Some Observations About the GOP Primary, Pt. 2
The remaining GOP debates, Trump going full fash, and a new House Speaker.
These Debates are Fucking Lame
Politics is not as complicated as the lanyards in the biz make it out to be. Most Americans already know that their fellow citizens are immiserated and brutalized and even murdered by the state as an elected strategy and just politics-as-usual. The main point of contention in our agonizing and abstracted discourse is whether you are the sort of person who is disgusted by this on principle and can imagine a better world in which public life delivers more than watching a spate of chittering goblins drive a soul harvester toward a brick wall. To a swelling tranche of bitter Americans whose sole aspiration is making sure all this pain never stops, there is never the question of whether the broader situation can be altered in any fundamental way; the question resolves to how this misery gets distributed.
America’s centuries-spanning manias and nested toxicities have led to Donald Trump himself promising and promising again—in language more explicit than the more euphemism-reliant Republican establishment he busted out—to hurt the people that his voters have been conditioned to hate the most. He says he will do it in all the ways that his voters fantasize the most, over and over forever, not until corporate power has been reigned in or various historical inequities have been reconciled, but until everything has been flattened and ignited and pulverized. The end state is much less distinct than the lavish, lurid fantasies of getting there. In place of conservatism’s worn nostrums of small government and Judeo-Christian values, there’s just retributive violence and impunity; a gun brandished as an argument-ender in the faces of masked supermarket employees or a truck barrelling toward a group of Antifa protestors while cops stand by to do the dirty work from there.
Throughout these four primary debates, the cynics and barnacles and adult libertarians running against this dumpy golf priss faced a thorny challenge: To pitch themselves as both the competence candidate and the cruelty candidate while not being Trump himself. This was their dampened opportunity to position themselves as sincere sadists selling the same rancid fantasy in a more compelling and presentable way. These aspiring genocidaires are accomplished, ambitious, and credentialed in familiarly merit-coded and worthless ways, and while they are authentically shameless and cruel, they lack both Trump’s demented gravitas and his curdled charisma. They latch onto the Orange One like Lyme disease does to a tick.
For every trans teenager punished or schoolteacher harassed, and every un-prevented COVID death resulting from policy seemingly oriented toward that very outcome, Ron DeSantis has governed Florida with the calculation that his abject cruelty would appeal to some awful Ohio guys and snag him the nomination. He brought lasting damage to real people’s lives just so he would get to where he is: Floundering in the polls and getting bodied by wine moms somewhere in Iowa. Since the first debate, the following snoozefests have mostly been a parade of transphobic drivel, empty ambition, and boring propaganda. In line with his world-historic anti-charisma, DeSantis invoked Calvin Coolidge as his favorite President in the final debate, an evolution in conservative “based-ness,” as referencing Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln, apparently, is too gauche and normie. This is a primary already oversaturated with boutique and obscure references to appeal to the most fervid internet-damaged freaks with Roman busts as their Twitter pic or the Pepe accounts with 45 followers, hoping they will repost these low-energy quips to their 200-person group chats.
Vivek Ramaswamy, at one point, claimed to be the only one with the courage to say what everyone else is afraid to say before asserting that January 6th was “an inside job” (technically true), that “the government lied to us for 20 years about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11,” and “the great replacement theory is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.” In the previous debate, Vivek and Nikki Haley almost reenacted How Can She Slap, when he called out her alleged hypocrisy for opposing TikTok for being Chinese while her daughter has an account. How would Vivek even know this—does he have an alert for every 15-year-old that joins? Anyhow, if Vivek was committed to salvaging his flagging campaign, he should ditch the tired 8chan pablum and go full hog by calling Nikki Haley a lizard person and threatening to rip off her human mask on live TV. Or something like, “I’m the only one willing to say that airplanes have never flown and Bill Clinton is a pansexual!” Then he could bust out the classic “motion physically can not exist because it would require infinite midpoints” from Zeno of Elea.
If Trump couldn’t dignify this goober-fest with his presence, no self-respecting American should’ve debased themselves by watching these debates in their entirety. Thank the good lord these are over.
Law and Disorder
Now that we are almost a decade into Donald Trump’s complete capture of American politics, it is perhaps too easy to say that he has distinguished himself from other presidents mostly—if not entirely—through his thermonuclear oafishness. If you want to understand the fundamental appeal of Trumpism, you only need to realize that he is both horrifyingly grotesque and objectively hilarious, and this duality is not a contradiction. If there was a button he could mash that would erase 10,000 of his haters, he’d push it with the same idle delight he gets from ordering Chris Christie to fetch him Quarter Pounders. This trial has laid bare some undeniable fascistic developments: Trump has promised revenge on his enemies in his second term after telling his supporters earlier this year he would be their “retribution” if reelected. And this is before you can even wrap your head around the implications of “Project 2025” lurking around in the muck. There is also nothing that any American institution, or any dire situation, that can stop Trump from being himself. He’s out here doing Ace Attorney memes in a real courtroom.
Some choice cuts:
“Aberdeen is the oil capital of Europe, very rich...” Trump says, at which point, the judge interjects: “Irrelevant!”
Trump adds softly, “It is.”
Asked about Donald Trump Jr., Trump says: “He’s a hardworking boy,” and then corrects himself, “young man, and he’s done a very good job, as has Eric.”
*during cross-examination*
“Who within the Trump Organization was responsible for identifying and detecting fraud?”
Trump: “Everybody.”
I guess Trump is a fan of leaderless and horizontally integrated organizations. If Trump wasn’t doing his best impression of a fascist Monte Cristo, it would be almost admirable to watch him completely invert the way that you think trials are supposed to work from a lifetime of being inundated with Law and Order propaganda.
Most notably—and unsurprisingly—Trump has fraudulently inflated the values of his companies and properties by billions of dollars. It takes a delusional level of audacity to value Mar-a-Lago, a rinky-dink Florida golf course, as worth as much as Madison Square Garden or Wembley Stadium. Is the Empire State Building even valued at $1 billion? If Mar-a-Lago is worth over $1 billion, then the mansion from Netflix’s “Queen of Versailles” that was turned into a castle at the height of the real estate crisis is worth at least $1.2 billion.
Meet the New Speaker
Kevin McCarthy was unprecedently and unceremoniously ousted from his position as Speaker of the House in October, his fate sealed by literally the dumbest sex trafficker in existence. At the time, much was written about how his tenure was defined by kowtowing to Trump while failing to appease the Freedom Caucus, although it was entertaining to watch “We Need to Vote About Kevin” unfold as a desperate 15 ballot-attempt to snag this position. Only America could create a system in which someone could lose the vote and get infinite do-overs until they become Speaker. After this ongoing saga, McCarthy’s chaotic tenure felt like a recurring slapstick self-injury until the bottom fell out, instantly and shamefully. This feels like the end of an era. Kevin McCarthy is the last of the Young Guns to hold office, the kind of Republican whose modus operandi is that it is an unspeakable tragedy that poor people live too lavishly off food stamps and billionaires aren’t rich enough. He was first and foremost a true-blue sycophant: My favorite bit of McCarthy lore was he would buy Trump bags of Starburst and periodically spend time picking out only the flavors he asked for.
Right as he blinked and honked on his way out of this degraded position, a spate of self-evidently loathsome bunglers lined up to brute-force their dopey imagineering of Republican governance. All their yammering and wailing and relentless showboating salesmanship caused a lot of residual toxins to show up downstream, making it abundantly clear that the GOP is both incompetent and dangerous, like a monkey with a hand grenade. The spectacle of politics is both grandiose and abstracted enough to almost make viewers forget this iteration of the Republican Party is brimming with interchangeable donkeys and ice-chewing psychopaths who will feast on their own MAGA excretions until they are as delusional, cocksure, and incoherent as their fanatical groupies. Hardline right-winger Jim Jordan was on the precipice of becoming the new House Speaker until it was revealed by a 10,000-word Washington Post profile that he may or may not have been aware of mass sexual abuse while he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State.
After a dizzying month of voting on the thirstiest aspirants for Trump’s soggy mantle, the GOP finally settled on a Louisiana Congressman named Mike Johnson. His whole gambit is: I am David Duke without the baggage. At least, finally, the Republicans have someone who can impersonate Steven Colbert. TAKE THAT, PARAMOUNT!!
You don’t need me to tell you that this guy is another bog-standard Evangelical election denier who will send more hurt and austerity in movement-approved directions—and he somehow wasn’t the worst choice for the Speakership. He believes the U.S. has undergone a “truth decay” and has referenced the years 1700-1940 as a high-point for American morality. In 2016, while he was working with the Convention of States Action—a far-right extremist group—Mike Johnson petitioned to have Louisiana included as one of the states calling for an Article Five convention to remake the “sacred” Constitution as well as rewrite the Bill of Rights and eliminate federal agencies. Presumably, their goal is to remake American society in the image of his demon bubble, to pander to a minority of ultra-right religious weirdos who would like to turn women into baby factories, make divorce punishable by death, and force gay people to the margins (I’m exaggerating, but not by much). This man is on track to oversee the 2024 election.
It is also worth examining this Rolling Stone piece that goes into titillating detail about how Mike Johnson and his son are just gooning together with this app made by a company called Covenant Eyes. It sounds like tech someone would build if they were aroused by shame but utterly unable to integrate that feeling into their grotesque religious identity. I assume the creator of this app was a middle-aged perv who was grooming his 13-year-old stepson and the mom walked in on them watching “Ray Lil’ Black Doing Real Hentai,” and he scrambled to explain that it’s a mutual accountability exercise.
Anyways…
During a conversation on the “War on Technology” at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church — unearthed by X user Receipt Maven last week — the Louisiana representative talked about how he installed “accountability software” called Covenant Eyes on his devices in order to abstain from internet porn and other unsavory websites.
“It scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you; we do all of it,” Johnson told the panel about the app.
“It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate.”
My accountability partner is JACK MY SON. Now, you’ll notice Mr. Johnson doesn’t mention that he had a clean slate. Jack’s iPhone is buzzing with 30 notifications in a row to notify him that his dad just Googled “Lucie Wilde Big Naturals: Volume 12.” Does Mr. Johnson expect this partnership to function like AA where you have to call your sponsor whenever you relapse? Imagine Jack is making out with some girl and he’s about to get to third base and he gets a call from his dad: “Son, I have had my hand down my sweatpants for the last hour. It started with a Victoria’s Secret commercial and now I’m watching Andrew Tate cam girl slaves.”
Even Mike Pence wasn’t this creepy. It is worth reiterating that this man is third-in-line to the presidency. Also, according to his financial disclosures, he doesn’t have a bank account—which sounds like someone who definitely has bank accounts but doesn’t want anyone to see them.
No-nut Johnson is a true believer who mingles and is generally on-brand with other scornful and abrasively amoral MAGA Republicans, many of whom are wheezing six-faced glad-handers who believe solely in their own self-aggrandizement. He is the prototype of the Frankenstein monster the GOP has created and unleashed onto the village, while proving how religious fanatics seamlessly integrate with grifters. Like many of his Moral Majority forebearers, Mike is reliably grasping and weird, overwrought and indulgent, weepy and fuming and sweaty as he preaches about morality while ignoring the overtly atavistic rot and rank hypocrisy among his party—not to mention his funding from oil and gas corporations. If anything, his Speakership is an overt reference point for how the GOP has steered at a cultural and aesthetic level towards a very specific sort of toxic stodge. He’s an unsettling fraud with heavy Handmaid’s Tale vibes, which makes him a moderate in his party. I sure hope the next election will prove that this push to the far right is too much for the American people to bear. Thank goodness the Democrats are running with … Joe Biden.
I watch the Republican debates to laugh at Vivek throwing shade at Ron and Hailey, and Ron cutting off Hailey when she tries to talk. 😆🤪
Damn you're good! Is it legal for a person to laugh this much first thing in the morning? Now do the democrats. Oh, that's right, there's no primary allowed. Well, how about conjuring up a scene where Biden wakes up in a pool of sweat tells Jill he had a nightmare in which he had to debate RFK Jr., Marianne Williamson, and Cornell West.