The Normalizing Begins
And its not just Joe and Mika that are bending the knee
And so it begins. The nights are really getting cooler as we grow closer to Inauguration Day. We’ve seamlessly transitioned from crisp mid-Autumn, the Season of the Witch, into Normalization, an infinitely more terrifying time of year. While the #Resistance moves into the role of #Protectors of the guardrails of Democracy, Establishmentarians — even soulless opportunists like Shane Smith — are jumping on the Trump train, which seeks to atomize every institution standing. Just a cursory glance at his appointments — Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard as Director, National Intelligence, Basic Gas Executive at Energy — speaks to his intent, which is naught else but political implosion. And the irony of Establishmentarians locking arms with their potential destroyers for the sake of temporary access to their Power will be something for the Historians of the future to work out, if indeed there is even a future of America worthy of contemplation.
We get it. The working class is so sick of their inequality, of the decline of their buying power that they are on board entirely with Trump’s retribution. Further, vis-a-vis the DC residents, a new administration is coming to town; the pendulum swings. Trump’s “invisible empire” has brought about the Trump World Order. And if you want a ticket to State dinners and/or access to the incoming admin, you have to get in line and bend the knee, gingerly. A thousand bows and courtesies. In other words, Normalize. That incessant whisper, curling in the cool wind, calling to mind the courtesy granted to Presidents past …
Susie Wiles is already being whitewashed as the first woman incoming Chief of Staff and the most powerful woman in Washington. Who among us could possibly, in good conscience, oppose the first female Chief of Staff to a United States President? “Susie Wiles is a normie appointment,” John Heilemann cooed in his podcast this week. Reuters wants to know — Who is Trump’s “ice maiden”? Recalling, briefly, Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick and other tough political women that weren’t really so bad, after all. USA Today described her as “quiet competence.” You get the idea. The emphasis among the DC Establishment is always on power and on access and on both those fronts Susie Wiles will be the nexus of all political realities. So: Normalize. Bend the knee.
That is, in fine, the true measure of ultimate reality in Washington — proximity to power. The farther away from the heat source of all heat sources in DC — the President — the cooler the atmosphere becomes. Such is the Nature of Power. And who is closer to POTUS than the Chief-of-Staff? “Wiles is beloved by the Trump campaign staff, many of whom call her a mentor,” CBS News reported recently. And in the process, what is most notably being whitewashed is the role of Susie Wiles in the rise of the racialized far-right in recent American political history. Wiles was, of course, Trump’s de facto campaign manager but, before that, she managed Ron DeSantis’ struggling 2018 campaign for governor and won it quite frankly by subtly injecting race into the proceedings …
In 2018, DeSantis defeated Andrew Gillum, the black mayor of Tallahassee and former congressman, by such a narrow margin that it required a recount. “I’m not saying (DeSantis) is racist,” Gillum said during a debate. “I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist.” Zach Cheney-Rice of New York writes:
Gillum’s evidence included that DeSantis had declined to return a campaign donation from a man who called Barack Obama a “Muslim nigger” on Twitter; attended conferences alongside far-right bigots, including Milo Yiannopoulos, David Horowitz, and Sebastian Gorka; and dog whistled his way into national headlines by imploring Floridians not to “monkey this up” by electing his black opponent.
A majority of voters backed the Republican anyway, but even Senator Bernie Sanders — usually hesitant to accuse anyone of racism — characterized the election as one where “racism reared its ugly head,” adding that DeSantis was “racist and [was] doing everything [he] could to try to play whites against blacks.”
Once comfortably inaugurated, DeSantis immediately called on the Clemency Board to secure a full pardon for the Groveland Four, an historical outrage in which a group of three black men and one black teenager who were accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl named Norma Padgett in 1949.
That was then; this is now. History is composed by the winners, to be sure, so the very pertinent conversation regarding racism in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial campaign and the role of Susie Wiles in it has conveniently been overlooked in the glowing profiles now in abundance on the road to — how else does one put it? — Normalization. It has all just casually and conveniently faded to … white? Because, as the conventional wisdom goes, just under 50 percent of voters in the 2024 election voted to give this guy another chance, and so we have to listen to him, was Joe Scarborough’s actual plea.
Speaking of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski … One could smell their defection from the #Resistance camp into #Normalization almost immediately. After Trump’s election win, instead of reacting with shock at the future fortunes of the American Experiment, there was only a sense of awe, an almost amoral admiration at the accomplishment. One did not get the sense that either Joe or Mika were going though what we were going through. Being in line for a juicy tax cut, truth be told, has been known to have clarifying effects upon the political philosophy of millionaires. We will not here entertain the possibility that this is the case with our Mika and Joe. Neither had actually spoken to Trump in seven years, understandably, after the then-President of the United States publicly went after Mika, insulting her cosmetic surgery. Joe at one point in time went so far as to call Trump Hitler and compare his followers brown shirts. But now: Normalization.
But blame not poor Morning Joe and Mika for their astonishing hypocrisies as the poster children for Normalization. According to Brian Stelter, part of their motivation was the fear of retribution. In other words, their sheer reptilian survival instincts just kicked into super overdrive, subsuming their human warmth altogether. It was — in the words of Valmont — beyond their control ...
I don’t really believe that for a second, but it is a clever alibi. Former Ambassador Nikki Haley, who gambled everything and won nothing, comes closer to the mark. Ratings. Ancillary to that — Power, access. They will not be the only ones. More Washingtonians will be forthcoming in the bending of the knee, like Trump’s former Republican critics who, from Cristie to Cornyn, have all gotten in touch with their inner subservience. Administrations come and go, Washingtonians in the Establishment will exhibit their usual cunning, adjusting to the new realities accordingly. Especially if they are white millionaires without trans children. Life will go on for them — Charmed, I’m sure — but for all else, It won’t last. But for the present, it is beyond their control.
xx
And so here we are on the advent of the Normalizing. This normalizing among the Establishment is taking place even as Trump is trolling the #Protectors from the advantaged position of President-elect. Donald Trump Junior — who Trump Senior did not want named after him for fear of loserdom — has made something of a career for himself as a social media Master Troller. He uses the privileges granted to him by birth to kill beautiful, rare animals around the world with the illegitimate impunity of an heir. And Trump’s pre-inaugural, post-electoral influence has Don Junior’s fingerprints all over it, including the Big Mac photo-op with the incoming Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK, Jr — another talentless, highly ambitious heir and scion.
Can you imagine what Kennedy Senior, an Aeschylus-quoting Civil Rights martyr, would have thought of his child working for someone sued by the Justice department for Housing discrimination against African-Americans? An Hyperion to a satyr. “Trump casts high-profile appointees whose power will ultimately be minimal but who create more drama when their heads roll,” writes Tina Brown, no stranger to the DC Establishment. “It’s all a giant flex, a chain of in-your-face fuck-yous, as if he were imagining the most outrageous names he could come up with and shoving them in front of us like a series of flipped birds.” Or, birds drowned in Armagnac.
The Democrats, by contrast, can learn not merely a little from UK Labor. I was watching @Kier_Starmer on Question Time with the Prime Minister this weekend on C-Span while eating grief Chinese food and was amazed at how many times he mentioned the words "working class." How strange. Starmer crowbarred it into every answer he gave, projecting the nearly alien impression that despite the prestige of the position he was acutely aware that in a democracy his bosses are the majority, which are, mirabile dictu!, the working classes. This is a small but important lesson for the Democrats out of the arena, in the wilderness, searching for an Archimedean point from which to fight. The final autopsy is not yet in, but there are already very many points of criticism — from the media atmospherics, she failed to sufficiently distance herself from Biden, etc, &c, and such …
Ultimately none of those things matter if we don’t acknowledge the public perception that the Democrat party as at one with the monied interests. The Democrats have somehow become the party of the rich and, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we have two year’s to make a course correction before midterms.
At least I think we’re still going to have midterms ….
“Bobby — a man with no scientific expertise who sailed through Harvard on a heroin high — blames everything from autism to food allergies to cancer on childhood vaccines. He came out of the conspiracy closet in 2005 with articles published in Salon and Rolling Stone — both of which were retracted. In 2015 he joined anti-vaxxer Eric Gladen’s World Mercury Project, immediately raising the nonprofit’s financial profile by half a million dollars. The Project renamed itself the less tin-foil cappy-sounding Children’s Health Defense. During the pandemic, the Children’s Health Defense reaped millions and grew into a ‘juggernaut’ and the grift keeps on giving. Kennedy’s assault on expertise and science is extra-odious to me because he’s lying about something I actually know a little about. In the last months of 2020, the publisher of a small press called to ask if I could quickly write a short book about the race to the COVID-19 vaccine. I said yes if I could also write about the Trump administration’s abysmal handling of the pandemic, and the crazy conspiracy theories then already erupting around the mRNA platform. I hired a young postdoc at Stanford to crash-course me in genetic science and fact check me on DNA, and read everything I could get my hands on about the history of vaccines. The result was my short book, Virus: Vaccinations, The CDC and The Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic. One question I grappled with was why so many of us rejected the vaccine. I concluded that we live in the most medically protected time in human history — and we have forgotten what came before.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Donald Trump said Monday that he would use emergency powers and the United States military to carry out his mass deportation plan—a centerpiece of the immigration crackdown he promised in his 2024 campaign. Though he provided no additional details, it would be an extreme move, and draw immediate legal challenges from immigration groups. Trump declared a national emergency in his first term, during a stand-off with Congress over funding for his border wall. Though that decision was hit with an injunction, the Supreme Court—then comprised of a five-member conservative majority—sided with the Trump administration. Joe Biden ended the national emergency declaration on his first day in office, later saying it had been ‘unwarranted.’ A national emergency, for the purpose of a mass deportation initiative, would seem similarly unjustified—especially given the dramatic decrease in border crossings this year. But this time around, Trump may be on even friendlier legal terrain. The Supreme Court now has six conservatives, three of whom he appointed; he will likely install scores of Trump-friendly judges throughout the judicial circuit; and his allies are preemptively working to draw up anti-immigration measures that could withstand lawsuits.” (Eric Lutz/VF)
“But let’s move beyond the things that editors and headline-writers might directly influence. Let’s move on to the much larger threat—which is apparently beyond control by anyone who might want to change it in a positive way. That threat is the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes… or any other terms to describe the gulf between “reality” as human beings have evolved to understand it, and the artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens. —This is not a new challenge in human experience, as Plato’s ‘shadows in a cave’ is just one reminder. —It’s not a new problem in American democracy. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published when Warren Harding was in the White House, was about people’s inevitable reliance on “pictures in our head,” often stereotypes or half-truths, to judge events they had not witnessed themselves. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the convergence of information and entertainment (with entertainment coming out on top), was published nearly 40 years ago but grows ever more prophetic-seeming.—It’s not even a new insight into this election. In the past week, while traveling, I’ve seen excellent essays by Nathan Heller, Julie Hotard, Brian Beutler (and Beutler again), Michael Tomasky, and a growing number of others on the ‘news’ problem that extends far beyond the official ‘news media.’” (James Fallows)