The Trump Distraction Machine
Look at the Harlequins! #Corruption #Incompetence #Distraction
Let’s talk about the distractions, shall we? I wrote recently about the two issues that Democrats should be focusing on intently in fighting against this Administration’s attempts to subvert our democracy — Corruption and Incompetence. These are clear, simple, anti-values which characterize the 47th President and his far-right, Orbanist governing philosophy. Actually, “governing philosophy” is a bit too generous a description of what he’s trying to do, which is closer in behavioral similarities to primate governance — with its tendencies towards xenophobia, group identification and territorial control — than anything ever constructed by, say, the intellects of Spinoza or Locke.
Also, if only it were that easy, deterring the Trump project. If only by pointing out the various incidents of extreme corruption and utter competence — particularly in the cases of Secretary Hegseth and Attorney General Bondi — real change would hastily precipitate. Charmed, I’m sure.
Enter: The Trump Distraction Machine. Trump has posted 2,269 times on Truth Social since his second Administration took power, according to a Washington Post tally. That number is three times more than the number of social media messages he spent in the same period in 2017. That’s three times more the flatulent intellectual pollution — or as Steve Bannon would put it, “flooding the zone” — as Trump, 1.0. And the zone, to be sure, is being flooded with merde, to distract disengaged voters from the central project of the Trump Administration, which is to deconstruct the so-called Deep State and erect, in its place, a Trumpocracy for all the ages.
Are these “Truths” we see at present self-evident? Of these 2,269 conjured “Truths,” all are pretty batshit, some more so than others in fuck’ry. “Which I continue to believe is an invaluable window into his psyche — and the sort of stuff he is consuming,” opines Chris Cilizza, unironically, always game for titillation over actionable intelligence. “One example: Over the weekend Trump re-posted something on Truth Social that claimed Joe Biden had been executed in 2020 and replaced by a robot. Roll your eyes if you will (and I did!) but the fact that the president of the United States is not only seeing conspiracy crap like that but making the conscious decision to SHARE it with millions of people is revealing.”
— Or distracting, Chris. (Averted Gaze) Or … distracting …
The robot clone conspiracy is clearly calculated to rasp the journos, as are the relentless attacks on Harvard University, alma mater of so many bloodless media elites. But no matter how romantic the memories of Harvard Yard, Trump’s privations does not warrant the amount of coverage and apologetics the story is getting on old media. So, Trump — a product of the New York tabloid culture of the 80s as well as Wharton — has developed ever more sophisticated strategies to give the media elite establishment a bout of “the vapors.” The Harvard and robot-clone distractions serve a dual purpose, on the real — One, to confound the equilibrium of pointy-headed libbys and, Two, to entertain a base so enormously soured by resentment that they no longer realize that the ticket price to this damn clown show is their own democratic freedoms. Media elite triggering and open cruelty to migrants are the new bread-and-circuses. The cost of admission, unfortunately, is Medicaid.
And in the process, the Trump Distraction Machine (tm) — always on, always disinforming — has seized the crowd’s gaze from the malfeasant deconstruction of the so-called Deep State. This, in turn, involves the deconstruction of the rule of law while replacing of it with a personalistic, Trump-branded rule (tm). And what a baleful thing that would be, ladies and gentlemen of the jury! An Orbanist-style government right here in these United States of Amnesia, as Gore Vidal used to call us. In this, Trump is part of a larger historical project, one involving not just himself, but Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel as well as Narendra Modi’s India. Because all successful autocrats are more or less similar, in words paraphrased from a great Russian writer in the beginning of a novel that no one remembers anymore because it is not on Netflix or TikTok.
We are entering into uncharted political waters here, in America, dear reader. We are entering into an ancient, pre-modern form of government that sociologist Max Weber called patrimonialism. Patrimonial state administrative rule favors transactional favors based on patron-client relations, personal allegiances and kin ties. Sound familiar? This comes at the cost of the government workers who, say, staff the National Weather Service as hurricane season arrives, watch over mine safety concerns, or even USAID workers combatting HIV and tuberculosis abroad. All of this is decidedly unsexy stuff. But hugely important to the lives saved and our quality of life. Stephen E. Hanson and his coauthor Jeffrey Kopstein talk about all of this bureaucratic unsexiness in “The Assault on the State.” Hanson paraphrased one of the book’s arguments at the Reves Center, recently:
Whether we realize it or not, we all depend on bureaucracies staffed by qualified experts to live what we now consider to be “normal” lives. Prior to the invention of the modern state, rulers facing famines, wars, and natural disasters frequently consulted oracles and soothsayers and relied on the advice of unqualified cronies, leading to terrible, unnecessary human suffering. If we destroy the modern state bureaucracy in the United States and the rest of the world and replace it with personalistic rule, we can expect similar results.
What is to be done? Because the task of defending bureaucrats to unengaged voters is not an enviable one. Neither, dear reader, is it enviable to defend Harvard (which will ultimately be OK) to multiethnic working class men, who already view Democrats as essentially against voters without a college degree. “Trump Trap” — set and sprung! See how the distraction works?
Again, What is to be done? America is in a perfect storm of misinformation, which serves in favor of Trump’s Distraction Machine. According to a recent Gallup poll, trust in American mass media is at an historical low of 31%. Add to that the fact that the National Election Study, which has been asking Americans about their trust in government since 1958, is also recording historic lows in trust in government. Pew research (see above) confirms this. Add a dash of foreign adversaries with malign intent and the rise of social media (cue: sinister metal), which has proved to be naught else but the perfect accelerant of misinformation and conspiracy theories, something, historically, America has never lacked for. “Conspiracy theories and disinformation from foreign adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran, no matter how fantastical, now ‘go viral’ quickly once they hit the social media apps on people’s smartphones,” adds Professor Hanson. “One of the most difficult tasks we face as a nation in the years ahead is finding a way to rebuild trust in reputable media, and to encourage a healthy skepticism of increasingly unregulated social media, which in the past tended to relegate conspiratorial viewpoints to the margins of politics.” In other words, you could be a political observer all your life... and never see something like this. It would be a disaster of epic proportions. It would be... the perfect storm …
Jonathan Rauch, recently on The Bullwark, went into an involved explanation as to why Incompetence and Corruption are the two strongest arguments to hold up against that hideous strength of Trump’s “patrimony.” It went like this:
Getting to the two inherent flaws. One of them is the incompetence. We are seeing this on full display now and I guess we all saw it during COVID too. It's just for a variety of reasons that didn't land with certain segments of the population. But we're seeing it again, just kind of the vast incompetence. I had a friend, it was like a business guy, finance guy who was sort of Trump light, like, just a typical, I just like the tax cuts, don't pay that much attention kind of person text me last night, just like, this is way more of a shit show than I thought. And I was like, You don't say, doctor. But yeah, exactly. Anyway, unfortunately, we have to all live through it for people to learn from this. But incompetence was one element of it and corruption was the other. And talking about how those shortcomings might help us get out of the morass here. Well, let's talk about them serially because they're both important and they're different. Patrimonialism was the standard form of government until the modern state, basically, more or less, until the United States, and was actually very until the late 19th century when we professionalized the government, and until Otto von Bismarck and the modern state. The interesting question is why did it ever go away? Why was it replaced? The major reason for that is that running a big modern state with a modern economy and a modern military, a vast mighty war machine, this takes a lot of expertise and it takes a whole lot of social organization. And that means it's got to be bureaucratic and rules-based. There is just no way that some guy with his whims and his family and his pals and his personal loyalty can do those things effectively. And what patrimonialists do when they snip the tendons of the administrative state and replace them with loyalties diminish the capacity of the state to do what the state needs to do. And it turned out that patrimonialist systems were just not able to meet the demands of modern statehood. And, you know, you see that in a place like Russia when you look at the, to use your scientific term, shit show, when they tried to topple a weak neighbor and what they wound up with wasn't a victory, it was a traffic jam.
Finally, the world is now on the cusp of one million Russian battlefield deaths. All because “Papa Putin,” who runs Russia like his own personal fiefdom (sound familiar?), thinks nothing of throwing his countrymen into the meatgrinder in order to pursue his personal ambitions of becoming the next Peter the Great. The incompetence of Russia’s handling of the Ukraine War illustrates everything wrong with patrimonialism, in real time. And there should be no distracting anyone from the fact that President Trump’s inability to differentiate and distinguish himself from his fellow traveler in patrimonialism, this warmongering Russian butcher, who was elected in a “landslide,” with 88% of the vote, is on full display for all the world to see.
“It was a stunning, audacious attack whose widespread effects are only just becoming clear. Ukraine managed to smuggle 117 aerial drones on the backs of trucks that deposited them at the perimeter of four Russian air bases — one of them deep inside Siberia some 2,500 miles from Ukraine's borders, according to Ukrainian officials. While there are differing accounts on the extent of the ensuing damage of Sunday’s ‘Spiderweb’ operation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 40 Russian aircraft — 34% of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers — were hit. Ukraine's security service, the SBU, put the estimated cost to the Kremlin at $7 billion.” (Alexander Smith/NBC News)
“Last March, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crowded into a sweat lodge near Austin, Texas, with about 40 other people including a regenerative farming advocate and a nutritional supplement entrepreneur. ‘We were front to back, side to side, you couldn’t move,’ Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota legal activist, later recalled on a podcast. ‘I was like, man, I want to get out. I got to take a break. And then I was thinking, I’m the only Lakota in here…. My whole nation’s riding on me over here.’ He stayed in. The sweat lodge was the closing event of the American Wellness Summit, a one-day fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Those in attendance had come in search of spiritual healing and cleansing renewal, yes, but also access to worldly power. And indeed, one of the people perspiring inside that jam-packed lodge was struck by a vision that would prove to have seismic repercussions for the health of every American. ‘It sounds very woo woo,’ Calley Means, 39, told Joe Rogan six months later. ‘I just had this strong vision of [Kennedy] standing with Trump.’ A former wedding-dress entrepreneur, Means had become a vocal proponent of ending chronic disease in America. Inspired by his epiphany inside the lodge, and convinced that it represented the best path to implementing Kennedy’s radical health care agenda, Means enlisted Tucker Carlson to help arrange a meeting between the candidates. On the night of July 13, after the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Means and Carlson made the fateful introduction. ‘There’s rare moments in history when the deck can change,’ Means told Rogan, adding that he felt ‘this could be a realignment of American politics.’” (Katherine Eban/VF)