I have had many frustrating conversations with people who view Trump as an existential threat.
I have made the case over and over that while Trump is in many ways strange or peculiar, there is nothing in his actual record to justify the deep horror he inspires in so many people, the sense that he constitutes a unique and special danger to the country.
I have tried repeatedly to make the case that Trump’s presidency was, in terms of policy, fairly mainstream Republican. I have tried to persuade people that there was practically nothing that could be fairly described as autocratic in Trump’s governing style. I – a legal layperson - have failed to get any one of maybe a dozen lawyers I’ve spoken to about this over the years to find me actual instances of unconstitutional behavior in Trump’s presidency.
The suggestion in this article – that Trump embodies a certain necessary force of creative destruction – has me reconsider the whole thing. Maybe the people with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) – the people unable to even talk about the man without their blood pressures rising – have the deeper vision. Maybe they are seeing not a man – what I’ve been talking about - but the signal of the chaos which must follow the collapse of a society which no longer has faith in anything.
My sense is that a lot of people simply have lost faith in our ability to get anything right anymore, in spite of good intentions and lots of money being spent on plans and programs which are under the direction of hordes of well credentialed 'experts.' Incompetence seems to be the order of the day. That the attempt on Trump's life was even allowed to occur illustrates this point. How could some 21-year-old kid with no military training spot the chink in the armor of a security plan created by a supposedly elite group like the Secret Service? And if they can't protect a former president, just think of our chances when the chaos comes. No country for old men, indeed.
Frank Lee is right it is that simple. The propaganda probably has hold of your spouse and children and neighbours and colleagues and parents. Ask them, you will know within 45 seconds.
Forty-five seconds sounds about right to me, too. You just have to ask a person, with respect to any strong assertion they make about the world: "How do you know that?" What comes next tells you everything, and it works across the political spectrum.
See Gurwinder's brilliant essay (link below) on epistemological heuristics. He opens with this great Orwell quote (also below) and then draws an illuminating five-part taxonomy of propaganda styles. It's unforgettable.
Orwell: “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played.”
Likewise. You'd think, if you don't like a candidate, just argue for better policies and wait for the election, that is how democracy works. Not even Trump could make himself president for life. So TDS is something far deeper, a sort of primal rage against the man who says 'no' to the herd, and T himself a symbol of something deeper too, which is a scary thought.
No, the TDS people perceive the deeper level that the liberal democratic order is stupid. That the Leftist America (post-60s America) is shit. That they suck and arent actually smart nor important and that the world has not changed in the way its falsely constructed to look like. The construction worker is morally superior than the HR person, curse words, beer belly and all. They are real humans, the libtards and the whole edifice of fake and gay psuedo-humans are wack and lame. All that which globohomo trumpets as progress is in fact the road to perdition, meaninglessness, endless sterile bullshit. Liberalism (and materialism) is on the wrong side of history. Thats why theyre apoplectic and Trump breaks their brains. They are correct that he is a existential threat to the entire world they thought they lived in. Their global, flaccid, feminist empire of bullshit is gonna cone down because it was always fake and gay. Jesus Christ is King 😁
The same thought crossed my mind, a moment before I quasi-dismissed it as chance or luck (damn good luck). But reading your post, the thought's returned. I think there is something deeper about these moments of pure coincidence or fortune--however we want to characterize it. It's echoed in the iconic 1979 film Apocalypse Now, where the protagonist (Captain Willard) says about Colonel Kilgore (the "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" character played by Robert Duvall) that "He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn’t going to get so much as a scratch here." From a rational point of view, it's essentially unanalyzable. But we know it when we see it. Great post.
One of my favorite writers was the late and great Terry Pratchett, a man famous for his humor/fantasy Discworld series. What people who don't read Pratchett never realize is that he was also one of the wittiest observers of human nature and mankind. In a book I'm rereading at the moment, Witches Abroad, a satire blending various famous fairy tales, Pratchett mentions the power of stories and how they can come to develop an inevitability of their own and people falling into place to carry out the story.
And I am struck at how this phenomena, something that sounds fanciful and surely is sneered at by those with PhDs and who call themselves experts, seems to be playing out in this strangest presidential election of my lifetime, and once more people are falling into place to make it happen. The idea that Donald Trump should return from past the beyond to defeat Joe Biden in a momentous triumph of revenge had already been starting build an inevitability of its own even before the disastrous debate. In doing so, Trump has taken on the aura of an even greater man, warts and all (and before people start protesting, remember that historically, "great" did not necessarily mean likable or nice). Consider the framework of this story that is the presidential election of 2024: Replace Trump with a prince whose kingdom was stolen from him through trickery, a warrior brought to near death so many times but who keeps surviving, replace Biden with a corrupt ancien-regime who tried to destroy the bearer of truth to protect its privilege and status, replace the June 27 debate with Toto revealing the man behind the curtain, replace the failed assassination attempt with endless examples, and each element is repeating a powerful human storytelling that every person recognizes, and it all clearly points to an inevitable outcome. As Pratchett said, it is now impossible for the third and youngest son of a king, starting on a quest that killed his elder brothers, not to succeed. Likewise, it is now impossible for Donald Trump not to win the presidency, and already the American public is falling into place to make it happen.
People recognize the narrative causality emerging, feel the deeply ingrained stories in the human psyche, and in a weird way, recognize it must have to happen. So they fall into place to make it happen. And as Pratchett said, it is why history keeps repeating all the time.
This is a very interesting comment. I'm not sure I agree with some of what you've written, but this idea of a narrative developing, and people finding their part to play in it, is very interesting.
Trump would be wise and remembered forever if elected if he would offer to RFK Jr a position of Attorney General - to clean the DNC-FBI corrupt stables.
And offer something to Tulsi Gabbard, and perhaps, even he can swallow his pride, to Douglas MacGregor. Though the latter's views on Gaza might make that impossible.
"All the organic energy now appears to be on the political right, because the right’s vibe is now not only “cooler” than the left but indeed does appear somehow “epic,”
While I agree with this, I don't think we should discount all the Democrat suck that we have experienced thus contributing to the decline in left cool. And then there is yet the final consideration... the fair-weather fans... those seeing the inevitable win and loss and jumping ship to the expected winning team. Blackrock's Larry Fink has been on a recent PR stint to pivot away from Biden and the Democrats. He know where is bread is going to be buttered or turned into crotons and given back to the people.
Trump supporters have endured and still endure the worst of attacks, degradation and violence against them. And there are very few violent retaliatory actions the left can honestly claim of them except Jan-6 which the left leverages to the hilt. In terms of world-spirit, it paints trump as almost Gandhi-like... but with a vocabulary of a construction worker from Queens.
One final point is that Trump and his VP are anti-establishment patriotic Americans. This is what the globalist establishment hates and fears more than anything. This is another awakening taking place that benefits Trump. Youth especially, and some minorities are waking up that Democrats have been feeding them a raft of fake caring while they loot away their economic futures. The Democrat machine has managed to perpetuate the lie that Republicans are the big corporation puppets, but that cry of wolf is being destroyed by the advance of independent media like Substack.
…or as Sam Kriss recently put it: “Being shot looks amazing on him; for the first time he seems graceful, dignified, even statesmanlike. He wears his own blood like a medal. It’s pure summer; there’s something very summery about this shooting. The wide cloudless sky, the high American flag, and Donald Trump’s red American blood dripping down his cheek. Immaculate vibes. It’s preppy. It’s Ralph Lauren. It’s A$AP Rocky as JFK in Lana Del Rey’s National Anthem. It’s webs of white froth, white seabirds trilling over the sludgeplains of low tide. Sometimes the sun burns so hot the sky seems to darken. The whole world glows livid black. The Homeric season. Black ships, black blood, and the wine-dark sea.”
I believe that Donald Trump has crossed the threshold into becoming what is termed a "condensed symbol." He has, in fact, entered the domain of the mythic.
Biden's interview on Lester Holt tonight was truly appalling. He didn't have any really serious brain farts, but the lack of introspection was so blatant even Lester pressed him on it. Biden actually said he's done nothing to incite hatred, has nothing to apologize for, and all changes in rhetoric must come from the GOP. How you can declare on Sunday, "everyone needs to tone down the rhetoric" and then on Monday, "I can't not say that Trump is a threat to democracy when he is", just boggles the mind.
To be fair, it's likely (based on his frequent answers of "I'm not sure" to simple questions in the same interview like "have you talked with Obama recently?") that he honestly doesn't remember what he said or who he's said it to from one day to the next.
Well my point is not to say that Trump is Napoleon. I think Napoleon was a disaster for the West. Only to say that Trump seems to have the same sort of "man of history" air around him now.
Napoleon certainly got a lot of people killed but his legacy lives on in things like a modern appreciation of the Jews, the metric system, the codification of laws that had influence beyond France, the Rosetta stone and the breakdown of aristocratic government across Europe.
The list of popular anti-Christs includes the Papacy, the American presidency, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nero , and Hitler. Napoleon's presence on the list is due to Tsar Alexander who objected to Napoleon liberating the Jews. Of course, Alexander was engaged in an existential war with Napoleon and needed to rally the Russian people. I would like to update the list to include George Soros and Klaus Schwab.
“ The gathering darkness of totalitarianism we face is nothing less than a Faustian effort to deconstruct everything it means to be human”.
Their’s is a sick religion - That Hideous Strength - which attempts to elevate us to the throne. Human beings, overclocked chimps, ascendent, ya, maybe that’s not the answer:LOL!
Trump is the antidote, the antihero, rude crude and ever so shrewd. Only he could withstand the coordinated and multiple attacks that have been unleashed on him. Their totalitarianism is well advanced, and the tools of attack have been laid bare, for all to see, in their efforts to destroy him.
Trump despite all of his profanity is the one who shows us the danger we are in and the depths of their depravity.
My friends and neighbours who hated Trump because of his personage are like little old ladies over their tea, rumour mongering. You are wrong, you are small, you are pitiful but you can change.
What we have here is power, naked, power, ambition, and blatant pillaging. Trump speeches are dedicated to mocking them, their hypocrisy and the Kleptocracy they have created.
But you haven’t watched a speech have you? Maybe because you are a little old lady over your tea?
I have had many frustrating conversations with people who view Trump as an existential threat.
I have made the case over and over that while Trump is in many ways strange or peculiar, there is nothing in his actual record to justify the deep horror he inspires in so many people, the sense that he constitutes a unique and special danger to the country.
I have tried repeatedly to make the case that Trump’s presidency was, in terms of policy, fairly mainstream Republican. I have tried to persuade people that there was practically nothing that could be fairly described as autocratic in Trump’s governing style. I – a legal layperson - have failed to get any one of maybe a dozen lawyers I’ve spoken to about this over the years to find me actual instances of unconstitutional behavior in Trump’s presidency.
The suggestion in this article – that Trump embodies a certain necessary force of creative destruction – has me reconsider the whole thing. Maybe the people with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) – the people unable to even talk about the man without their blood pressures rising – have the deeper vision. Maybe they are seeing not a man – what I’ve been talking about - but the signal of the chaos which must follow the collapse of a society which no longer has faith in anything.
My sense is that a lot of people simply have lost faith in our ability to get anything right anymore, in spite of good intentions and lots of money being spent on plans and programs which are under the direction of hordes of well credentialed 'experts.' Incompetence seems to be the order of the day. That the attempt on Trump's life was even allowed to occur illustrates this point. How could some 21-year-old kid with no military training spot the chink in the armor of a security plan created by a supposedly elite group like the Secret Service? And if they can't protect a former president, just think of our chances when the chaos comes. No country for old men, indeed.
“You have to say to yourself, OK I will be part of this world. I will put my soul at hazard.”
Spend a day in their media feeds, and you will likely understand why they are so captured in their irrational opinion. Propaganda works.
Frank Lee is right it is that simple. The propaganda probably has hold of your spouse and children and neighbours and colleagues and parents. Ask them, you will know within 45 seconds.
Forty-five seconds sounds about right to me, too. You just have to ask a person, with respect to any strong assertion they make about the world: "How do you know that?" What comes next tells you everything, and it works across the political spectrum.
See Gurwinder's brilliant essay (link below) on epistemological heuristics. He opens with this great Orwell quote (also below) and then draws an illuminating five-part taxonomy of propaganda styles. It's unforgettable.
Orwell: “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played.”
Gurwinder's link: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-you-are-probably-an-npc
Thank you I’ll give that a read
Likewise. You'd think, if you don't like a candidate, just argue for better policies and wait for the election, that is how democracy works. Not even Trump could make himself president for life. So TDS is something far deeper, a sort of primal rage against the man who says 'no' to the herd, and T himself a symbol of something deeper too, which is a scary thought.
No, the TDS people perceive the deeper level that the liberal democratic order is stupid. That the Leftist America (post-60s America) is shit. That they suck and arent actually smart nor important and that the world has not changed in the way its falsely constructed to look like. The construction worker is morally superior than the HR person, curse words, beer belly and all. They are real humans, the libtards and the whole edifice of fake and gay psuedo-humans are wack and lame. All that which globohomo trumpets as progress is in fact the road to perdition, meaninglessness, endless sterile bullshit. Liberalism (and materialism) is on the wrong side of history. Thats why theyre apoplectic and Trump breaks their brains. They are correct that he is a existential threat to the entire world they thought they lived in. Their global, flaccid, feminist empire of bullshit is gonna cone down because it was always fake and gay. Jesus Christ is King 😁
Tucker C 🎯
Napoleon had a horse, Trump has a golf cart. I found a MAGA hat lying in the gutter. I raised it up and the people put it in my head…
The same thought crossed my mind, a moment before I quasi-dismissed it as chance or luck (damn good luck). But reading your post, the thought's returned. I think there is something deeper about these moments of pure coincidence or fortune--however we want to characterize it. It's echoed in the iconic 1979 film Apocalypse Now, where the protagonist (Captain Willard) says about Colonel Kilgore (the "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" character played by Robert Duvall) that "He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn’t going to get so much as a scratch here." From a rational point of view, it's essentially unanalyzable. But we know it when we see it. Great post.
Trump's will is unmatched. It's that simple.
One of my favorite writers was the late and great Terry Pratchett, a man famous for his humor/fantasy Discworld series. What people who don't read Pratchett never realize is that he was also one of the wittiest observers of human nature and mankind. In a book I'm rereading at the moment, Witches Abroad, a satire blending various famous fairy tales, Pratchett mentions the power of stories and how they can come to develop an inevitability of their own and people falling into place to carry out the story.
And I am struck at how this phenomena, something that sounds fanciful and surely is sneered at by those with PhDs and who call themselves experts, seems to be playing out in this strangest presidential election of my lifetime, and once more people are falling into place to make it happen. The idea that Donald Trump should return from past the beyond to defeat Joe Biden in a momentous triumph of revenge had already been starting build an inevitability of its own even before the disastrous debate. In doing so, Trump has taken on the aura of an even greater man, warts and all (and before people start protesting, remember that historically, "great" did not necessarily mean likable or nice). Consider the framework of this story that is the presidential election of 2024: Replace Trump with a prince whose kingdom was stolen from him through trickery, a warrior brought to near death so many times but who keeps surviving, replace Biden with a corrupt ancien-regime who tried to destroy the bearer of truth to protect its privilege and status, replace the June 27 debate with Toto revealing the man behind the curtain, replace the failed assassination attempt with endless examples, and each element is repeating a powerful human storytelling that every person recognizes, and it all clearly points to an inevitable outcome. As Pratchett said, it is now impossible for the third and youngest son of a king, starting on a quest that killed his elder brothers, not to succeed. Likewise, it is now impossible for Donald Trump not to win the presidency, and already the American public is falling into place to make it happen.
People recognize the narrative causality emerging, feel the deeply ingrained stories in the human psyche, and in a weird way, recognize it must have to happen. So they fall into place to make it happen. And as Pratchett said, it is why history keeps repeating all the time.
This is a very interesting comment. I'm not sure I agree with some of what you've written, but this idea of a narrative developing, and people finding their part to play in it, is very interesting.
When a narrative arc takes off, fact checking is useless. The truth that is 2+2 = 4 doesn't matter. The story is more important.
TERRY PRATCHETT RULES !! O.K.
A N Owen, absolutely brilliant.
He is the man for this time and no other. God often uses unusual people to fulfill his will. Interesting times.
A modern day Samson perhaps?
Trump would be wise and remembered forever if elected if he would offer to RFK Jr a position of Attorney General - to clean the DNC-FBI corrupt stables.
And offer something to Tulsi Gabbard, and perhaps, even he can swallow his pride, to Douglas MacGregor. Though the latter's views on Gaza might make that impossible.
“Secret Service deliberately failed to protect Trump” – Scott Ritter -- OUTSTANDING and fairly definitive !!
(ordered by “establishment” – which remember includes GOP RINOs which are majority Rs in both Senate and Congress)
https://youtu.be/lYrwhCSzV60?si=JgM0vmLSwETyNwUv
"All the organic energy now appears to be on the political right, because the right’s vibe is now not only “cooler” than the left but indeed does appear somehow “epic,”
While I agree with this, I don't think we should discount all the Democrat suck that we have experienced thus contributing to the decline in left cool. And then there is yet the final consideration... the fair-weather fans... those seeing the inevitable win and loss and jumping ship to the expected winning team. Blackrock's Larry Fink has been on a recent PR stint to pivot away from Biden and the Democrats. He know where is bread is going to be buttered or turned into crotons and given back to the people.
Trump supporters have endured and still endure the worst of attacks, degradation and violence against them. And there are very few violent retaliatory actions the left can honestly claim of them except Jan-6 which the left leverages to the hilt. In terms of world-spirit, it paints trump as almost Gandhi-like... but with a vocabulary of a construction worker from Queens.
One final point is that Trump and his VP are anti-establishment patriotic Americans. This is what the globalist establishment hates and fears more than anything. This is another awakening taking place that benefits Trump. Youth especially, and some minorities are waking up that Democrats have been feeding them a raft of fake caring while they loot away their economic futures. The Democrat machine has managed to perpetuate the lie that Republicans are the big corporation puppets, but that cry of wolf is being destroyed by the advance of independent media like Substack.
Napoleon said it is better to be lucky than to be good.
Napoleon also supposedly said, Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself. Let us hope Trump gets that.
Seems to be.
…or as Sam Kriss recently put it: “Being shot looks amazing on him; for the first time he seems graceful, dignified, even statesmanlike. He wears his own blood like a medal. It’s pure summer; there’s something very summery about this shooting. The wide cloudless sky, the high American flag, and Donald Trump’s red American blood dripping down his cheek. Immaculate vibes. It’s preppy. It’s Ralph Lauren. It’s A$AP Rocky as JFK in Lana Del Rey’s National Anthem. It’s webs of white froth, white seabirds trilling over the sludgeplains of low tide. Sometimes the sun burns so hot the sky seems to darken. The whole world glows livid black. The Homeric season. Black ships, black blood, and the wine-dark sea.”
Epic.
Trump was shot at 6:11 pm, EST.
"Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes." Ephesians 6:11
Cool
Brilliant post as usual. You are the one true chronicler of our times.
(We're all in the mythologizing business on this bus.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmWFrMq3qNY
I believe that Donald Trump has crossed the threshold into becoming what is termed a "condensed symbol." He has, in fact, entered the domain of the mythic.
Biden's interview on Lester Holt tonight was truly appalling. He didn't have any really serious brain farts, but the lack of introspection was so blatant even Lester pressed him on it. Biden actually said he's done nothing to incite hatred, has nothing to apologize for, and all changes in rhetoric must come from the GOP. How you can declare on Sunday, "everyone needs to tone down the rhetoric" and then on Monday, "I can't not say that Trump is a threat to democracy when he is", just boggles the mind.
To be fair, it's likely (based on his frequent answers of "I'm not sure" to simple questions in the same interview like "have you talked with Obama recently?") that he honestly doesn't remember what he said or who he's said it to from one day to the next.
That's an apt comparison. The troubling thing is that Napoleon has also been associated not only as a savior, but also as an anti-christ.
Well my point is not to say that Trump is Napoleon. I think Napoleon was a disaster for the West. Only to say that Trump seems to have the same sort of "man of history" air around him now.
Napoleon certainly got a lot of people killed but his legacy lives on in things like a modern appreciation of the Jews, the metric system, the codification of laws that had influence beyond France, the Rosetta stone and the breakdown of aristocratic government across Europe.
The metric system alone is enough to not like the man.
Hey, it kept the French from getting to the moon.
The list of popular anti-Christs includes the Papacy, the American presidency, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nero , and Hitler. Napoleon's presence on the list is due to Tsar Alexander who objected to Napoleon liberating the Jews. Of course, Alexander was engaged in an existential war with Napoleon and needed to rally the Russian people. I would like to update the list to include George Soros and Klaus Schwab.
Most excellent observation…thanks for giving us a peek under the curtain of the next act…it has been a long time coming….
Great post.
This author once said :
“ The gathering darkness of totalitarianism we face is nothing less than a Faustian effort to deconstruct everything it means to be human”.
Their’s is a sick religion - That Hideous Strength - which attempts to elevate us to the throne. Human beings, overclocked chimps, ascendent, ya, maybe that’s not the answer:LOL!
Trump is the antidote, the antihero, rude crude and ever so shrewd. Only he could withstand the coordinated and multiple attacks that have been unleashed on him. Their totalitarianism is well advanced, and the tools of attack have been laid bare, for all to see, in their efforts to destroy him.
Trump despite all of his profanity is the one who shows us the danger we are in and the depths of their depravity.
My friends and neighbours who hated Trump because of his personage are like little old ladies over their tea, rumour mongering. You are wrong, you are small, you are pitiful but you can change.
What we have here is power, naked, power, ambition, and blatant pillaging. Trump speeches are dedicated to mocking them, their hypocrisy and the Kleptocracy they have created.
But you haven’t watched a speech have you? Maybe because you are a little old lady over your tea?
Go fuck yourself.