Today’s TRP post continues the Questions essay, being mainly about questions logically evoked by the Trump 2.0 Administration’s very odd behavior—odd, that is, against any measure of the historical norm—that for some reason virtually no one is asking. The commentariat appears to be increasingly fixated on the latest news feed, such as it may be, and both short-term and low-altitude perspectives—all that leavened by stunned rage on the part of those among We the People who still read and hence can still think. As for everyone else, well, why so many Americans are not stunned, not concerned, not asking interesting questions…..that brings us back to The Age of Spectacle thesis, doesn’t it? (You knew it would….what else are we doing here, right? Patience please: We’ll get there bye and bye.)
So in the first part of the essay we asked why it is that almost no one is asking if the recent focus on abundance, occasioned by the big publishing splash achieved by the recent Klein-Thompson book, takes into account the possible downsides of unleashing even more abundance in what is already an unprecedentedly affluent—and culturally decadent—society? In that first part we also asked, among other things, why almost no one had raised the fact that President Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs debacle was illegal as well as idiotic. Yes, Congress has over time passed some—some would say too much—authority for tariffs and trade policy generally over to the Executive Branch, but no one who knows the law here would hesitate to call what Trump has done a vast overreach. (The “bible” here is Christopher T. Zirpoli, “Congressional and Presidential Authority to Impose Import Tariffs,” Congressional Research Project, Library of Congress, February 27, 2025, available at Congress.gov)
In the second part, titled “A New Subsidiarity,” we marveled at the fact that, again, almost no one seemed to be wondering out loud how it came to be that the Federal government became so financially enmeshed with such a wide and deep array of civil society institutions that the sudden appearance of a “bad Emperor problem” could arm a renegade Administration with such a copious armory of extortion, blackmail, and pressure opportunities. So we began an answer to this unasked question, at least in brief.
Before moving on, let us behold the addition of striking new evidence of the underlying contention made some time ago in TRP that Presidents do not change who they are when they enter the Oval Office, but only continue being who they are but more so—in President Trump’s case a failed, grifting businessman and a reality-TV personality. I argued in the March 7 TRP as follows:
Donald Trump knows no model for thinking about large organizations other than that of a private for-profit business that he himself owns and more or less operates. So he thinks of himself now the same, only larger. He is currently CEO, and Elon Musk, he thinks, is CFO of this entity, otherwise known as the U.S. Federal Government. As is common in such cases . . . Trump and his associates are now busily cutting costs in anticipation of stripping or re-purposing what is left of the “business” for their own money-making uses. Corporate raiders have claimed in the past that this is a very efficient thing to do because it gets rid of accumulated waste and fat and makes capital assets more productive. Sometimes this has been true. Usually, however, it has just been a pretext for legal greed.
The elected seizure of the U.S. Federal government by corporate-brain types promises a particularly 21st-century form of corporatism—by which is meant generally a tight conjunction of government and big business—constructed from the inside out instead of the usual plutocratic outside in. . . : Government redacted, so to speak, and reconfigured for the purpose of looting both the domestic and global commons for the benefit of its masters—and to hell with everyone else, the “losers” upon whom the newly enthroned oligarchs will punch down at and for their pleasure.
What has happened since to validate this description? Three things at the very least, and no, I’m not piling on here nor am I engaging in any “I told you so” boasting. Not at all: I am merely burnishing, polishing as it were, a previously created item, something any self-respecting craftsman would do….
First, President Trump agreed to be interviewed by The Atlantic, and in that interview, published on April 22, he introduced the now infamous department store analogy, to wit:
. . . the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. . . . . So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else. For instance, do they have the VAT system in play? Do they charge us tariffs? How much are they charging us? How much have they been charging us? Many, many different factors, right. How are we being treated by that country? And then I will set a tariff. Are we paying for their military? You know, as an example, we have Korea. We pay billions of dollars for the military. Japan, billions for those and others. But that, I'm going to keep us a separate item, the paying of the military. Germany, we have 50,000 soldiers—. . . We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history. Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They’re going to come in and they’re going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things. But what I’m doing with the tariffs is people are coming in, and they’re building at levels you’ve never seen before. We have $7 trillion of new plants, factories and other things, investment coming into the United States. And if you look back at past presidents, nobody was anywhere near that. And this is in three months.
Of course Trump’s comments had to end with a fabulist’s fantasy of how wonderful, and unprecedented, and great he is. His narcissism is bottomless, as bottomless, apparently, as his insecurity. And of course he is wrong on all the facts. In particular, the idea that his beautiful tariffs have already begotten $7 trillion worth of investment in new plants, factories and other things is pure horseflop. And horseflop it will remain.[1]
Read the entire Atlantic interview if you can stand it, for it shows vividly, better than anything to date, how Trump is able only to think of the world as a setting for the writing of a dollar-denominated balance sheet. He does not know where trade deficits actually come from or what they even are, as outlined in TRP on May 2 and of course elsewhere; he thinks only in terms of black and red: If the United States is running a trade surplus with any country we are winning, and if the United States is running a trade deficit with a country then we are losing. That’s all he knows, and of course this would be absurdly hilarious if it were not so serious. This is not just a green eyeshade way to see the world, it is a beclouded green eyeshade was to see it.
Second, note the comment by General Keith Kellogg, President Trump’s military assistant and a man who has spent about as much time with Trump on foreign policy/national security policy issues as anyone lately: “Trump’s first question in meetings with foreign leaders was almost always, ‘What is the trade imbalance between our two nations?’”[2]
And third of course is the evidence provided by President Trump’s current trip to the Arab Gulf—to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—the first foreign trip of his second term. Note that it excludes and so snubs both Israel and Turkey, the former of the “special relationship” and the latter a NATO ally. Note further that the actual business of the trip is personal—extracting gifts and investments for himself, cronies like Steve Witkoff, and others—with the actual diplomatic and politico-military aspects downgraded in reality to mere performative gestures, in effect to props. As former UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace wrote yesterday in The Telegraph, “Donald Trump never, ever, takes responsibility for any failures and never sticks around long enough for his deals to be exposed as the hollow shells they usually turn out to be.”
Spot on. Again: Trump is still doing what he was doing before he was elected President, gulling investors so as to leave them with pennies on the dollar while he manipulates the bankruptcy laws for fun and profit, and daring the courts to try to stop him as he ever runs right up against and beyond the limits of the law which, to paraphrase Lenin’s famous remark about promises, is to him a mere piecrust made to be broken. By the time Trump’s Ukraine-Russia diplomacy turned out to be diplomacy with a condom, useful only for extracting the Ukraine rare-earth minerals deal, he was gone to the Gulf, and by the time his claimed near-deal with Iran is shown to be vacuous or worse, if it even comes to pass, he will have his Qatari (very poorly maintenanced) “luxury” 747—emolument….? What’s an emolument? The MAGA faithful don’t know, they don’t care, and if they could be made to understand it the likely reaction of most would be some assortment of “well, everyone does it, it’s just that Trump is so smart he does it better” and “wow, I wish I could get away with that, even on a small scale: Now let me think….”—and he will also have tens of billions of dollars worth of investments directed toward his private family business interests.
He’s not the least worried about future indictments for all this global-scale grifting and corruption because he views the July 1 Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity as covering all of that. So no worries, he tells his associates, loot as you will, and all will be pardoned on earth if not also forgiven in heaven. That AI-enhanced photo of Trump as the Pope, set loose the very day after Pope Benedict died….talk about bad taste….doubtless suggested to many of the, well, less-gifted MAGA host that, yes, Trump may well have pull in heaven, too.
And all the while there is no shame, no regret, no thought to the nation’s interests, and no thought to future consequences. What we are seeing here is the flip-it mentality of the worst kind of corporate raider played out on what is supposed to be a political stage, and we are seeing it in an inside-out form and at a scale that mere months ago was unimaginable. Alas, it is still unimaginable to many, so alien it is to everything we have become accustomed to expect from a President of the United States. It reminds me of John Kenneth Galbraith’s oft-reported, if not exactly accurate, remark about the sudden shock of the October 1929 stock market crash: “The end had come, but it was not yet in sight.”
It is only once we fully take on the undeniable truth about who Trump is and how his mind works that we can understand his attitude toward the law (merely transactional), contracts and personal promises (merely transactional), history (totally irrelevant), and the future (totally irrelevant). And this is turn explains the natural disingenuousness of the entire Administration—yes, all of it, extending even to the Republicans in Congress. Trump’s twisted personality, that of an ersatz TV-movies mafia-don, dominates the entire political scene to the point that subordinates do not dare offer any opinion on anything that deviates from the President’s. What does Speaker of the House Mike Johnson think of the Qatar luxury 747 business? “Not my lane,” he answers, and moves on. What does DHS Secretary Kristi Noem do when asked directly about the no-due-process aspects of ICE deportations? She evades any actual answer, repeatedly. She is afraid, rightly so, to justify the behavior, but she doesn’t dare criticize it. That leaves her with pretty much nothing to say, and nothing is what she pretty much says, oh so carefully. Has she already fallen so in love with Washington, DC that she doesn’t want ever to return to South Dakota?
So the Administration’s disingenuousness is not peripheral to its nature; it is central to it. Allow just three examples to be briefly cited.
The Administration’s complete flip on where education policy should be formulated and managed is evidence docket number one. Conservatives, and not only conservatives in American history, have always insisted on local control of education and on minimizing any Federal role. That is why President Trump unleashed Linda McMahon, she of the condiment interpretation of Artificial Intelligence—you simply cannot make this stuff up, so stunningly dense are so many of these people—with a hatchet to go destroy the Department of Education. But then they find, somewhere….., the audacity to claim that the State of California, or townships in Massachusetts, cannot teach or even discuss DEI-related ideas, very broadly construed even to include affirmative action—a very different matter, in which merit does matter—because it supposedly violates the 14th Amendment, or some such tomfoolery they will think up and shamelessly babble forth. The law is to be treated as utterly transactional in nature; it is only the lawyers’ hegemonic narrative winning the day that matters. To anyone paying attention over the past half century or so, this is obviously a mash-up of “BAMN postmodernism”—by any means necessary fact- and truth-free—that started its journey on the New Left and has since alighted and decamped on the New Right. All you unreconstructed aging hippies out there: Hey, you cool with that? See what you have done?
Evidence docket number two takes us back to Trump’s Atlantic interview. He doesn’t know, he claimed, if he’s bound by the Constitution. He has lawyers for that, he says, besides which he hears the Supreme Court say one thing when almost everybody else thinks they hear it say another. That is pure disingenuousness, and it doesn’t even require in this case his being a fabulist, since he has lawyers—ensconced in official positions now in the Department of Justice—to be professional fabulists for him, just as he had lots and lots of lawyers at the Trump Organization to do the same thing. Trump’s life-long attitude toward someone else’s authority has been to defy it insofar as he could, just keep pushing and monitoring the responses, like a cat-burglar in a hotel trying all the doors to find the ones inadvertently left unlocked. Should someone indeed stop you, you just crawl away meekly and wait for another day.
Evidence docket three: Of course Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard’s Chief-of-Staff, insisted that a February intelligence assessment concerning the Venezuelan government’s role, or lack thereof, in supporting gangs in the United States, be rewritten to deviate from the truth in order to support the President’s imaginative fantasies on the subject. This tack resembles the sort of archery practice methodology wherein one first shoots the arrows and then paints the bullseyes around the points in which they stuck in the side of the barn. This is not how the IC is supposed to work, but in a reality-TV mindset where fantasy trumps reality this sort of thing is as natural as scriptwriting for an episode of “Percy Jackson.” Vladimir Putin can reinvent the past by, say, reviving the heroism and creativity of Josef Stalin, but Donald Trump, without having himself to lift a finger, can reinvent the present!
Fine; Trump is what he is and he will never change so long as he sucks oxygen, and he got freely and fairly elected anyway….now twice thanks to the endless incompetence and advanced reality-detachment of the Democratic Party leadership. But then for the Administration to claim that its lawless, due-process emaciated campaign to deport illegal aliens rests on the bedrock of its legal duty to enforce the law has got to rank as the most excruciated howler in American legal history. This is disingenuousness not with a condom but with a naked hard-on.
Same thing, just by the way, with police violence. MAGA types excoriate it when they don’t like the application of police violence, and that would ordinarily be to their credit except for the fact that they endorse it enthusiastically when they do like it—take Derek Chauvin, for example. They even applaud the application of violence against police when that suits them, as on January 6, 2021. Like the President himself, their inconsistency is perfectly consistent….if you understand the premise of perfect transactionalism.
In sum, the MAGA world in power has engraved Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous definition of consistency—that it is the hobgoblin of little minds—on their very souls. No, of course, I’m just kidding. Few of them know the remark; besides, Emerson was arguably America’s first hippie, and despite the MAGA world’s mostly unselfconscious aping of hippie cultural innovations they usually don’t like being explicitly associated with them. Look, if you lack a taste for irony you should probably get yourself a different hobby. If history is, as Emile Cioran wrote, “irony in motion,” then the future must be composed of ironies in-the-making, no? How many can you detect incubating in the moment?
Paranoia
Of course it’s obvious that the invention of this and that sundry national emergency was necessary as legal fiction to several of President Trump’s first-hundred-days Executive Orders. But ironically—see?—this was not pure, perfect disingenuousness. To the contrary: The constant aura of apocalyptic danger, portentous stakes, high-energy moral collisions, and the mad spinning of the bravery-cowardice calculus are integral to the MAGA mind. The President may or may not buy in to all of this, but he knows very well that this surrealist staging aura is necessary backdrop for him to successfully cast his shamanist spells on his true believers. Remember: As with his business background not at all being left behind him as President, so with his show-business background. And again: The entire Administration hums the same tune, which is why Trump Administration DHS officials think it’s a boss idea to make propaganda films about deporting illegal aliens, including innocent children—and maybe a few not-illegal ones, too, but like who cares, right?—based on “Hunger Games” plotlines. This is how they think to make paranoia translated into cruelty entertaining enough to “sell” the policy.
That said, there are MAGA true believers in the apocalyptical quality of the American moment who are actually capable of reading and writing. They may be a tiny fraction of the menagerie within the MAGA circus tent, but they are important beyond their small numbers. Some are inside the Administration. Michael Anton, of Flight 93 essay infamy, is Director of Policy Planning in the State Department. Xenophobe-in-chief Stephen Miller works in the White House and has been mooted as President Trump’s next National Security Advisor, despite his lack of foreign and national security policy experience. (Claire Berlinski has described him as “a glue-eating necrophile house-elf,” but to me Miller exemplifies the description that former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating created to describe a particularly smarmy individual, to wit: “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”) But most MAGA intellectuals do not have government jobs as such, even as they may benefit institutionally or individually from the Administration’s lateral largesse. Case in point: Paul Dans, the architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Dans briefly put the case for smashing everything about the Federal government near and far in the April 26 Economist. The essay is brief but breathless nonetheless. He blames the undefined “left” for exaggerated immigrant violent crime, for 100,000 fentanyl and other drug overdoses annually, for spiraling debt, for a supposedly unconstitutional administrative state, and for leftwing universities and law schools having creating a monstrous activist judiciary to threaten true freedom and democracy. As Dans sees it, the Administration is not defying the law, only the massive distortion of law perpetrated on the nation by this leftwing activist judiciary.
As he sees it, too, President Trump’s first hundred days “closed the book on FDR’s 90-year progressive era and ushered in the ‘Golden Age’ of populism: out with New Deal and in with the Real Deal.” He advises Europeans to
. . . remain calm; there is a method here. Mr Trump has embarked upon a great restoration of America. The nation needs first to get back on its feet in order to remain the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy. The system is broken. A builder, Mr Trump knows that the initial phase of any renovation is demolition. Like popcorn ceilings and formica countertops, many of the progressive additions to America’s government are today retrograde and need to be pulled down.
He claims that “Mr Trump entered the Oval Office with America on a collision course, his only option being to move quickly and forcefully” to save “[a] country falling apart and potentially unable to defend itself.”
There is more, but the basic idea is, I take it, understood. More important that any idea here, however, is the body language: apocalyptical, the nation standing on the very precipice of catastrophe, hemorrhaging the very lifeblood of freedom and democracy, so needing to move quickly and boldly to fend off disaster at the hands of monstrous leftists who in the MAGA lexicon—wisely left behind by Dans writing for The Economist—are indistinguishable from Communists, Marxists, and, depending on just how wigged out the folks you are talking to are, Satanist Jews and others who plot to “replace us.”
Dans’s entire case is, yes, just more horseflop. Not that there are no problems and everything is fine with contemporary American governance; but the problems he sketches are funhouse mirror distortions of what conservatives as well as so-called leftist are in fact responsible for over the years—as if only government can harm political and economic best practice. One wouldn’t even know from Dans’s account that the Roberts Court, in the Judiciary saddle now quite some years, is, perhaps, a tad conservative?
No, this is not a remotely coherent critique of American governance. It rather conjures the kind of John Birch Society paranoia that furnished the fodder for one of the best essays ever written on the underlying culture of American politics: Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” from the November 1964 Harper’s. If one takes the time to find this essay and read it “forward” into the present moment, little trilly fissions of energy climb the back of the neck. I would not want to spoil the pleasure for you; do it yourself.
So, too, you need to remember in parallel Slim Pickens’s iconic lines about “our precious bodily fluids” from the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove” to get the full flavor of that particular extrusion of traditional American paranoia, which periodically wells up from the water in the Christological American goldfish bowl. Dans had only a short space from The Economist to make his main points. Had he been given more room I’ve no doubt he would have pointed to the dangerous plot of fluoridated water—but happily he did not need to, for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has taken care of that for him over at HHS.
What can one say? Live long enough in America and plenty of weirdness one thought had been buried in the past somehow manages to recirculate itself into the present in barely disguised form, sometimes in a form hardly disguised at all. I’ve used this Dylan quote from 1966 before, but I just can’t help but use it again:
And here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.
Yes, well, whatever the price was we apparently failed to come up with it. Because here we are once more, stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again—whatever the deuce that ever meant.
Why, Why, WHY?
And last for now, why? Finally, yes, here is this week’s big still mostly unasked question: Given how obviously deranged the Trump phenomenon is, and by that I mean both the Administration and the populist and para-intellectual excuses for it, how can it be that almost nothing Trump or his Administration does seems to be able to move the needle of opinion in any decisive way?
Of course this is not a new plaint. Mitt Romney remarked just after the Iowa Republican primary in January 2024: “I think a lot of people in this country are out of touch with reality and will accept anything Donald Trump tells them. . . . You had a jury that said Donald Trump raped a woman, and that doesn’t seem to be moving the needle. . . . There’re a lot of things about today’s electorate that I have a hard time understanding.”[3] And at least a few people are indeed now into this ur-question with a greater sense of urgency than was Romney in what seems like eons ago.[4] But still, why, why, WHY?
Well this time, yes, we have paid enough to get out of going through all this twice. We did it in The Age of Spectacle manuscript. Why do We the People, in our current dominant political plurality, just swallow all this hallucinogenic malarkey down and seem to beg for more? Just how bored is the quintessential American “last man” anyway? “At least he’s doing something” is the best that most of this crowd can come up with to sit easy with the nearly random destructive chaos raining down on the nation—and the world, too, just by the way?
So then, the answer: A tipping point plurality, if not yet a plain majority, of adult Americans are being seduced by a combination of the New Orality, in tandem with the decline of deep literacy, to return to the preliterate era of mythic consciousness, complete with multiple emanations of magical efficacy. To rational people who read this kind of thing resembles fiction, bad fiction much of the time. But to its creators it is real in the mode of the mythic consciousness; in that mentality mode life does not imitate art, it is art, for no distinction exists between the two. It is a mentality, a state of collective mind, in which conflation and emotion batter the hell out of distinction-making and analysis, in which only the present exists and dots do not connect, in which impatience and addiction to distraction are the norm, and reality and surreality increasingly blur as two-dimensional screen-delivered high-graphic entertainment displaces the Lebenswelt, that sturdy three-dimensional reality that is always there and will eventually bite you in the arse if you ignore it for too long.
It is also a state of mind with a definite epigenetically driven physiological aspect: Literate and non-literate brains are not physically identical, the former having additional, more plastic neural circuitry added on to frontal cortex from the experience of learning to read and then reading regularly. Oral comprehension and speech are wired genetically into us but reading and writing are not; they are artifacts of culture that help to make the species the self-completing social—or “coral,” distributed-system—organism we are.
Oh, and one more thing: If it helps you to remember the essence of the answer, think of it as the switching out of our stories held in common, the canon of our culture, from one in which simile is a conscious literary form to one in which metaphor is sunken in consciousness to the point of disappearance. When metaphor is subconscious it is quite natural for reality and imagination to blur, as in dreams and childhood play. Our stories—yes, even our stories about politics—have therefore become in once sense transfictional, meaning beyond the ontological status of being manifestly fictive. And they have become in another, closely related sense, transfactional, meaning that facts are now of no relevance within their narrative plotlines.
That, dear TRP readers, that in a nutshell is why the Trump 2.0 Administration can do what it does, and nigh on half or even more of the adults in this country think that it is all perfectly normal, and even OK, and even, well, definitely worth watching. Heavens no, don’t switch that dial.
So then let us close by recalling Michael Crichton’s only semi-facetious way of putting it, from Timeline (1999):
What is the dominant mode of experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment. . . .
Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century.
In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time is on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
[1] For a brief, wise, and irrefutable argument as to why tariffs cannot and will not revivify conventional American manufacturing, see Larry Kotlikoff, “Will Tariffs Restore Manufacturing Jobs? The Steel Industry’s Experience and Long-Term Automation Say No,” Economic Matters (Substack), May 14, 2025.
[2] Quoted in the excellent essay by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, “Why Trump Has Turned Against Israel,” The Grand Scheme (Substack), May 15, 2025.
[3] Romney quoted in Charlie Sykes’s Morning Shots, January 18, 2024.
[4] Note most recently Jonathan V. Last, “American Cthulau,” The Bulwark, May 15, 2025.