But Reality Is Unscripted
Thoughts that wake me up in a bad mood.
I get up every morning and write a “Daily Log” entry in my on-line notebook, usually starting with something on how well I did or didn’t sleep, what time I got up, what I was reading, what record I put on, and some stray thoughts on whatever I woke up thinking about, before getting into my plans for the day. So the first several paragraphs below came tumbling out, before it occurred to me that they might be worth sharing.
I should perhaps mention that another part of the reason Trump was on my mind was reading Tom Carson’s Chicken Little’s Revenge screed yesterday. Although artfully written, as so dauntingly much of his work is, I wound up noting: “Trump’s an easy mark, so why does so much of this miss its target?” (Still worth reading, although Can We Please Impeach Trump’s Casting Director? [05-01] and Triomphe the Insult Comic’s Arc de Trumpe are even better.)
I had myself been sharpening my plainer prose while trying to construct a list of the ten worst things Trump has done (out of an initial list of hundreds, maybe thousands). But it’s a fool’s mission, for while it seems important to talk about the policy issues, it’s often meaningless with Trump. Sure, he has really bad ideas about how to run the world. And sure, he surrounds himself with really bad people, who are generally incompetent at anything beyond hogging a mic. But he doesn’t care about any of that, and his carelessness (and the carelessness of everyone who still follows him) is very draining on his critics.
But for present purposes, I suppose I could reduce my top-ten to just one point: the worst thing about Trump is that he fills your head with a never-ending stream of nonsense, with occasional sprinkles of petty jealousy and loathing, and no matter how technical and/or philosophical you want to get, you simply can’t escape his suffocation. Early on, I worried more about opportunity costs, and that is huge even if it’s hard to fully grasp.[*] More profoundly, the casualty is hope. Even though I still expect Trump to leave office in disgrace, I am much less hopeful about the future than I was before the 2024 election.
[*] Opportunity costs are what you lose by spending time and money on one thing when you could have spent it on something more valuable. Time is especially important here, because you can’t get it back. In cases like climate change, not addressing the problem now makes it more expensive later, perhaps even impossible. Few people think about opportunity costs, because they almost never show up in ledgers. But they’re a very important concept in economics. When John Quiggin revised Economics in One Lesson as Economics in Two Lessons, his second lesson was all about opportunity costs.
We watched the first of a two-part Silent Witness last night, where Jack’s darkly guarded brute strength erupts, and he appears to have killed someone (who clearly, by American standards, had it coming, but this is British TV, so still acts like it has a conscience — and being not just fiction but TV, we can rest comfortably knowing that Jack will be exonerated, and that his passage through the hell of prison will unearth evidence that will be used to punish the even worse malefactors behind the scenes).
I woke up today with the thought that Trump has single-handed soaked up all the vices, the weak thinking, callous indifference, and clumsy acting out of America in the 80 years since the end of WWII. (As if he’s in the penultimate season of Breaking Bad. But as this isn’t fiction, let alone TV, reality is unscripted, and there is no chance he’ll get a final season to make his peace with the world that took his too-readily surrendered soul.)
Of course, those vices went back much earlier, but had been temporarily masked or at least sanitized by the collective consciousness and culture of the Roosevelt years: the struggles against the great depression of capitalism, colonialism, and fascism. The triumph of WWII blessed America with unprecedented wealth and power (and ego), which (as always) made us corrupt and venal. You don’t have to wait for Trump to find examples. Back when I was a child in the 1950s we were already hearing about “the ugly American.” Even earlier saw the advent of “the quiet American” (as Graham Greene dubbed his CIA operative), sowing the seeds of future fiascos and wars — like the 1953 coup in Tehran that should now be seen as Act One of Trump’s war against Iran.
Still, Trump is unique in American history. His great innovation is utter shamelessness, combined with a knack for acting so impulsively that he defies rational analysis. Where Clinton, Bush, and Obama struggled mightily (and desperately) to dress up America as a benevolent force in the world, Trump delights in its malignancy. And that’s precisely what his followers love about him: he says and does and gets away with things they can only dream of. Most of this I can hardly comprehend, much less relate to. I only know that every fiber of his being is rotten to the core. That doesn’t mean that everything he says or does is wrong. It just means that there is no way to salvage the whole.
It seems one is expected to either love or hate him. I don’t hate him like I once hated Nixon, but at least I had a sense of Nixon as a human. I don’t get that with Trump. He has no depth, no nuance, no sense of tragedy. He’s commanded our attention, an inescapable nuisance like a humongous and indestructible horsefly or mosquito. But he’s another species, impossible to relate to. For instance, I don’t find anything remotely appealing about “reality TV” or “UFC cage matches.” I don’t lust after having a series of trophy wives, let alone cheating on them with porn stars. I don’t doubt that some guys get off on that, but I don’t get them either. Nor do I get the aesthetics: the gaudy displays, tacking his name on things like a dog marking territory. It’s not even kitsch.
But Trump does one thing that even I appreciate: he punctures the pomposity of Obama and the Clintons and many more (there are many better reasons for despising John McCain, but Trump alone had the temerity to attack the POW martyrdom he built his career on, and the phony integrity he cloaked himself in). Of course, this only works if there is some truth to it. Razzing Democrats for palling around with rich folk works, even if part of the evidence is the Clintons attending Trump’s 3rd wedding. We have lots of reasons to resent them as elites, and to dismiss their occasional shows of caring as hollow. And it really is no defense to point out that Trump’s done (and will continue to do) far worse.
If Trump could apply his wit to himself and his followers, he’d be the second coming of Lenny Bruce. Of course, he can’t: his ego is way too fragile to look at in the mirror, so weak he needs adoration to keep his tiny mind from collapsing into its own vacuum. He really needs his base to think they’re great patriots and true Christians, because without their devotion, he’s nothing. But he’s bound to disappoint even them. He’s promised redemption, but only delivered petty acts of revenge. He promised to “drain the swamp,” but all he’s done has been to turn it into his own private golf resort. He promised peace, and blundered into wars. He promised to “fix it,” and he’s broken everything he’s touched. He brags about hiring only “the best people” and, well, look around.
How long it takes them to dump his sorry ass is still an open question — one I can’t begin to answer, because the only clue that I have is the suspicion that Democrats can’t see beyond nostalgia for their skewered former leaders. I’ll give you one example: I saw a meme pointing out that Obama had produced a more viable deal preventing Iran from any sort of development of a nuclear weapon (“without killing anyone”), but Trump tore up that deal, and wound up launching an unnecessary and purely malicious war that (best case) will achieve far less than had already been agreed on. That’s true, as far as it goes, but it misses several key points:
Obama took Netanyahu at his word that Iran’s nuclear program was directed at Israel, which was false.
Obama was right in understanding that Netanyahu’s goals could only be achieved by an agreement with Iran, and not by threats that would only drive Iran to intensify its efforts.
But Netanyahu rejected that deal, because he wasn’t really worried about Iran’s “nuclear program,” but wanted to keep Iran as an enemy, mostly to secure US funding for Israel’s military. Netanyahu went on to mobilize American political support against Obama’s deal, getting Democrats like Schumer and many Republicans to vote against it, and making opposition part of Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Obama didn’t put any pressure on Israel to moderate its stance against Iran, or to defuse issues with Palestinians or with Lebanon. Only the US made concessions, and very minor ones at that. (Some frozen funds were released.)
Obama refused to extend the negotiations to cover other issues of contention, including Iran’s support for Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Obama kept most sanctions in place, and added more after the deal. He made no effort to normalize relations with Iran, although Iran had signaled a willingness to do so as far back as the 1990s, when Israel cranked up its anti-Iran phobia.
So sure, it’s fair to blame Trump for starting this war, and it’s pretty obvious no other American president (even Biden, who was silly putty in Netanyahu’s hands) would have done so. But a long string of American presidents, going back to Jimmy Carter (or maybe even to Eisenhower) set up the conditions that allowed Trump to act so foolishly. Obama looms large in that list, because he made the wrong deal, which left all the phobias and arrogance unchecked. And he can’t even claim deference to Israel has his reason for screwing up the deal, because he did the deal without Israel’s blessing. His wound was self-inflicted.
Of course, what he really needed to do was to press Israel into some sort of settlement with the Palestinians that would allow a general normalization of relations across the whole Middle East. He made a couple gestures in that direction, but Netanyahu fought back, and he quickly threw in the towel. His predecessors going back to Truman had done no better, but no Israeli PM before Netanyahu had taken so much delight in bullying US presidents. (Indeed, Trump’s problem is that he’s even easier to kick around than Biden, Obama, Bush, or Clinton was.)