Where to even begin, right? The man promised to play the dictator “on day one,” but I don’t think any of us realized his dismantling of the US government would be this swift and vicious. And crude as a bag of rocks.
He has followed Steve Bannon’s directive to the letter, “flooding the zone with shit,” in order to throw the forces of sanity off-balance. With a nonstop stream of edicts — most of them illegal, but at this point who’s counting? — the canny old bastard has delivered on his promise to deliver “shock-and-awe.”
“Shock and awe.” How very Trumpian of him to have repurposed a moniker from Dubya Bush’s invasion of Iraq — a war that was universally deemed a disaster, but never mind. Trump clearly admires the bombast of the phrase, and is counting on the public not remembering what a fiasco it was.
So here we are, less than a month in, all but blinded by the dust kicked up by the Mussolini & Musk wrecking crew. Their latest recruits include the
“teenage mutant incels” (cf. Stephen Colbert) whom Elmo has put in charge of hijacking the Treasury Department payment system.
One of these crypto chipmunks (op cit), who goes by the nickname “Big Balls,” is advising the State Department. Another was just kicked out — although not for long, if Elmo gets his way — for posting a comment that says it all: “I was racist before it was cool.”
Keep ‘em guessing
Trump’s whole plan of attack, of course, is to disorient. He may have been quite aware that most of his proclamations wouldn’t stand up in court, or that they’d be immediately blocked by judges. But does he care? He’s never been one to worry about judicial restraints. His tenure was never going to be a government by rule of law. It’s government by whatever-you-can-get-away-with.
More intriguing, psychologically, is that he seems to relish the fact that nobody knows whether to take him seriously (low-level Gemini). This king of chaos deliberately courts the doubt and perplexity that his wild statements provoke. Shrouding himself in deniability, he has raised bullshit ambiguity to an art form.
WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!) –Trump, addressing the impact of his proposed tariffs
Whether his executive orders are implemented or not, the tsunami of crazy has accomplished its aim, so far: throwing everyone off their game.
More vulnerable to pushback — from lawsuits, the public and GOP rivals — is his Best Buddy Elon, whose approval ratings, at this writing, are shaky. Elmo is 
also a chaos agent, but without the perverse charisma that Trump enjoys among his acolytes. The DogeMan must be wondering, right now, whether his billions will be enough to immunize him against the fate that befalls so many of Trump’s former loyalists: thrown under the bus.
So must every one of the political lackeys who’ve lined up down at Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. They must realize that their fortunes hang by a thread.
Vive la Résistance
The only point of consensus, among political observers of every stripe, is that Trump’s opponents in Washington have been caught with their pants down.
At the moment, the Democrats are not so much a political movement as an incohesive gaggle of dispirited souls, flopping around like fish orphaned by the tide. Strategically, they have reverted to their classic focus-group-tested caution. They talk about avoiding “the old playbook,”
…but timidity in the guise of strategic discretion is very much the old playbook. Waiting around until someone else figures out what you are supposed to say or stand for is very much the old playbook. – Jessica Winter
And the Left, as a whole? Four years ago, American anti-fascists called themselves The Resistance. Evoking visions of sexy French underground heroes
from WWII, the term had a proud history of boots-on-the-ground protest.
We haven’t been hearing the word too much lately.
Four Horsemen
It’s too soon to tell whether or not the progressive half of the country has lost its voice. But it is certainly losing its pipeline.
Anti-Trumpists seem to be realizing that old-school political movements are an anachronism in this digital age. Everything has moved online, with dissenters separated into walled-off little silos. Over the course of a generation, social justice organizing, along with every other kind of public discourse, has receded from three-dimensional view.
So the crucial question is who owns the digital landscape? Alas, we’ve all known the answer to that for a while now: it’s Elmo, Zuck, Bezos, Cook– the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as Frederick Woodruff calls them.
The next big shift has happened just recently, as Pluto (plutocracy) was moving into Aquarius (technology): these lords of the digital space have now moved into the bastions of political power.
They not only control our information. They have become the Establishment.
Who’s got the megaphone?
Could it have been only a couple of years ago that social media platforms were banning Trump? The passing of the megaphone from the Left to the Right has happened quite suddenly, right in front of our eyes.
Back before Trump came down that golden escalator — a century ago in political time — the world looked upon Mssrs. Musk, Zuck, Bezos and Cook as boys playing with toys, in the culturally progressive valleys of California. They comprised their own little self-contained clique, on the other side of the 
country from Washington’s halls of power.
Bright, eccentric, politically libertarian, they stayed busy tinkering with their rockets and self-driving cars, competing with each other like middle school nerds at the science fair.
Gradually, the competition between them grew more ruthless. Delighted by how easily the public was getting suckered into using their products, the scope of their ambitions soared.
People just submitted [their emails, pictures, addresses, SNS]. I don’t know why. They trust me. Dumb fucks. — Mark Zuckerberg
The princelings then turned their attention to getting government regulators off their backs, and started to pump millions into political lobbying. When challenged, they claimed that they were still just trying to connect everybody. So sweet.
Baby oligarchs
Too bad for us that the Silicon boys, now all-powerful billionaires, are still boys. It’s not unusual for insecure teenagers to fail to mature, ethically, psychologically or emotionally. But these insecure teenagers happen to have a monopoly on the online world’s attention.
Perhaps their very success contributed to their arrested development. Maybe it allowed them an astrological bypass: they got to skip their Saturn Return. Stuck in the Jupiterian phase of young adulthood – expansion, hubris, illusions of immortality – they have gotten older without learning the lessons of consequences. They missed the part about character-building.
Musk in particular, though fully grown and infamously procreative (if child abandonment, absenteeism, IVF and surrogacy count as parenting) comes off as a lonely and unloved kid. He is said to cheat at video games, not unlike his boss, our toddler-in-chief, who cheats at golf.
I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.– Rebecca Shaw
Like social outcasts everywhere, the members of the Silicon Valley clique grew rich overcompensating, each trying to build the awesome-est robot. 
The fact that they were too busy to cultivate decent personal values may have helped rather than hindered their ascent. In the social media business, being a defensive paranoid must have come in handy. Perhaps it made it that much easier to monetize social division in others; to amplify insecurities for a living.
Wow, the tech moguls thought: This could be cool, to not only control all communications and manipulate all emotions in the country, but to reprogram the government’s regulatory engine so it runs like we want it to! — Maureen Dowd
Granted an audience
Sucking up to Trump was a logical next step for our California lads.
One of the most bad-ass things I’ve ever seen in my life. – Zuckerberg’s response to the putative assassination attempt on Trump
They think Trump can be their new toy.
Game recognizes game
Or will they can be his new toy? Sure, Trump has changed his mind a bunch of times about the tech sector; as recently as 2021, he called bitcoin a scam. And he’s an old man; he doesn’t understand the digital world any more than he understands how batteries and windmills work.
But game recognizes game.
Trump’s a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers’ carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins…Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples’ productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. — Corey Doctorow
Trump has an instinct for the attention economy, and he can see that guys like Musk are the ones who shape it. Who better than these hungry, amoral dudes, to help him sow distrust in institutions? They’ve proven their genius for exploiting the addictions of the credulous public. They specialize in
tearing down social cohesion.
Indeed, they embody it. The personality dysfunction of guys like Zuck and Elmo mirrors that of our society. It makes archetypal sense that a spiritually unmoored, ADHD-riddled culture has made heroes out of a clique of on-the-spectrum puer aeternus, riddled with intellectual chops but devoid of self-awareness.
Once Trump won, putting Elmo in charge must have seemed like a no-brainer. Our Donnie likes getting elected, but being elected? Not so much.
He liked campaigning. He likes traveling around to his rallies. But he is visibly uncomfortable at official events in Washington.
Donnie Dotard’s interest in the Presidency stops at the Get Out of Jail Free card…the actual work of governing a whole-ass country really cuts into your golf time, y’know? He’s been eager to outsource the job parts of the job… All of a sudden, along comes this dork who’s willing to pay for the privilege. He’s super rich, he hates all the same people you do, and he’s always got great drugs. — Shower Cap blog
Staying sane
Therapists tell us that when we’re grieving, we have to process it through five stages. I think most of us find ourselves in one or another of these phases since the election, and they have to be worked through. Tuning out is a normal human reaction to overwhelm. It makes sense that traumatized progressives have shied away from the news.
But before we get too comfortable with our ostrich-in-the-sand approach, let’s consider what we mean by “news.” What’s going on in the country is greater and deeper – both more problematic and more interesting – than the battle between factions in Washington. What’s going on in the world is bigger than 
“politics.”
Today’s crises are moral and existential in nature. Do any of us even remember the names of the dueling political parties in Germany in the 1930s? Probably not, but we certainly remember the ethical and philosophical issues involved.
What if we were to look at current crises not in terms of Washington’s power games, but in terms of morality? Not “morality” as the churches define it, but as our deep selves define it.
What do our hearts tell us about bullying the weak and vulnerable? What do we instinctively sense about people who scapegoat? About the kind of leader who wants to cut off aid to desperate populations overseas?
What do our guts feel, about punishing refugees for the crime of trying to escape war and poverty? Forget about what the talking heads are saying. What does our common sense say, about ethnic cleansing in Gaza? About drilling for oil on a planet at risk of ecocide?
So What Should We Do?
This is the question being asked by anyone with a conscience, as we watch the country spiral into full-blown, balls-out kakistocracy. It’s a question to which there is no one-size-fits-all answer. But we must ask it of ourselves, continuously, if we are to maintain moral and psychic health. I’ll be discussing it ongoing, in these blogs and in podcasts with Frederick Woodruff.
Meanwhile, let’s keep in mind we’re living through a period of extreme flux, and cannot afford to obsess over each day’s new outrage. We can and must contribute what we can, in this time of trouble, via our own unique gifts and capacities. But there are also processes in play that operate above and beyond our individual efforts. We will accomplish more, for our own health and for the world’s, if we stay anchored in these eternal truths.
Such as the idea that collective consciousness does not evolve in a straight line. And the idea that all dying entities – from leaves on the tree in autumn to once-mighty empires — contain the seeds of their own destruction.
