The Endless Summer of 2020
No order, all chaos.
For as long as I’ve been attuned to current events, Beltway consensus has manufactured a de facto reality that scans as a nihilistic mutation of the end of history. The manic cant of diminished horizons instructs us to believe that any serious opinion regarding American politics is one based on a long retreat into hair-trigger passivity and the rote acceptance of every self-serving national myth. Every offence from every administration is a gamble that nothing matters to anyone, a bet placed by the anti-human goblins in charge against the basic idea of civic self-respect. This is one bleak apotheosis for the shining city upon a hill, with generations of people fighting and dying to make its lofty and qualified founding ideals into something real, and then that project shrinking until it’s just one seething dunce watching himself on television, and everyone else watching him do it.
Something like four percent of the country’s population gathered in the streets to chant about how much they do not support a mass deportation regime that serves no practical purpose but the creation of numbers and images attesting to its cruelty and scale. The damage these ICE raids have done in the daily instances of gratuitous suffering, in the fraying of communal bonds, to the invisible function of the everyday economy and the rule of law is inarguable—but also seemingly irrelevant to the Law And Order party. The Trump administration is also betting that what is commonly understood as reality is a secretly fake agenda caused by the soaring cosmic perfidy of his enemies—liberal media, scientific consensus, historical literacy, Hollywood, etc. It’s this post-ironic, postmodern certainty that they can imagineer their preferred endless present through sheer brutality and brass. And so federal troops were deployed onto a protest so these policies can fail on forward, defiant and increasingly incoherent.
As the No Kings protest swelled across major cities, Trump’s attempt at a counter-offensive was holding a military parade through Washington D.C. to celebrate his birthday—and by proxy, to showcase the might and grandiosity of America’s troops. As is anything regarding this administration and its cult leader, there’s always a queasy gap between promise and practice. The result was a sparsely attended event with the same production value as a small-town Veterans Day parade, where Trump and his crew slouched behind bulletproof glass glumly watching low-energy soldiers marching out-of-step while tanks squeaked by. Even with a trillion-dollar budget, it seems like no one at the Pentagon could afford some WD-40. The soundtrack consisted of royalty-free karaoke versions of AC/DC songs, or as if they paid some washed-up ‘80s guitarist $1,000 on Fiverr to make “hard rock” muzak, and the whole ordeal was sponsored by UFC and Palantir (I think I heard a Coinbase shoutout over the loudspeaker). In a recent post, I had used this aspirational display of imperial prowess as an example of encroaching American fascism, but after gawking at the pathetic outcome, we owe a sincere apology to the very fine people of North Korea. Any self-respecting military would stage a coup after this.
There is no endgame outside of a series of trolls and taunts. Trump has turned the clock back to the summer of 2020, determined to do all the same stupid things again and again, hoping for a different result. His actions seem less like a political program than a lazy man’s revenge fantasy, one that foregoes outcomes and resolutions so it can foreclose the possibility of progress. Trump didn’t appoint a cabinet so much as he cast one, one that produces more shitposting than governance, perfectly reflecting a man who prizes the creation of epic images and large numbers above any other end. Above all the gilded carnage and squalor that this careening way of being produces, there is something more grandiosely vain at play. It’s not just through a heightening of oafish provocations and dispiriting politics of aesthetics, but the wholesale replacement of every political thing with Trump’s overbearing demands, to the point where political life is not just tortured to produce the sort of content that Trump likes, but until it becomes content itself. There is no purpose to anything but the ongoing amusement and aggrandizement of a sour old priss with proclivities toward uninformed sadism and racialized bullying and flattering stories about himself.
It should be obvious to anyone who isn’t steeped in ardent Zionism that Benjamin Netanyahu is the biggest threat to peace in the Middle East, but Trump is hellbent on playing the role of agitator. His preferred method of what passes as “governance” is the endless ritual of violent repetition, so it was strange to see a magic 8-ball method in his demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and urging civilians to “immediately evacuate Tehran,” followed by some cagey hesitation. This mixed messaging may have seemed like a reality TV star’s idea of tough-guy machismo, but the way Trump talks about declaring war feels more like an internal debate on whether you want to go to a coworker’s birthday that requires two subway transfers. So when the U.S. “totally obliterated” three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, it did not surprise me that Trump announced this on Truth Social or that he did so without Congressional approval or that he seeks a Hail Mary approval ratings bump that is customarily given to wartime presidents; but there is a depth of ignorance that is still somewhat jarring—the idea that he thinks he can precision airstrike a foreign country and order for peace without repercussions. This all feels like we’re trapped inside a spectacularly cruel television episode, and it still doesn’t even account for the Senate trying to sell off 250 million acres of gorgeous wilderness in our forests and deserts (and if they do, I’m just going to reclaim the land that my ancestors stole).
This stupid and strident chaos is the natural result of scammers and gold-plated godheads squatting above the self-annihilating grandiosity of this desperate and deluded moment. In the place of half-abashed business elites and GOP waiver-wire retreads that filled out and accidentally moderated the first Trump administration, there are now sweaty content creators and literal television personalities loudly and lazily overseeing cadres of highly online sociopaths who bask in the parasocial triumph of their preferred avatar. It is difficult to imagine a more inherently unstable regime than one based literally on the viewing habits of one dim and declining cable news addict. It is also difficult to fathom the possible horrific outcomes of an administration whose only principle is the creation of a self-serving spectacle, should its sole decision-maker become sufficiently desperate or just bored.
This kind of haphazard and scattershot brutality doesn’t reflect any kind of strategy. This is Donald Trump we’re talking about, and attributing any kind of longer-term goal in anything he does is always giving him too much credit. He is a creature of pivoting from one clammy graft to another, surrounding himself with people exactly as stupid and selfish and sadistic as he is, not because of their competence or because they are trustworthy beyond their self-serving fealty to him, but because he loves a mirror. The resulting freakish and orgiastic backstabbing and self-dealing and perversity of this depraved ruling class is their shameful way of trying to freeze this chaos into permanence through sheer idiotic will. It is all jarring and miserable, as the paroxysms of political violence and self-harm surround us, there isn’t much comfort in the knowledge that none of this works or is sustainable. In the long run, the bill will come due in some way, but the people in charge do not believe in the long run. The work of MAGA is to freeze the present in place and to defy whatever reckoning tomorrow might bring. Everyone else is trapped in this unending day, a place where bad things are always happening, but nothing ever resolves. As we defy this endless present whenever and however we can, it’s easy for this to feel like an uneasy stalemate, floating in weightless suspension until it’s time to react to some other astonishing act of malicious stupidity. But there is nothing else to do but the hard and overdue work of remaking our politics and culture, because what is unstable really can fall once it’s pushed.
“The slow cancellation of the future,” as Mark Fisher might have called it, doesn’t seem so slow anymore.