpretation.) It looks like Iran will exit the war with functional control of the Straight of Hormuz. That means Iran has SA, UAE, and the region above the Straight by the testicles. So who won the war?
There is an election in Israel this summer. If voters in Israel perceive that the US abandoned them to a conflict with Iran and the Arab states, will voters there go full-fascist or will they want a legislature who seeks a stable peace with their neighbors?
A number of excellent questions you ask, Doug. And it's pretty clear that a rational person would not view those as 50/50 chances. We know what things that should not become reality actually could become reality at this moment in history.
The last question, I think, might be the most important one, if only because it has so many elements that are completely out of our control.
It's starting.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/republicans-sound-like-theyre-getting-nervous-about-supreme-court-expansion
I tuned into Deadline Whitehouse today and saw a segment with Senator Chris Murphy. In that interview I think he said some stuff that I have been thinking about (my thoughts have been in somewhat less clear terms). It has to do with an unsettled feeling about what happens if we manage to perform well in the mid-terms, specifically a sense of how deep the problems run in our society at this moment in human history. I'll put a link below, it's a little over 7 minutes long, but you might have to look at it before 4:00 tomorrow afternoon (I don't know how long it will stay up as the featured spot in the upper left of the page…)
Some folks may have trouble with the idea of trying to find common ground with drumph supporters. I think a lot of the die-hard MAGA folks are a lost cause, but there might be some lifelong R's who couldn't ever bring themselves to vote for a D candidate, and I think it's worth working toward a live-and-let-live arrangement with some of those R's who don't think all Dems are the devil incarnate. We all have the freedom to have our own opinions. To me, the midterms are absolutely all hands on deck and the gloves are off. But if we don't move toward some major sociological changes as a society, we could be stuck in vicious cycle where every four years the pendulum swings back the other way and nothing gets done that helps the PEOPLE.
Please give it a listen and share your thoughts.
https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house
Thx for the link! Murphy is one of my Senators (CT); I've been following him with high hopes since his first major speech on the Senate floor (2013?), when he warned (against Conventional Wisdom) that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a terrible country and a dangerous ally (IMO, he's exactly right on both counts).
Watching this video, I was first struck by how scruffy and worn out Murphy looked; then, in describing the broad set of problems he deals with in his new book, he looked kinda spooked by the scale of the mess we're in. Seeing that, I have even more respect for him; he comes across as a Real Human Being, not Just Another Empty Suit.
Here's another one. This is a Lucas Bean clip that came up in my feed… it explains or at least offers one explanation for why there are so many maaggg men. And why there's a certain aspect that will never change.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HDEDTtpmhXc
Yes. but add the Dunning-Kruger effect. Those with limited intellectual abilities tend to overestimate their knowledge or competence. The areas they assessed were logic, grammar, and humor.
They did not know how weak their skills were in comparison to others.
In their world, they did not get that there was a lot they were not getting.
I'm waiting for the shoe to drop in Trump signing the MOU to end the Iran War. It feels like he's waiting for something. Which made me think. The war was supposed to be a distraction from the Epstein Files. (And it worked.) Now the defeat in the war is a problem that needs a distraction. And Trump can't let the daily news cycle return to Epstein. So is the delay that Cuba is not falling?
There's a children's song about the "Poor old lady who swallowed a fly.." She keeps ingesting animals to consume smaller animals that she ingested to go after the fly. Trump distractions are starting to feel like that.