Some Observations About the GOP Primary, Pt. 1
The first GOP debate, the failed Ohio ballot, Trump's indictment, and DeSantis eating more shit.
The Debates Need More Trump!! Gimme that Raw and Uncut Psychosis!!
The quadrennial simulation of democracy in America is in full swing, and it’s a bleak reminder that election seasons are an ever-lengthening and crushing darkness in which we’re only allowed a brief gasp for air. The first Republican debate finally happened, and without Donald Trump’s hambone authoritarian grievance theater, the entire ordeal struck me as a snoozefest of canned thunder and boring spectacle. I didn’t demean myself by watching the full-length version, but judging by the “highlights,” this event comprised of eight try-hards slinging barbs to appeal to the “slavering orc” demographic that votes in the GOP primaries. The debate’s overarching message was one of inexorable national decline. There was a mention of the “woke-industrial complex,” and some relatively “moderate” Republicans fumbling around their party’s self-inflicted abortion issue. The focal point for Twitter-obsessed libs came when candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed “human behavior is causing climate change,” and unsurprisingly none of them did so.
To understand the circa-now Republican party is to understand Trump as an aspirational brand to the most unpleasant upper-tier suburban people in the United States. What these intransigent admirers like about him the most, and aspire to be through their online cosplay and thirsty conniption fits, is his freedom to be unconcerned with anything but himself. This is not because he is empathetic or brave or astute; it’s because he is an asshole. The howling and unreflective void at Trump’s core will keep him aggrieved and stupid until the moment a sufficient number of his vital organs resign in disgrace. But this liberates him from actual hate or love as other people feel them, so he can devote every bit of his being to his sweaty pursuit of himself. Instead of hate, there is simple resentment, abject and valueless and recursively self-pitying; instead of love, there is the blank sucking nullity of vanity and appetite.
In this Trump-damaged present, politics is about a feeling, an itch or an irritation that doesn’t quite achieve the pathos of emotion. It’s about reaction and reflex and revulsion, and while the eight other bottomfeeders can wanly ape Trump’s scatterbrained hyperagression, it is clear their pale imitation doesn’t go much deeper than choreography. This pantomime takes various forms, like agitating against mask mandates, making sure that academic curricula do not contain a harmful quantum of uncomfortable stuff pertaining to the realities of American life or history, and challenging both the existence of trans kids and the woke depravities of Disney. On a quotidian level, this pantomime plays out in school board meetings and Facebook threads in which rage-grandpas giddily froth about how prepared they are to “do a 1776” to their chosen political enemies. In a Republican presidential debate, this whinging oafishness is substituting for governance, which says a great deal about the ignorance and abject whimpiness of our moment.
There is, of course, always the option of turning it all off so my fever-wracked brain can forget about this soul-rending banality and let me sleep for a few clammy nights. The months of howling discursive nuclear winter leading up to this debate have belonged entirely to the mutants. The discourse devours itself, the horribly blistered long-clawed creatures glibly re-litigating their insane anti-vax gibberish and the greasy lumbering ones blowing sulphurous grandiosities about the alphabet mafia committing unspeakable atrocities to their precious Bud Light.
As I wince in the jet-engine oversaturation of the Republican primaries, the headlines and hot takes won’t necessarily get quieter, let alone better. The superheated backwash just makes its way back to room temperature and curdles. The same dim honkers who have spent the months leading up to this debate improvising bumfights on TV and pumping up imaginary beefs will go on to spend the remainder of the primary making just as much noise. This is not a case of political punditry abhorring a vacuum so much as it is political punditry revealing itself as a vacuum—a loud and obliterating one, and one that refuses to pause and take a beat in the laziest way imaginable.
Ohio Literally Wants to Kill Your Babies
A pro-choice ballot is expected to win in Ohio this upcoming November, so state-level Republicans haphazardly assembled a mid-summer snap election to make it more difficult to amend the state constitution. Trump won Ohio by eight points in 2020, and this hamfisted gambit was massacred by 14 points. Republicans have not reckoned with a post-Dobbs America, and pro-choice wins in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kentucky prove that restricting reproductive rights is brutally unpopular despite political media pretending this is a 50-50 issue. Litigating the culture war from the right is an ever-increasing ante of highhanded and mean-spirited viciousness, and over a long enough timeline, the GOP was finally pressed to deliver something that will affect people who will sometimes vote for or against them.
The GOP has immunized their base from “electability” concerns by spending decades telling them that they are the silent majority, and now they ran headfirst into an abortion issue that has put them into an impossible position where their only move to be a national party is to roll back on the biggest animating issue for 30% of their base. Y’all Quaeda’s jihad to “protect life” is a war that seeks to refashion America into a place where institutional forms of repression are used to contain the desperation and emotional turmoil of a delusional evangelical demographic that’s been intellectually dismembered and culturally defeated.
I’ve always despised the idiotic rehashed prognostications of Is this the end of the Republican Party? because this country is too divided and there will always be a voice for the 40% of Americans who think Winston Churchill needs to be rescued from Tron to fight the pedophiles. It isn’t difficult to thoroughly illustrate the pretensions and vacuity of conservatism, and this is a movement that at least subconsciously understands it has no real tradition of presenting itself as dignified and inclusive, instead of just the marriage of the worst American ideas and some glossy marketing. Republicans will have to own their minoritarian status and work harder to exploit the antiquities of the American political system and the weaknesses of its political discourse. Their power rests in the Supreme Court in a way that is compartmentalized from politics, so if they win enough elections, they can still cram the judicial system with hothouse-grown goons who can be counted on to issue rulings that advance movement goals, regardless of how it affects them electorally.
The conservative movement shrinking and demeaning American politics looks like their default consensus opinion on abortion, that this issue is up to the states paired with the assumption that large swaths of Red America would vote to make it illegal. Their hope was this would subdue abortion as a salient issue so voters wouldn’t directly relate access to reproductive healthcare in their state to who becomes president. This tactic only works if you can make social wedge issues a vowel and tack it to bread-and-butter economics, but the Republican economic agenda is broadly and ambiently unpopular. It cannot be overstated how much this gambit depends on the billionaires funding it—buttressed by the massive Republican structural advantage from Senate apportionment, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. Retreating from the anti-choice position is untenable for the GOP; it will alienate a massive portion of their base, enough of whom are in swing districts that put governorships and Congressional seats into question.
Hilariously, the only person on earth who could hypothetically bulldoze through this issue through with his babbling and ominous permanence is the most indicted man on the planet.
The World’s Most Indicted Man, Again.
To see Trump’s mug shot is to be reminded of how it felt when this type of vain, vicious, unappeasable goon first squatted plump and boastful over the broader culture. I read the Onion Headline, “Nation’s Liberals Anxiously Waiting with Unzipped Pants to Jerk Off to Trump Mug Shot,” and oddly enough, Trump’s supporters were doing the same thing. The leather-and-chrome theatricality of the American brand of fascism Trump lords over is first and foremost a tell—a coalition of vengeful and embittered nullities expressing an aggrieved, repressive, fundamentally bourgeois political impulse, dressed up as a confident expression of natural dominance. There is a rich irony in Rudy Giuliani being hit with a RICO case, and he disparaged it as acts committed by “the real criminals.” After his mugshot was taken and he was released on bail, Giuliani claimed this case is, “an attack on the American people” and he is “fighting for justice.”
Trump filled out his intake form like a dating profile, like describing his hair as strawberry blonde—he could’ve cut “strawberry” off at “straw,” but this was probably the hair plug color he chose from the catalog back in the ‘90s. He also listed himself as 6’3” and 215 lbs, which is the same stats as NFL quarterback Lamar Jackson, not the size of someone who stands like the front half of a centaur that is unaware of the horse half. This confirmed that America has a two-tiered justice system: A rich golf blob can show up to court and claim to be 215 pounds without any verification. It could be real—Ozempic is out there and I could imagine Trump getting on it since he does look more like a melted candle lately, which is a poor move for him aesthetically. Posing for his mugshot as some act of defiance, Trump made the same squinty face you make at 2 AM at the bar bathroom where you’re checking yourself to see if you look like a respectable member of society, and while you see that you’re clearly mangled, you still think you’re fine to be out in public.
Trump should have gone with his trademark thumbs up and smiling pose instead of scowling like a Pallas cat, which only looks badass to the most slavering servile tranche of his base. Instead, he had the Kardashian DMV Glam Squad and his advisors in his ear to help him think 10 steps ahead and communicate how dire of a moment is for our Republic and our Consitution, like an Andrew Tate-style Dark MAGA. Since everyone in that Sheriff’s office voted for him (because they’re cops) they let him do some contouring before.
These infamous mugshots came from Trump and his racketeering mob of 18 co-defendants receiving criminal charges in Georgia this week for conspiring to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. This includes his crack team of Lionel Hutz-tier lawyers—John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Rudy Giuliani—as well as Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, and David Shafer, the former chair of the Georgia Republican Party.
Trump has no real friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided by ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless strivers, all of whom see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. I assume, to make sure none of his team flips on him, Trump will recreate the “Casino” scene where the Irish mobster was tortured, but instead of putting their head in a vice or squeezing their nuts, Trump will threaten to give them the Pfizer vaccine.
Several of the individual accounts stem from false claims of election fraud that Giuliani and two other Trump lawyers Robert Chile and Ray Smith III made a legislative hearings in December 2020. Another batch of charges concerns a plan Trump’s supporters carried out to vote for a false slate of pro-Trump electors and send a forged document to Congress claiming those electors were legitimate. A third charge accused several Trump allies of conspiring to steal voter data and tamper with voting equipment in the elections office in Coffee County, Georgia. Some of the defendants were charged only in connection with a bizarre scheme to harass and intimidate an election worker whom Trump and his allies had wrongfully accused of fraud.
This all seems bad, but Donald Trump did vow to release an irrefutable report he says will exonerate him:
This statement raised many questions about why Trump would wait three years to release such irrefutable evidence, but it sounds like it would be a report that he would wave around at a Mar-a-Lago press conference that says “Trump didn’t do anything wrong” in 14-point font and huge margins. For reasons that remain unexplained, Trump canceled this press conference.
Much has been made about the depths of Trump’s arrogance and delusional belief that he is above the law, but in the ways that he is currently making civic life more degrading and extractive wherever possible, it is more likely Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself. It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can parse these beliefs for a consistent throughline, they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Be On TV More. His worldview amounts to the sum of tabloid nonsense he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subject to a few decades of compounding rancid interest, deteriorating mental aptitude, and towering monomania. He watches a lot of cable news, but his hyperactive laziness prevents him from following stories that have been custom-built for amorphously aggrieved people like him.
None of this bodes well for wiggling him out of these criminal charges, but this dynamic will treat us to more posts like this:
Desantis on a National Stage is like a Deep-Sea Creature Coming Up to the Surface
It is stupid to win either a Republican or Democratic primary on policy, but the wish casting feels a bit grosser with the GOP. On July 31, the New York Times released a breakdown of different tranches of Republican voting preferences, and Trump has more support among primary voters who think that compelling Bud Light to attack trans people is the most important issue of the day and people who think that’s not important. There is no policy that will appease these people, and not because Republicans are insufficiently brutal, but because conservative politics is grounded in a fundamental opposition to being appeased. The whole DeSantis deal is to get quantum on all of these culture war issues and tease out their underlying pathologies, but he is an unsettling creep without any of Trump’s deranged charisma; this pitch is a more dramatic misunderstanding and misapprehension of the GOP base than offering them universal healthcare.
DeSantis has rewired his whole physiognomy and self-presentation to emulate Trump—he can’t stop doing the accordion hands—and it will get him beaten by Tim Scott in two primaries. He’s trying to both imitate and distance himself from Trump, making weird needling comments like, “Trump wouldn’t have any legal troubles if he drained the swamp, but of course, I’d let him fuck my wife.” Meatball Ron’s crimes against basic etiquette have been extensively documented by New York Magazine and Vanity Fair, but his most notable foible is his habit of eating pudding like a raccoon—two fingers in the cup is desperation, three fingers is goblin mode. I’m not sure how many fingers would be the appropriate number to eat pudding, but three seems to be the worst; it’s as if you tried to fit your whole face inside the cup and then you checked down to the maximum amount of fingers you could jam in there.
DeSantis was questioned about this idiosyncratic personal habit in a Fox News interview, and he responded with vehement denial and sneering, “IT’S SUGAR, MAN!” About a week later, he was spotted plodding around Iowa in a sleeveless zip-up in 98-degree weather, and when a kid holding an Icee approached him, the only thing his brain could think to spit up was to hiss like a reptile—and, as far as I’m aware, his voice was not altered through the child plugging their nose shut filter. This exchange was a bad impression of a Billy Eichner bit where he chastises overweight people for what they’re eating.
There is other bizarre and jarring stuff going on with DeSantis, like the viral video of him laughing like a serial killer, his refusal to serve people Bud Light, and these creepy gas station ads. Allegedly, he treats his staffers like garbage and they formed a support group to cope, and he doesn’t send “get well” wishes or sympathy letters; Donald Trump has pure contempt for anyone who is not Donald Trump and views the whole world as full of enemies and marks that he holds in the lowest possible regard, but at least he knows how to extend the glad-hand—if only because his idea of Doing Business is talking on a phone with the pig-tail cord for eight hours a day.
The most amusing of these stories is the one of DeSantis mispronouncing “Thailand” as “Thigh-land” on first dates as a litmus test to see if women would correct him. His now-wife Casey confused this malaprop 6th-grade bit as the clinical machinations of a grim Machiavellian 3D-Chessmaster, and apparently thought to herself: “Ah, Thigh-land… Later tonight, this man will be getting into my vah-bina!” Casey, the grey eminence of this campaign—the Lady Macbeth pushing Meatball Ron toward the White House as a vessel for her own ambitions—saw a guy with some decent college baseball stats and assumed there was growth potential, but it was growth in all the wrong ways, like how Haley Joel Osment’s head got bigger but his face stayed the same.
There is also a photo of DeSantis at an Iowa truck stop convenience store, bent over and looking for food. It bears a queasy resemblance to the photo of Hillary Clinton in a normal person’s apartment where she looks like she just saw the slideshow from “Manhunter.” DeSantis wound up buying a Quest Bar that has probably sat on that shelf since Obama first became president.
Only in America would an unmanageable goof like Ron DeSantis be qualified for some of the highest offices in the land, but would be unemployable in any other context. If he managed a Quizno’s, there would be an insurrection within a week—his employees would run him through the toaster and drown him in the pepper bar. He was considered a formidable opponent to Trump because he passed some “anti-woke” legislation in an anomalous freak state that is essentially a giant humid insane asylum and nursing home. Like a deep-sea fish, he can only subsist in his own fucked up ecosystem, like when you pull them up and they explode. The GOP farm system is full of DeSanti like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton who are easily as offputting, but at least they were smart enough not to run in 2024, which was the easiest IQ test possible. The payoff from this failing campaign arrived at his stump speech at the Iowa State Fair, where he was bodied by lib wine moms wearing tee-shirts that say: Actually, It’s DR. Jill Biden.
Rule #1: Never get in a land war with Midwest moms. DeSantis probably spent weeks thinking he was going to "own the rubes," only to find himself in the "find out" stage almost immediately.
I loved that. The tron bit was the best!
Now roast the other team. I don't know what they are called but the Biden one!
Keep these fuckers guessing.