Trump 2: Griftnado

A day after the election a coworker stood outside my office and exclaimed "They're putting up riot fences in Chicago!" with a palms-up shrug and "just say'in" smirk.

He didn't return later to follow up: "A few hundred people protested. No riots. No attempts to overturn the election, even though a certain candidate was adamant that the result couldn't be trusted..."

I do not know if his media diet puts blinders on reality for him, or if he just wasn't interested in parsing that the precautions taken weren't causally linked to a mandatory riot.

So far I haven't responded to any office banter with my own thoughts on what it means for a self-described aspiring dictator to be given an opportunity to execute on his stream-of-conscious whims. I hope that it stays that way, since I like working with this group in spite of the proudly ignorant hot-takes in the office.

Three weeks since the election and things are already so bad that I can only imagine this guy is solely focused on probing the depths of his party's obsequious deference. The current culmination of which was last week's nomination of a man who's alleged to prey on highschool students to be the nation's Attorney General.

Since the election there's been plenty of ink spilled to process the whys and hows. I've come across a mix of takes and viewpoints, and I want to catalog it here to compare against in the coming years.

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/17/how-to-survive-the-broligarchy-20-lessons-for-the-post-truth-world-donald-trump

  • 15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”

• https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-mass-deportation-plan-cant-happen-if-us-military-members-resist-it/

  • The only reasonable response to Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations at the hands of active-duty soldiers is for them to say “no.” Like the 206,000 people who resisted the Vietnam War, soldiers now must find the courage and strength to lay their weapons down and refuse to be an occupying force in their own country.

• https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2024/11/08/a-slow-crooked-path-forward-toward-who-the-hell-knows/

  • I don’t really know. And it’s important to recognize, you don’t know either. We don’t know what’s to come or how bad it’ll get it. It may be worse than we expect or a little better, and it’ll almost certainly be stupider than we think, because fascism is surprisingly oafish, which makes it feel all the worse that it succeeds when it does, because of how fucking ridiculous it is.

• https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/how_it_went
  • An election day story.
• https://electrek.co/2024/11/12/call-it-like-it-is-tslas-rise-is-not-due-to-performance-but-hope-for-corruption/

  • In the past week, TSLA stock has increased by about one-third of its previous value. But this increase has had nothing to do with company performance, or even due to external factors like consumer tastes or beneficial changes in EV policy. Rather, the week’s speculation has come out of a simple desire to see Tesla become the benefit of government corruption.

• https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/13/last-gasp/

  • Why would voters turn out to support a "Department of Government Efficiency," run by a bully whose career has been defined by abusing the people he is in charge of? Maybe they're turkeys voting for Christmas, but they also have personal, traumatic experience with government departments that protected the abusive corporations that preyed on them.

• https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/11/sure-i-voted-for-someone-whose-policies-might-kill-you-but-nows-the-time-to-put-aside-our-differences/

  • And if your worst-case scenario comes to pass -- that this was the last democratic election we'll have in this country -- think of how stress-free you'll be then.

• https://terikanefield.com/why-i-am-setting-out-on-a-journey-and-inviting-you-along/

  • What mattered was the way he spoke, not what he said. When news becomes entertainment, what matters is the quality of the performance. The measure of a show’s success isn’t the level of factual accuracy. The measure of success is whether people are kept glued to their screens, and fear hooks people.

• https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/oklahomas-ryan-walters-quietly-cancels

  • Just to point out how ridiculous this all is: Ryan Walters, who could be tapped to run the Department of Education, wants to eliminate the Department of Education in order to ensure that “communities—not Washington bureaucrats—[get] to decide what is best for their children”… even though he also wants to become a Washington bureaucrat so that he can personally force classrooms across the country to use the Bible when teaching fake history because he believes that’s best for children.

• https://www.wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-future/

  • Musk is the most brutal example. Despite turning Twitter into a website pumped full of racism and hatred that helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was still able to get mostly-positive coverage from the majority of the mainstream media despite the fact that he has spent the best part of a decade lying about what Tesla will do next.

• https://kottke.org/24/11/0045624-erin-mckean-goes-down-a

  • Erin McKean goes down a rabbit hole of WWII resistance diaries, “dipping into the thoughts of people who were also made heartsick and distressed by fascist politics”.

• https://kottke.org/24/11/0045615-what-will-you-do-what

  • What Will You Do? “What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs? Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?”

• https://www.citationneeded.news/wind-the-clock

  • What you don’t do is give up. The outcome of this election has exposed to many the realities we didn’t want to see, of just how many people around us openly embrace hatred and bigotry and authoritarianism. Standing up to that can be scary and even dangerous, but it is also right.

• https://kottke.org/24/11/0045652-this-is-a-canny-observati

  • This is an astute observation about the conservative sense of permanent resentment: “They’re seeking political power as a substitute for cultural power, and it’s never going to give them what they actually want.”

• https://kottke.org/24/11/trumps-historically-small-victory

  • While Mr. Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, he garnered just 50.1 percent nationally, according to the latest tabulation by The Times, just 1.8 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris. When the slow-counting blue giant of California finally finishes tallying its votes, that margin is likely to shrink a bit more. The Cook Report already calculates that his percentage has fallen below 50 percent, meaning he did not win a majority.

• https://kottke.org/24/11/0045661-roxane-gay-to-suggest-we

  • Roxane Gay: “To suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people, for instance, […] is unacceptable. It is shameful and cowardly.”

• https://www.alreporter.com/2024/11/22/opinion-america-has-trouble-coming/

  • Trust me on this, I’m from Alabama. A state that has been run almost exclusively by inept brothers-in-law who needed a job for most of our existence. We’re at the bottom in health care, life expectancy, education, infant mortality, maternal mortality and infrastructure. We’re near the top in gun violence per capita, heart disease and obesity. 

    We are the warning light for what America could become under such corrupt, ignorant leadership: A land with tons of potential, fantastic natural resources and good, hard-working people but one that is constantly undone by a government operated by self-serving, self-enriching, pandering, uncaring, ignorant and downright cruel leadership.

  • This post's title stolen from Josh Moon.