The State of Our Fuckedness Is Strong

Yesterday I wrote a bit about how the Trump indictments impugn more than just Trump. I argued that his rhetoric of being indicted on their behalf is more than just symbolic, and that his example has given his supporters moral license to act in anti-social and anti-democratic ways. While those of us who oppose him struggle to understand how anybody could support somebody so bereft of any ethical center, I believe it’s precisely that quality which attracts his most ardent supporters. At the base level, his actions indemnify boorishness, bigotry, misogyny, and criminality. The overview, though, is that Trump’s success proves the viability of a disastrous vision of America. Trump’s upcoming trials will also be judgements on the base and those who would use this base to enshrine this vision. So what happens if he is convicted? Conversely, what happens if he is not? Put more simply: how fucked are we? I think we’re pretty fucked and I think the degree of our fuckedness has to do with foundational questions of what it means to be an American.

From the beginning the American experiment has existed in the tension between social cohesion and individualism. The tension is right there in our name, “The United States of America.” We’ve never been a cohesive entity with a shared identity. The closest we have is fealty to a document. The Constitution has done a pretty good job of holding us together to this point (with the exception of one teeny-tiny civil war) but that piece of parchment is starting to feel kind of crumbly of late.

Nothing will be decided here.

Most worryingly, the First Amendment is now being tested in fundamental ways; from book bans to tax dollars being spent on parochial education to Trump’s absurd “free speech” argument in defending his actions on - and leading up to - January 6^th, to the ever-expanding weaponization of information and the spread of disinformation, we’re seeing a troubling trend in the ways in which we utilize and exploit “free expression.” Information we dislike is readily dismissed as biased. Even the notion of objectivity is under assault. Traditional media has struggled to keep up. How does one present the viewpoints of “both sides” when neither side can agree on the facts? For example, how does one offer a cogent point/counter-point to the science of climate change when one side disputes science? If we’ve arrived at a place in our history where a third of the country can blithely dismiss the scientific method itself as biased, how are we supposed to persuade them on subtler matters that require interpretative thought? Matters such as, I don’t know, the law?

When Kellyanne Conway introduced us to the idea of “alternative facts,” she wasn’t being flippant. She was being prescient. Reality itself is now flexible. Nobody understands that better than Trump who has embraced the Big Lie to model an entire alternative fact cinematic universe in which he won a stolen election, his actions before and after were perfect, and he is being punished for no greater crime than telling the truth. Historically, totalitarian regimes could get away with these sorts of falsehoods because they controlled the information flow. Now the information flow is uncontrollable, a firehose which only serves Trump’s purposes.

So what happens now that the Big Lie reality has bumped into Reality reality? What happens when a presidential campaign has to schedule itself around court appearances? My guess: it only makes him stronger. I’m not saying his trials will take him to the Oval Office. I’m saying it doesn’t matter.

We’ve already seen the first hints of what is to come. Trump has, predictably, attacked the prosecutors, the judges, and the evidence. After wedding himself to the white religious right, he is now presenting himself as a modern Christian martyr: “Never forget that our enemies want to stop us because we are the only ones who can stop them,” he says, “They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. They want to silence me because I will not let them silence you.” His legal defense will rely on matters of the law, but his larger defense – the one that ultimately matters – will rely on matters of a higher law. The challenge for those of us living in Reality reality is figuring out how to disabuse his supporters that Trump is serving anybody other than himself. This argument, I think, has already been lost.

From the moment he declared “I alone can fix it,” Trump elevated himself to National Savior. For those that love him, his prosecutions only confirm his persecutions. It is not his misdeeds they are coming for but rather the fulfillment of his prophecies. It is his vision under attack, not his criminality. Trump has turned himself into the vessel of a higher calling, one that aims to turn back the clock on that foundational American promise: a nation of the people, for the people, and by the people.

His promise is antediluvian in nature, before the flood of non-white immigration, civil rights, social programs, and progressive taxation. It’s an Ayn Randian fantasia that rejects any notion of the common good. It’s power and wealth for those at the top, bread and circuses for those below. It’s insulating the powerful while scapegoating the powerless. It’s public corruption as public policy. It’s what we already see in Trump’s favored nation of Russia.

You can call it by any number of names. Trumpism, fascism, illiberal democracy, Christian Nationalism. It all amounts to the same thing. And enough of the nation wants it that we’re unlikely to rid ourselves of the vision even if Trump goes to jail. If anything, the martyrdom of Trump will most likely accelerate the problem. Others are already lining themselves up to propagate the vision when Trump’s time at the top inevitably ends.

Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have enacted Trumpian policies on a state level. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is attempting to expand Trump/Lindbergh’s “America First” message. Few of the remaining Republican presidential candidates have distanced themselves from Trump or his message. Republican congressional leaders have not done so. Republican donors may not love Trump himself, but that appears to be more of a distaste for the messenger as opposed to the message. Fascism is the flavor and Trump’s trials are as much about quenching that fire as they are about election interference.

But can the fire be put out?

In a recent interview with a major Republican donor, former Trump attorney and current Trump co-indictee John Eastman explained it in apocalyptic terms. “We are talking about whether we are going to, as a nation, completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, which is what the modern left wing, which is in control of the Democrat Party, believes — that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated,” he said. “This is an existential threat to the very survivability not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation properly understood provides to the world. That’s the stakes.”

Assuming Trump is not elected to a second term in office, explain to me how this mentality goes away at the conclusion of the Trump trials. It doesn’t. Not so long as the white population continues to decline as a percentage of the total American population. Not so long as technological upheaval/globalization continue to pinch the middle class. Not so long as the Big Lie Cinematic Universe continues to find new minority groups to scapegoat. In other words, it’s not going away. So yeah, the state of our fuckedness is strong. And I don’t think there’s a damned thing anybody can do about it.