CSotD: Trust – It’s easier if you don’t verify
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This isn’t China, though Bagley is right to compare the cult of personality that has risen around Donald Trump with the one that rose around Mao Tse Tung. Certainly, the two cults, the two revolutions, share several elements, including the condemnation of intellectual elites in favor of mindless loyalty and the elevation of mindless loyalty in place of personal goals.
But Mao was building on centuries of repressive authority, as had Lenin in Russia, as did Castro in Cuba. It’s harder to explain such a cult when it springs up in a place like the United States, which hasn’t even had the trauma that seemed to make post-Armistice Germany vulnerable to a Hitler.
Maybe that’s something for historians to ponder in the future. Sitting around taking our pulses and measuring our temperatures and discussing how we got here is not going to get the fox out of the hen house now.
Last weekend was a good start, as some three million people took to the streets. Solidarity is a powerful weapon. But as far as the major media goes, the result seems to be columns discussing how it doesn’t matter because something something something.
The pulse-takers have descended on the event to measure its temperature and explain its significance, like the experts who explain that, looking at its wings and its shape and its size, a bumblebee can’t possibly fly.
But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, just as a starfish doesn’t know that it’s impossible for it to regrow a missing leg. Sometimes you can accomplish more if you don’t know what’s impossible.
Granted, the Hands Off demonstrations were not sufficient, but they were, by god, necessary. Trump didn’t immediately dissolve his government and resign, but you’re a fool if you thought that was a likely outcome.
We’re more in the position of Galileo who was forced to recant his theory that the Earth went around the Sun, but is said to have then muttered “Eppur si muove” — “And yet it moves.”
Slyngstad resorts to excessive exaggeration here, but he makes a valuable point in that Trump has surrounded himself with loyalist flunkeys who are willing to explain and justify whatever he does.
He has also managed to intimidate some elements of the mainstream media to where they are reluctant, if not actually afraid, to confront him, and he has officially elevated the status of rightwing loyalist media, granting them favored access.
So although Sean Spicer was laughed out of his job in a very short time, Karoline Leavitt is firmly ensconced in the position despite making Spicer look like Edward R. Murrow.
There is a serious question about the extent to which Dear Leader can continue to make claims that don’t stand up to any examination, and Madam & Eve combine his ridiculous tariff on an island inhabited only by penguins with his ridiculous “competition” in a golf tournament sponsored by Saudi Arabia as a scam to flatter his ego and set up a lucrative sportswashing venture for them.
Meanwhile, though we can’t afford to feed the hungry or nurse the sick, Dear Leader has gone to Mar A Lago every weekend since his second inauguration, at an estimated cost of about $3.4 million per trip, and this past week, he went twice.
The rest of his schedule, aside from a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, appears to have largely been publicity ventures like planting a tree and shaking hands with auto racing champions.
With a short stint on Tuesday and another on Wednesday to sign executive orders while Rome burns.
Dear Leader is proposing to throw a military parade to celebrate his 79th birthday in June, or maybe he isn’t, or maybe it’s to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Army and maybe it isn’t happening at all and maybe it would cost $92 million.
So it’s kind of like a tariff: You have to check the time and date to see if it’s happening or not happening.
But if it is going to happen, Margulies suggests a possible money-saving step, which would be to make it a commemoration of the Bonus Army Parade of 1932, perhaps with the same exciting conclusion of a cavalry charge, fixed bayonets and tear gas unleashed on the unhappy veterans.
It may depend on whether Dear Leader can find a way to turn it into personal profit, which Le Lievre points out is his key motivation.
Perhaps he could issue a special, personal NFT or some bitcoins to commemorate the day, or he could sell special Golden Parade Sneakers for comfortable walking.
Perhaps he could persuade a few law firms to chip in several million dollars each to sponsor the Briefcase Brigade. He can be very persuasive when he talks to lawyers.
In fact, he can be very persuasive as an advisor in general, as Morland points out, and his loyalists aren’t the only ones wondering how he does it. Even his political opponents are asking that question.
In fact, you could write a book about it. The question, Matson asks, is when the book would be available, how much it would cost, when it would next be available, how much it would cost that time, rinse and repeat.
Trump was upset with people who got a case of the yips the other day and had to pause his tariffs for three months in order to meet with all the countries begging to negotiate or, as he put it in formal diplomatic terms, “kiss my ass.”
The problem, he says, is that people don’t realize you may have some short range pain but it’s worth it in order to achieve long-range goals.
As MacKay explains, it’s all a matter of properly setting your range.
After you set up your framework, however, and put it into action, Jennings assures us that happy days are here again!
Well, more or less. We’ve heard this song before, haven’t we?
In the meantime, a lot of good journalists have walked out of compromised newsrooms and opened up their own independent sites. Here are some I’ve found worth following:
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