I Don't Care About You
As you may have seen, Trump held a rally in Las Vegas a couple days ago. When he took the stage, his latest stemwinder was yet another litany of self-pity, anger at the contractors, and a bizarre aside in which he contemplated whether he’d rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark. (He would prefer electrocution.) There was also a telling moment in which, almost as an aside, he said, “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote.”
It's an odd thing with Trump. Most of the time, he’s lying out of his diapered ass, but every now and again, we get a peek behind the puffery to catch a glimpse of the real man.
“I don’t care about you,” he said, and nobody in the crowd batted an eye.
The point has been made time and again that any other politician running for office who made a similar comment would be drummed from public life. If Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden had said they don’t care about their fellow Americans, it would – rightly - spell their professional doom. When Trump says it, nothing.
Why?
From the beginning of his political career, we’ve been told to “take Trump seriously, not literally.” So how should the rallygoers who suffered through hours of hundred-degree heat to hear their candidate interpret his statement? Because as best as I can tell, whether we take him seriously or literally, the sentiment remains the same. He does not care about you.
He has never cared about you.
He didn’t care about you when he opened a fake university or when he stole from his own fake charity, or when he committed fraud. He didn’t care about you when he used your campaign donations to pay his lawyers or when he sold you worthless Trump NFTs. Even the presidency was not enough to satiate Donald Trump’s underfed ego; he used his time in office to enrich himself and his friends while begging for your adulation. And you gave it to him because you thought he cared about you.
He just told you otherwise.
Do you believe him? Or was it another one of his “jokes”? (I put the word in quotes because he’s never made a recognizable joke in his life, which is the subject for another essay.)
From the beginning, Trump has deployed nebulous, imprecise language. That rhetorical incompetence, whether by design or by luck, neatly masquerades his profound intellectual incompetence. Politicians often give themselves wiggle room in their speeches, a little bit of oratorical jiujitsu to create plausible deniability when shit goes south. A perfect system for a his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who once described his boss’s manner of speech: “He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders. He speaks in a code.”
This “code” has always given cover for his supporters and defenders. His bombast, boasting, meandering anecdotes, and nonsensical asides are so outlandish that they almost take on the surreality of a Buddhist koan. What is the sound of one covfefe clapping? Do we take the question seriously or literally?
Here, then, on a hot day under a southwestern sun, Trump utters an unambiguous sentence: “I don’t care about you.” How should we interpret this simple, declarative sentence? The reason it provokes so little shock is because we’ve become inured. Nobody expects him to speak the truth because, in MAGA land, Trump digital tokens may not be fungible, but the truth certainly is. What they want, instead, is emotion. The “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd is, in fact, entirely about the feelz.
As such, people can choose to believe whatever they choose to believe, no different than going to a cheap Vegas buffet. Does the prime rib look a little off today? Have the chicken instead. If somebody’s puking in the corner, well, they probably deserved it.
MAGA is both more and less than the sum of its parts. What started as one man’s quixotic negotiation for a better television salary has become a legitimate populist movement struggling to backfill intellectual heft underneath the doddering edifice holding it up.
The odious “Project 2025” is an attempt to graft muscle and bone to the movement’s gelatinous flab. Conservative thinktanks have become little more than Trumpian necromancies, interpreting their champion’s vaporous messages for popular consumption. How else to explain the cottage industry of talking heads who have spent the last several years popping up on every cable news show to explain “what Trump really meant”?
In this way, Trump’s MAGA has taken on the call-and-response cadence of a church revival with the congregation and pulpit making up the message as they go along. Didn’t like today’s sermon? Don’t’ worry – tomorrow’s will contradict today’s. A man who ran on appointing conservative Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe has now backpedaled from his hardline pro-life stance (which was a backpedal from his even earlier pro-choice stance), this week sending a brief message of support to the Danbury Institute, a fervent anti-abortion organization which calls the procedure “child sacrifice.” The remarks were under ninety seconds and made no mention of abortion, leaving attendees wondering if he still stood with them as fervently on the issue now that polling has indicated it’s a loser for Republicans.
If the medium is the message, then what are we to make of the medium? In a job where nebulous language can get people killed, the medium of the presidency is too important to be subject to the whims of a man who believes he may one day have to choose between electrocution or shark attack. We saw the consequences of this play out during four chaotic years of his first presidency, culminating in the disaster of the covid crisis. The medium of Trump the man is simpler to understand: he cares only about himself. He said it to you himself just the other day. Do you choose to believe him? Covfefe.
And the fact that the people in attendance lapped it up just tells you everything you need to know about them. It’s a cult. But I will never, ever understand why anyone would fall enamoured with that disgusting, obviously moronic waste of carbon.
Exactly. He really likes himself and he really wants other people to like him. He needs to feel very important, but even having the most important job in the world was not enough to fill that need. He craves power and adoration and loyalty and it does not seem to matter who falls to the wayside in that quest. The problem with running this country as a business is that real people live and die based on the words the President says. The stakes are quite a bit higher than the contents of office snack machine, or the PTO policy.
But, I'm preaching to the choir. His followers vote against their own best interests and dismiss actions and statements that would immediately vilify any other candidate because to them, this is about something much bigger than one man. He represents a Biblical influence on a sinful world and a chance to turn this nation away from the wicked wokeness and into a Christian Nationalistic society. He is a chess piece that is too important to lose because the game is in its final moves.
So they know, deep down, that he does not care about them. We all know he does not care about anyone but himself. To the left, that is a bad thing. To the neo-right, it is a cross to bear in order to get the outcome they believe is Biblically foretold.