Why Character Attacks on Trump Reinforce His Support
Or, how Trump calling dead soldiers "losers" and "suckers" is irrelevant.
“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump allegedly stated as he was canceling a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery back in 2018, according to last week’s toweringly specious Jeffrey Goldberg report in The Atlantic. Buttressed by four anonymous sources, they’re always anonymous, the piece also alleged the president referred to the 1,800 soldiers who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers.” (Also, classically on brand, Trump rejected the idea of the trip because he feared his swirling pompadour thing would unravel in the rain.) As is the case for this greasy genre of BREAKING NEWS, it has all the trappings of an election-tilting bombshell that would tank a normal politician under normal circumstances — OMG, Donald Trump doesn’t care about the troops! — but it comes off as another blaringly worthless claim and a taxonomic depiction of something we already knew about the Cheeto In The White House.
Trump has always been an inveterate gossip queen. It’s as true now as it was when he live-tweeted Access Hollywood episodes about Robert Pattinson’s romantic travails. So Democrats and their semi-associated media noisemakers decided that crafting a coherent alternative to this sludgy, shrugging mania wasn’t something to be bothered with, and instead turned politics into a paranoiac’s dream, imbuing Trump’s every move with earth-shattering importance. It’s something every American lives in, and lives with, day after day — an omnipresent, bitchy-sour, televised referendum on a flubby putz marching around the crabbed sanctums of American politics with wholly unearned maximalism.
The veracity of Goldberg’s reporting is irrelevant. The collapse of shared reality into a mishegoss of QAnon crackpots and anti-Trump hysteria was bound to deliver some glum spectacle. America is a nation plagued with mid-90s Simpsons jokes morphing into quotidian reality, institutionally fixated on a bigoted dunce who is both deeply cynical and bottomlessly credulous. It’s the logical output of a stale culture filled with total and hapless marks whose brains, like Trump’s, entered energy-saver mode sometime around the Cold War or 9/11 or November 8, 2016. Republican janissaries regard their God-Emperor with a 90% approval rating these days — yes, even after all of Trump’s various crimes against the Integrity Of The Office and his mismanagement of simmering protests and his willfully botched pandemic response. But, tilt the frame a bit, and Goldberg’s combination of dudgeon and detail paradoxically reflects a queasy glimpse into a gormless politico-media ecosystem.
Life in Trump’s America is like life on Twitter: An endless cycle of offending, deflecting, reversing course, denial, counter-accusations, reoffending, reigniting, self-loathing. Arguments about one set of remarks freewheel into arguments about an even more infuriating set of counter-remarks. Every single person who has spent any amount of time here in the past four years is almost certainly worse off for the experience. Ever since Trump escalatored into politics, his ultra-grating reactionary provocateur shtick more or less follows the same dumb pattern. He’d waltz into a brawl napalming nothing but negatives and cheesy racist canards and character liabilities, which provokes his hyperreactive opponents to drop whatever they’re doing and spend their time howling into a shared janky delusion. I’m not sure if it even matters whether Trump’s ability to play heel and statesman in the same breath is a strategic gambit or his disorganized doughnut brain doing its natural tumble. It nonetheless helps him hoover winnable issues that validate the primary tenant of his worldview — i.e. whatever self-regard blurs right in front of his nose.
Trump is perpetually misdiagnosed because he is so unlike normal people, and especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework. Even semi-accurate labels like “fascist” feel spurious, but only because of his total inability to concentrate and lead and grasp basic managerial concepts. This bloated soft-serve golem is fascist in a uniquely American, breathtakingly stupid kind of way. The Trumpenreich is more Idiocracy than Hitlerian. Trump is only committed to whatever gets and keeps him on TV; if that includes doling out tasteless filibusters and fiery counterpunches to thorny controversies, then the president will stamp his imprimatur on whatever incoherent revanchism needs a co-sign. He is a murky and misinformed ignoramus and his life is an endless grift of titillating or toxic falsehoods, that much is obvious. All the other unhelpful signifiers surrounding him slip wildly out of joint. The parts of the brain that restrain most people from hocking schlock online degrees or dry steaks or magical COVID panaceas are absent in Trump: He has an animal shamelessness, will say anything, and experiences empathy in the same way functional humans experience indigestion.
Similar to his real estate empire, every part of Trump’s political coalition is either leveraged, inherited, or acquired by fraud. Not exactly known for reading Hayek or quoting Jefferson, he managed to strike a psychic deal with the GOP base: In exchange for middle-brow venality, he grants his most slavering followers license to act upon their deepest, proudest hatreds. Where his Republican contemporaries couched in euphemism and focus-group smarm and obfuscatory dialogue trees, Trump foghorned the flabby fascism and glowering dickery that was previously relegated to subtext. He delivers the special kind of bloviating anti-articulations that reify the anxious and amorphous grievances of sneering White Americans whose entire worldview centers on half-remembered paraphrasings of Fox and Friends segments.
Republicans gave up on pretending to offer anything substantive to anyone with a sub-$500,000 annual income, so they basically grafted a Trump Fathead onto a mostly white-space webpage and pawned it off as their official 2020 party platform. It’s a hodgepodge of fudgy, vagued-out language and a blank devotion to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” — meaning whatever breathtaking amoral bluster he blithely yoinked from the sludge canals of right-wing media. Conservatism is selective and self-serving and alternatively priggish and thuggish in how it maintains its peculiar brand of Maximum America, but it is always singular. The GOP’s tangle of glaring hypocrisies and weird contradictions and honking sadism unravel cleanly when you realize this is mostly about power. And it triggers the libs.
It’s only when you ponder the totality of all this, the fullness of the strange faith in Objective Truth and the general unfalsifiable rudderlessness of our present, that it becomes clear there is no reckoning with our diseased politics without accounting for all the many things that Americans stridently and strenuously refuse to know. It may be difficult to believe during a time when everything is broken and sinking and extremely on fire, but there is a distinction to be drawn between ignorance and stupidity — although there’s not always a detectable difference in our day-to-day continuity.
This is a generalizable phenomenon that spans across politics, as Trump’s election shattered the liberal perception of political reality. Since then, it has set Democrats off on weird meta-narratives regarding Russiagate and its seedy relationship to the White House; clammy skeins about menacing Bernie Bros bludgeoning with snake emojis; and, most predictably, cliched handwringing over “electability.” Goldberg’s piece is the type of pugnacious flimflam that media gaggles run with and Democrats glom on to because they’re both unshakably confident it will resonate with some abstruse flyover blue-collar-guy or some tremulous suburban moderate.
None of this is to say Trump isn’t an existential threat to democracy, mind you, because he is. But Goldberg’s hyped Losers/Suckers-gate is another salacious bombshell that doesn’t really scan as anything new because it provides the shape of meaningfully confronting Trump, but never the scale. These kinds of stern condemnations never seem to stick and just feel off and grasping and cringe. To the red state truthers, it’s another hyperbolic tantrum toward the ever-expanding constellations of fake news perfidies and perversions, no-name haters from the usual covfefe wind machines roaring at jet-engine volume. On one level, this is a total instinctive disbelief of Just Another Media Thing, and upon deeper examination, it’s a reptilian rejection of anything that doesn’t already assume their conclusions. To a culture that’s addicted to spectacle and inured to dishonesty, Donald Trump delivers bulk loads of both. When political engagement is replaced with personal ego gratification, negotiating in the marketplace of ideas gives way to a schizophrenic fantasy where participants are battling against both real and perceived enemies with a woolly blankness.
The worst thing about this is Republicans aren’t completely wrong some of the time … sort of. Because of the Democrat’s hamfisted inability to seize the narrative, Trump can plunge into pettifogging ape-rants about their institutional failings, which are barely plausible enough for his supporters to latch on to and reaffirm their own self-deceptions and broader frameworks. Nearly the whole of Trump’s re-election case comes from the smoldering wreckage of endless, oft-overheated Burn After Reading intrigues against him. What would he be running on if he didn’t have Russiagate, “fake news,” or impeachment? It all slow-rolls into a consuming and ongoing culture war that manages to be astonishing and exhausting without ever becoming interesting.
I prefer to hang on to the belief that there is something good and innate in people that drives them to be well-intentioned. But because I live in the same profoundly stupid and horrible world as everyone else, I swerve between hope and a deeper cynicism, an acknowledgment of a more pessimistic observation. Whatever urge there is to be kind is subsumed by the notion that you are right and whatever you do is, therefore, good — then you work righteously backward from there. As an enabler of behavior, a stoker of peevishness, a hardener of resentments, Trump has no equal. And it’s awfully addictive.
One of the most persistent cultural residuals of the Bush era is the conception that a vicious, relentless anti-intellectualism drives conservative thought. It’s easy to see why this truism has lasted so long, given the cycles of offhand umbrage and gilded bluster that delineate every drearily synonymous right-wing thinkfluencer. Fox “News” and Breitbart are stocked with gaseous, behind-the-curve professional idiots uttering the same tired catechisms, a recitation of macroscale proxy villains and unhinged rants about political correctness going too far that all seem stuck in 2015.
More precisely, though, conservatism is pseudo-intellectual. Reactionaries flock to the likes of Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson because they drape a gossamer cloak of logic and involuted rhetoric over their chuckling vengeful savageries. Sure, the Shapiros and Carlsons of the world are intellectuals in the same way that people who rumble drawn-out farts on the subway are trombonists. However, on a more mundane level, this specific brand of pundit flatters the various vanities of their audience by helping them navigate their Trump-enabled, reflexive bigotries through a civility-addled politics that values overdetermined aesthetic over substance. This is it’s not racist if it’s true with high-production gloss and cherrypicked factoids.
Trump’s supporters have fortified a principled dedication to not-knowing and not-understanding any kind of ambiguity, a refusal to countenance the lived experiences of other Americans, all wrapped in a patina of rational debate. From their perspective, willful ignorance isn’t just a virtue, it’s something to double down on. Underneath their childish well, actually hairsplitting, these people who think they care about Free Speech and Diversity Of Thought actually want to protect themselves from things that make them uncomfortable, or are searching for an answer that will affirm them. It all recedes from there.
Like many dull and uninteresting people, MAGA chuds perceive their own lives as a simple hero’s journey from hardship to success, powered by a perceived Ayn Randian mastery of the universe all because they run a pool supply company in some shitty suburban hamlet. The most insufferable quality of Trump supporters is their insistence on framing their willful ignorance as a matter of political disagreement, when really, it’s a lame attempt to mask their own personality defects. If the latter is true, then their refusal to address their know-nothingness would make them “Bad People,” and no one wants to be perceived as a “Bad Person.” But being a “Good Person” is difficult and time-consuming, and people have jobs. In a world where almost every action draws some form of judgment from some quarters of society, they feel entitled to an unearned moral pass that absolves them for supporting the most flagrantly corrupt and racist president in modern U.S. history. To them, their disposable perversions are merely misunderstood by quivering libs who are all brainwashed by the Liberal Media Hollywood Whole Foods Radical Homosexual Postmodern Neo-Marxist Lena Dunham Agenda.
There is no moral absolute to glean from Goldberg’s story because what Trump may or may not have said at that moment is just another vacant scummery from a deeply stupid man. Every moment is just that moment to Trump, and his simps think the same way. And the moment they perceive is not in a Zen-like centeredness that acknowledges everything is in flux and the only constant is change — meaning you flow through space-time completely free from any fixed position, pain, anger, resentment, hostility, or fear. Trump’s sense of the moment is, of course, both dazed and wired, frozen in amber until it’s not, centered on the fantastical horrors and thwarted dreams he saw on cable news that day. Apparently, this is also the case for our broader American moment. Because our politics no longer deals in real human conditions, it morphs into a mythological realm of hero versus villain catfights and visceral allegiances and pyrotechnic edifices. Any contention on this ground comes across as another maddening abstraction from an undignified PageSix columnist.
Trump was a victim of media before he became its star, a rancid celestial body in his own right. Maybe his luster will begin to fade the moment we realize how boring this all really is.