This entry also appears on Medium.
Since having posted a series of articles about Election 2024, I have been somewhat reluctant to engage in a daily Whac-A-Mole concerning the ongoing stream of Executive Orders and other forms of bluster coming out of the mouth of our Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler. Of course, if you look back to Trump 1.0, you’d realize that part of the staying power of the Ruler is his extraordinary ability to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon so eloquently put it back then. By issuing countless policy directives, it becomes virtually impossible to launch any kind of coordinated response. Years in the making, Trump 2.0 has elevated this seemingly chaotic tactic into an art form, “the likes of which the world has never seen before,” as The Don might put it.
If the word “shit” offends you, well, “Pardon” me, because we’re up to our ears in fecal matter. A helicopter-plane collision over the Potomac and people D-I-E? It’s because of D-E-I! Don’t like the name of the Gulf of Mexico? Well, it’s now the “Gulf of America,” and even Google Maps will comply! You have Manifest dreams of recolonization? Let’s annex Greenland! The Panama Canal! Make Canada the fifty-first state! How about that Israeli-Palestinian conflict? No problem! Oust the 2.2 million Palestinians. Where will they go? Who will take them? That’s anyone’s guess! Just know that the strip will be seized and we’ll Make Gaza Great Again, a veritable “Riviera of the Middle East”! Perhaps it will be populated with hotels and casinos bearing the Trump name—and sharing the same splendid fate as all those Atlantic City projects that Trump bankrupted.
From Trans-ylvanians to Tariffs!
Fed up with “men” identifying as “women”? Well, we can start by erasing the “T” in LGBT on all government websites (including that of the Stonewall National Monument), and putting a stake through the heart of those Trans-ylvanians. We all know that there are only biological Males and biological Females, goddammit! And don’t you dare question such an obvious truth! Who cares about the 1.7% of people who are intersex! Or the 0.6% of people who identify as “trans”! We don’t change the rules of 350 million people for 6 million social misfits.
But if blaming the “Woke” Trans Agenda isn’t enough to create the scapegoat that some people are longing for as the root of all evil, well, We’ve Got Migrants! If they don’t go back from whence they came with our military transports, we’ll just open detention centers in Guantanamo Bay and put them right next to those water-boarded terrorists! Worried that the US might be turning into a militarized police state? No price is too high to pay to achieve the goal of getting rid of 11 million illegals! Or is it 15 million? Or 20 million? And while we’re at it, let’s end birthright citizenship. To hell with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution!
Then, there’s The Tariff! Once lauded by Trump as the “most beautiful word in the dictionary,” our Ruler has embraced the “the prostitute of protectionism” as his hero: William McKinley, whose policies went hand-in-hand with an interventionist foreign policy. Gee, what a surprise!
Sadly, Trump—who has always bragged that he doesn’t like to read—is clearly incapable of reading an Econ 101 textbook. If he had perused such a textbook, he might have discovered that tariffs, in theory and in practice, whether imposed or retaliatory, are political tools that tax the population in a highly regressive way, impacting lower-income consumers the most. They raise prices, reduce choices, distort markets, and artificially benefit the protected industries.
Granted, there is no free market anywhere in the world and there are distinct differences in degree among the world’s mixed economies. Some have pointed to the forced labor that provides some goods at lower costs in places like the “People’s Republic of Crony Capitalism,” er, China. But this doesn’t consider the long-term effects of that kind of labor on the quality of goods, or the fact that they foster stagnation and corruption, while undermining efficiency, innovation, and worker productivity. Adopting high tariffs in response to these conditions introduces its own layers of inefficiencies by insulating domestic industries from competition and penalizing the consumer.
Still, Trump can’t decide whether he wants to use tariffs as a means of raising revenue, benefitting domestic producers, or as a means of “negotiating” with other governments to fight the failed war on drugs and the influx of “undesirable” immigrants. We have yet to see what political and economic havoc will transpire as these moves play out on the global chessboard.
A Musky DOGE
If that’s not enough fecal matter coming out of the body politic to fill up your septic tank, let’s not forget that we have the Department of Government Efficiency on our side—led by none other than the Great Elon Musk!
Musk has become the quintessential crony capitalist. He has amassed billions of dollars in his contracts with the Departments of Energy, State, Commerce, Veterans Affairs, Interior, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Transportation, and Defense. Not to mention the GSA, the EPA, and, of course, NASA. Like any statist businessman, he needs to keep those subsidies coming, while staving off competitors, regulatory battles, and federal investigations. To anyone who thinks Musk gave $288 million to the 2024 Trump campaign out of a sense of civic duty, I got a wonderful bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you.
It doesn’t matter that Musk’s crony credentials sit alongside innovative investments. Even Ayn Rand, who once lamented that big business was “America’s most persecuted minority,” recognized that the vast majority of businesspeople in this country’s political economy—which she dubbed “The New Fascism”—were hybrid cases. The point is that in an economy such as this, political skills are nourished systemically. Friedrich Hayek’s famous “Road to Serfdom” warned back in the 1940s that the more political power comes to dominate social life, the more political power becomes the only power worth having. Those most adept at using the levers of political power tend to have a comparative advantage. That’s only one of the reasons “why the worst get on top.”
You don’t have to be a commie, pinko anti-capitalist to see that Musk’s DOGE is one of the surest ways of putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Elevating an obvious rent-seeker who has earned billions of dollars from his government connections to a position in charge of “government efficiency” is such a glaring conflict of interest that I’m astonished anyone would be blind to it. Sure, DOGE will uncover glaring government inefficiencies and wasteful spending. Other commissions have done the same. But putting Musk in charge won’t “drain the swamp”; he’s part of it. As are so many of the other billionaires whom Trump has appointed to various posts. The conflicts of interest are legion.
Could anyone imagine how right-wing pundits would have reacted if, say, Barak Obama or Joe Biden had created such an office and put George Soros in charge? The screams of political corruption would be reverberating for decades to come. (Oh, wait, I forgot! Soros was the Puppet Master all along!)
From The Weave to The Flood
None of what I’ve said here minimizes my own concerns about the problems facing this country and the world. There are serious issues that need to be addressed in this country—from a bloated regulatory state and federal bureaucracy to a sprawling military-industrial complex, not to mention disastrous policies on housing, immigration, healthcare and pharmaceuticals (legal and illegal). And there are equally serious issues that need to be addressed in a world beset by a rising tide of illiberalism, ultra-nationalism, and brutality.
In assessing the current situation, it is important to recognize that Trump is as much a product of our times as he is its voice. During the 2024 campaign, his rallies drew large crowds who sat for hours listening to him do “The Weave,” as he called it. On one level, it was a meandering stream-of-consciousness punctuated by warnings of existential collapse, tangential storytelling, and over-the-top policy pronouncements. But on another level, the tangled web Trump wove created distortions, distractions, and deceptions. It was a rhetorical extension of “flooding the zone”—or as Rand used to call it, “overloading the crow.” Cognitive overload has its political uses. As Frankie Taggart of Barron’s reports:
A chaotic first week saw [Trump] sign scores of divisive executive orders, as well as pardons or commutations for nearly everyone convicted of crimes—including serious violence—in the 2021 US Capitol insurrection. And then there were the new president’s freewheeling media appearances, the feuds with perceived enemies, dust-ups with the clergy, stripping of security details for critics, the launch of a meme crypto coin, and one headline-grabbing social media post after another.
“He doesn’t just flood the zone, he drowns it,” said Evan Nierman, the founder and CEO of global crisis PR agency Red Banyan. “It’s a classic PR strategy: overwhelm, distract and control the narrative before anyone else can. Flooding the zone is his way of making sure no single controversy sticks because there’s always a new one incoming.” …
[P]remised on the notion that politicians can avoid scrutiny over any individual outrage by bombarding and overwhelming the public’s attention span [,] … [t]he blizzard of headlines is disorienting, and it is supposed to be, say analysts. The point isn’t to persuade anyone of anything, it’s simply to ensure that critics don’t mobilize around a coherent narrative and that no one has control over the flow of information. [As Nierman points out], “Trump thrives in the churn, where the public’s attention shifts too fast for any one scandal to stick. … While everyone else scrambles to process yesterday’s outrage, he’s already on to the next, ensuring his version of events dominates both the day’s headlines and social media conversation.”
Toward what end is this ball of cognitive confusion leading?
American Fascism?
For eons, many commentators have warned that the rise of Donald Trump signals a turn toward American fascism. Over the years, I’ve written quite a few essays on the nature of fascism, which can be accessed here. I have long maintained that since the early twentieth century, this country, under Republicans and Democrats alike, has moved toward more pronounced forms of neo-mercantilist corporatism, a hallmark of fascist political economy. There has always been an underlying threat that the current quasi-“liberal” corporatism might mutate into more authoritarian forms.
And yet, from a tactical perspective, we have learned that it is less than optimal to catastrophize every single one of Trump’s outlandish pronoucements and to call out his every utterance with the F word. That didn’t stop him from getting elected. It hasn’t deadened his approval rating, which stands at 53% today, with high numbers for being “tough” (69%), “energetic” (63%), “focused” (60%), and “effective” (58%)—numbers that his predecessor, the Walking Dead Joe Biden, couldn’t touch. It didn’t even affect his raucous reception at yesterday’s Super Bowl in New Orleans. And it won’t stop the worst excesses of his political program.
This does not mean that we should dismiss Trump’s utterances as mere distractions. For those of us who are liberty-minded, it is impossible to ignore the totality of the authoritarian, nationalist, protectionist, and nativist inclinations of Trump and his minions, as they turn toward transforming public policy.
At least for the next two years, the GOP-held majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives will most likely rubberstamp a lot of the Trump agenda—just as they have rubberstamped virtually all his cabinet posts and other high-level appointments. And while some aspects of that agenda might have sounded reasonable, especially to those swing voters who ushered Trump back into the Oval Office (“It’s the economy, stupid“), it would require many other institutional changes to affect a large-scale structural shift toward open authoritarian fascism. We still have constitutionally protected rights to speech, press, and assembly, and in just the last three weeks, many of Trump’s executive actions have been met with protests and dissent. Moreover, we have a constitutionally fragmented federal system that has generated, in that same period, over forty lawsuits from municipalities, states, and other organizations pushing back on Trump’s executive orders. These lawsuits will be time consuming, and they may or may not be successful, given that the Supreme Court continues to provide legal cover for the ever-expanding role of the President and the Executive Branch.
But we also can’t discount the fact that Trump, though beloved by his MAGA followers, is often his own worst enemy, a ‘Yuge’ mitigating factor that would undercut any successful authoritarian ascendancy. Even those swing voters who put him over the top in November may grow weary from what Nierman calls the “constant turmoil.”
Whether we are on the verge of an explicit authoritarian turn or not, take comfort in an American mantra, which applies at all times and under all circumstances: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Or, to put it another way: Don’t drown in the flood zone of shit. Let the rulers eat it!
Notablog 