In DonnieWorld, the worst sin is being boring. But boring is what that speech was, the State-of-the-DisUnion one he gave the other day. As Ryan Broderick says, he’s not even making up new lies anymore.
A month into his second run, the man’s scorecard has not been stellar.
Most notably, that ugly performance with Zelensky in the Oval Office on the New Moon. This is not to say that we should buy the pro-NATO version of things, either, with its The-West-are-Always-the-Good-Guys propaganda (check out the courageous U.N. speech by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, the new Noam Chomsky).
What history will remember about that meeting was how stupid and vicious it was. Watching the Orange One and his sidekick, the eyeliner guy, badger Zelensky under the bright lights of international cameras, you had to think: Come on, guys, third-graders on the playground could bully with more finesse than this.
And let’s not over-think Donnie’s stance on Ukraine. It had nothing to do with geopolitical strategy. It was a display of his tough-guy-for-the-cameras strategy. “This’ll be great for TV,” he said afterwards — a signature self-own, betraying a tone-deafness that would mortify a functioning adult.
The Zelensky meeting, a conversation about war and globe-altering alliances, elicited from King Donnie the same ignorant bluster as inflation or tariffs, about which he is equally illiterate.
Drunk uncle
One wonders if the MAGA crowd are still impressed by spectacles like this, cheering while the rest of the world cringes.
I don’t suppose his devotees care too much about foreign policy, being as it’s about policy and foreigners and all. But they do seem to care about layoffs, self-sabotaging trade wars, and the price of groceries, in which respect their hero is likewise coming up short.
The inflation relief he promised ad nauseum has not been forthcoming, because lowering costs, as he eloquently puts it, “is very hard.”
They nominated a drunk uncle but they didn’t want him to drive. – Nicolle Wallace
Fifty days in, his proudest moments have been strutting around renaming bodies of water and mountains after more dead white men, gestures both grand and petty at once (Jay Caspian Kang). This is textbook autocrat stuff. Many’s the aging strongman who has aspired to territorial expansion to cement his legacy.
But the psychological mechanisms behind this guy’s antics are noteworthy. Lately, his delusions of grandeur seem to be laced with projected self-loathing, as the other day when he called the country he governs “bloated, fat and disgusting.” Shadenfreude notwithstanding, it’s embarrassing to watch.
As James Garville put it recently, the boy ain’t right.
PINO-a-lotta
As Frederick Woodruff has noted, Trump represents the last rotting vestiges of Pluto in Capricorn (old-school authoritarians) while Musk embodies the new face of plutocracy, the tech lords (Aquarius). Thus, Trump’s snarky new social media moniker: PINO (President in Name Only). The acronym identifies the major plot line, so far, of Trump 2.0: Whatever it is that’s going on between him and Elon.
We might see the relationship as a toxic marriage in which each offers something that the other lacks. Donnie brought the fan base, something the charisma-challenged Elon was never going to be able to muster.
And Elon brought the cerebral chops (although his version of intellect is so disconnected from body, heart and soul that we might count it as more of a minus than a plus), which was never Donnie’s strong suit, unless you count his success in picking out the horsie on that cognitive test.
Observers worldwide have been waiting with morbid curiosity to see when the honeymoon would be over between Prez Cassidy and the Ketamine Kid.
In like a lion
The month of March came roaring into Washington like a lion with a chainsaw. The Musk Memo Fiasco made global news, with its mass firings – giving federal workers with decades of service 15 minutes to clean out their desks — followed by re-hirings, followed by re-firings.
It was like the Keystone Kops, if they had run around gutting foreign aid and school lunch programs.
Perhaps Musk is right. Haven’t those filthy takers at the FAA suckled at the government teat long enough? Why should I have to shell out hard-earned money, money I could be dumping into meme coins and NFTs, for frivolous extravagances like “air safety” or Alzheimer’s research? –Shower Cap blog
For a spanking new federal government, it was not a good look.
The chaos in the Capitol has some Republican congressfolk getting all skittery. They sense that the voters upon whom their futures depend may not cotton to Elon and his grand project. Some of these esteemed public servants seem to be wondering whether this might be a good time to call in sick for the next ring-kissing circle.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds again. 
The long view
But these are short-term twists and turns. They don’t tell us whether the Trump juggernaut will self-destruct. For that, we have to look at the long term.
I can think of three reasons, off the top, why the Trump&Musk regime will crash and burn. Number one: They suck at what they’re doing.
“They’ve radicalized me.” – Federal worker fired during Chainsaw Week
Number Two: They promise that they’ll take their voters backwards in time, which can’t happen. Note that last bit in MAGA: the “again” part. Alas, we can’t go home again.
Especially since “home” never really was.
Golden Age
Granted, focusing on the past is an aspirational philosophy for a lot of people. Nativist movements tend to obsess over an imagined Golden Age.
Most memorably, the Hitler bunch (by the way, remember when it used to be possible to just say “nazis?” These days there are so many of them, you have to specify which ones you mean). A couple of generations ago, in Germany, the group with the fetching leather accessories and tattoo-ready insignia set the standard for modern nativism.
The National Socialists have been in our faces ever since. Their larger-than-life villainy has been kept alive in innumerable popular fictions. Hollywood couldn’t get enough of those gold eagles and red-&-black swastikas — memes avant la lettre. This was some high-style thuggery, and it became the ideal for every successive generation of rageful skinheads.
Interestingly, although the Nazis were emphatically Teutonic – extremely race-specific, to state the obvious – their appeal has extended well beyond the Fatherland.
Hitler’s passions have been emulated all over the world, even by those of the dark-skinned persuasion, which would of course set Der Fuhrer spinning in his grave.
Clearly there is something archetypal going on.
The Before-Time
The Nazis promised their fans a return to an unsullied, aboriginal past. When this Before-Time existed, exactly, wasn’t really spelled out; nativists aren’t known for historical specificity. But they feel very strongly that — once upon a time — people from other places hadn’t yet started coming in and polluting everything.
In this fantasized era, everybody looked like the fantasizers. They were certain that they alone deserved the Golden Age, because their version of humanness was a cut above.
I think the question that’s destined to most befuddle the historians of the future is like…how, precisely, did such blithering bumblefucks come to believe in their own racial superiority?– Shower Cap blog
The German nativists, in their crusade to replicate this Edenic past, concentrated those who didn’t look like themselves into special world-renowned camps. Camps not unlike our own Guantanamo — where American-style extra-judicial unpleasantness has occurred, to minimal public outcry — and to which our current president wants to send immigrants.
“[When Trump says] The people” [he] means his people, the only worthy and legitimate people, the only ones worth defending because they are the only ones defending him. When he says “our once great country,” he means the country when it most benefited those most devoted to him, at a time when the racial hierarchy was more fixed, the patriarchy was more entrenched, immigrant communities were often whiter and gender identities were more rigid. — Charles Blow
Making fossil fuels great again
Trump spent much of his campaign appealing to rust belt voters. Coal miners, in particular, got a lot of love. And not because there are a lot of them in the electorate; proportionately, this demographic is vanishingly small. No, they were singled out because they represented an American past he and many of his followers recognized.
He liked getting his picture taken in garbage trucks and hamburger kitchens, dressed up in working-men costumes, promising to make the USA a great manufacturing power again. But coal? Really?
These industries are not coming back, of course. They belong to the 19th and 20th centuries, and that ship has sailed. We are in the Information Age now, an era with which Trump and his hardhat-wearing base are deeply uncomfortable.
Only the right sort
Then there’s his idea for designating visa eligibility, surprising only in its blatancy. He’s proposing to allow into the country those few who have achieved marked success in capitalist terms (not a new idea, just newly official. Exemptions for billionaires & former underwear models have always been on-brand). He wants to issue entry cards of “gold” and “platinum.”
A man of 
astonishingly limited imagination and bargain-basement taste, his exclusive membership scheme mimics that of a Las Vegas gentlemen’s club.
Antipathy
Today’s nativists, whether America’s KKK or India’s Hindu supremacists or Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, are remarkably consistent in what binds them. The common denominator is an antipathy towards the imagined Other.
This is not news. It has been clear for a while now that the so-called populism that vaulted Trump to power is fueled not by ideology but by grievance. Trump’s ascendancy has corresponded with Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, a sign whose unconscious aspect is victimhood and delusions of martyrdom.
What impassions the MAGA mind is not being for something, but being against something. This is the third reason their movement cannot last.
Negative energy does not further forward movement. Unlike the hard slog of running a government, reactionary uprisings like MAGA can only peter out. Their rebellious anger is quick to grab society’s attention and destroy its institutions, like Elon with his chainsaw, but it can’t be sustained.
Trumpism is a collective tantrum.
Do Americans really hate their LGBTQ+ neighbors and family members so much they want to see them excluded from public life? Do they really hate environmentalists so much they want to burn their own world down out of spite? Will it feel good to watch the planet cease to function just because they know it will upset the singer from Green Day? — Stewart Lee
Get Back, Loretta
We old hippies have our own nostalgia issues. Unlike our MAGA brethren and sistren, we have not created a vengeful political
movement, but some of us have been known to muse wistfully about growing up in an idyllic era.
We remember carefree summers at the ol’ swimmin’ hole, riding bikes by ourselves around the neighborhood, before helicopter parents were invented. And it’s true that those postwar years were indeed unusually peaceful and prosperous, if you were white and middle-class. (Not so much, if you were black or brown or Vietnamese or Eritrean or Palestinian, etc.)
We Boomers wax especially rhapsodic when it comes to our young adulthood. For my cohort, there will never be an era like the ‘60s 
… that is, like our curated memories of the ’60s. The peace-&-love era started to get fetishized even before the mud from Woodstock had dried off our boots.
It wasn’t just the dope that made those years seem so golden. It was that eternal longing to get back, as Joni Mitchell sang, to the Garden.
This is essentially a spiritual impulse, not a political one. The trouble comes in when we try to translate this yearning into ideological terms. On the level of worldly trajectories, we can’t go back, none of us.
We can only go forward.
