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Trump represents a difference in kind. Whether he is a fascist is the sort of question that generates more heat than light and so is not a terribly interesting question, but certainly his actions and rhetoric toward a US ally and fellow Liberal democracy are totally illogical, nonsensical, amoral, and speak to a man who has an extremely inaccurate model of the world and/or thought processes that are not coherent. This is not an alike thing to e.g. Having a snappy propaganda-esque poster of yourself made as per your counterexamples. Previous presidents/administrations have been anchored in reality (and morality) in a way that Trump et al are not. Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.
I know that you see Trump as your last, best hope against woke and progressivism, and so you use your intellectual horsepower and debate techniques honed here in themotte to carry water for him. But there is no intellectual basis for trumpism, and your attempts to create one is nothing more than sanewashing. Tracingwoodgrains had the right of this: as true as it is that Harris was a soulless avatar of The Machine, Trump was unworthy of defeating that machine.
I know that you will never agree that Trump is a piece of shit, if for no other reason than you see it as bad tactics. But I would hope that, at least, when you are alone with your thoughts, you might idly wish that your philosophy had a better spokesman.
I mean, at the very least he hasn't yet brought about the Handmaid's Tale-style dystopia his presidency was supposedly going to usher in , so I think there's some way to go before declaring all his opponents' fears vindicated.
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Let me try to cut right to the chase. I can confirm much of what you say here.
Yes, I do wish that my philosophy had a better spokesman. Certainly. I'm concerned about how Trump's behavior has seemingly become more erratic since his first term. I wouldn't say I'm "alarmed" yet, but I am concerned. I don't in any way support his aggressive rhetoric towards Canada. Maybe he's going senile, maybe this is just what he always would have been like in the absence of guardrails, I don't know. It's not ideal.
But nonetheless my support for him remains. The anti-woke vote is always the correct vote, full stop. That's basically the long and short of it. I mean, these people literally can't help themselves. They can't stop themselves from hating white people. They're running around with their hair on fire about the collapse of the rules-based global order and yet they still manage to find the time to get their jabs in at white people. Any action which decreases the cultural and institutional power of these people is ipso facto correct, even if it's risky.
So, yes, I'd prefer a more competent figure at the helm. But if Trump's the best anti-woke option we've got then so be it.
I had a brief look at that article and honestly couldn't help thinking there's something weird about calling a country independent while also implying it's unconditionally entitled to international aid to keep hundreds of thousands of its own citizens dying from AIDS.
Yeah, if this were the peak of the Cold War, an antagonistic nation would probably spurn Western aid.
Heck, if you swapped the name of the President in the headline, you could even argue that we "punished South Africa for independence" during Apartheid. Now, granted, the main consequences of the embargoes on South Africa were things like "Israel is one of the only countries they can trade with" and "there's basically no foreign-made shows on TV besides The Sweeney," and possibly not things like "AIDS will ravage the population."
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Over the last decade, the prediction/warning/whatever I've most frequently heard about a Donald Trump presidency has been that he is a white supremacist KKK neo-Nazi with concrete plans to transform the United States into a white ethnostate (optionally also a Christian theocracy), which necessitates rounding up anyone who isn't white, cisgender, heterosexual or Christian and herding them into concentration camps. I literally don't think there was a single day in 2016 in which I didn't see or hear the "Trump = Hitler" comparison at least once. A distant second was "Trump is a Russian asset".
After four years of Trump in the Oval Office, this accusation became increasingly untenable, so his critics abruptly changed course and started accusing him of being a crypto-fascist with no respect for democratic institutions. In this regard, his critics are on much firmer ground (I've been saying for a decade that Trump has far more in common with Orbán or Berlusconi than with old Adolf), so this pivot made a lot of sense.* What doesn't make sense is that his critics are now pretending that this was the only class of accusations they'd ever been levelling at him. (The "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see" thing still gets periodically trotted out, courtesy of slow learners who haven't yet gotten the message that we're no longer at war with Eurasia.)
This is the same kind of blatant goalpost-moving and historical revisionism Scott complained about when grading his Trump predictions. Throughout the run-up to the 2016 election, all I heard was a never-ending stream of "Trump is Hitler, Trump is going to round up all the Muslims, Trump is going to kill all the Latinos, Trump is going to round up all the gays and trans people, Trump is going to turn America into Gilead". After four years of nothing even remotely like this transpiring, the people who had made these predictions just cited a bunch of other random bad shit Trump and his supporters did (e.g. January 6th) and turned around and said "see? We warned you!"
It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared. Show me the concentration camps, then we can talk. At least have the humility to acknowledge that careless accusations of genocidal ambition on Trump's part have only helped him: when facing more reasonable accusations of taking a cavalier approach to the rule of law and democratic institutions, Trump can quite reasonably defend himself by pointing out that his critics were crying wolf when they accused him of being Hitler, so why wouldn't they be crying wolf now?
I know when you said that he's showing himself to be "everything" his opponents feared, you were speaking figuratively, and you don't think that literally every criticism/accusation/whatever levelled against Donald Trump was well-founded. But I feel like there's some kind of Pareto distribution, where 80% of attacks/criticisms/warnings about Trump took the form "Trump is a genocidal white supremacist" (optionally also a Christian fundamentalist, heteronormative etc.), then "Trump is a Russian asset", then "Trump is a fascist with no respect for democratic institutions". I think honesty and humility behooves people to acknowledge that 80% of their predictions failed to come to pass. When 80% of your accusations/predictions fail to come to pass (90% if you include all the utterly baseless accusations of Russian collusion), I don't think you deserve a prognostication medal because some of the remaining 10% were accurate.
*Google Trends shows the precise point at which "Trump is going to turn America into Gilead" stopped being The Narrative, in favour of "Trump is a fascist authoritarian". The obvious objection to this interpretation of the data is that most of the searches for The Handmaid's Tale pertained to the novel's television adaptation (which, incredibly, is still running); the even more obvious rebuttal to that objection is that the only reason the television series even exists is because of hysterical scaremongering about the alleged parallels between the novel and Trump's America.
Yes, and Obama is a Kenyan Muslim communist with a fake birth certificate, a trans wife, and also he's probably the antichrist. Weak men are superweapons.
This is a class of objection that is very popular among Trump's supporters, as it is both impossible to fix (demanding that all those who oppose Trump have one unified coherent message, and also that none of them act histrionic or retarded is obviously impossible), and it also neatly elides any discussion of what Trump has actually said and done. "see, Trump isn't genocidal! He's just flirting with the nakedly imperialist conquest of our longtime friend and ally" is not the repudiation that you perhaps think it is. I personally have nothing to apologise for on that front, as I never engaged in such hysteria.
Trump is unlike Hitler in many ways. One of those ways is that, unlike Trump, Hitler had a theory. He 'knew' what had caused the ills of Germany, and acted accordingly. Trump, on the other hand, is just a thoughtless man with no moral center. His greatest achievement in this term so far has been to remove the safety rails that kept him from fucking anything up too badly in his first term. From here we are in uncharted territory. It is impossible to know what Trump is going to do next, he spouts so much bullshit that not even his strongest advocates can predict him. But what was fully predictable, and obvious to anyone who cared to notice it, is that Trump is unworthy of the post of President.
With all that said, I don't entirely disagree with the thrust of your post. The reason that a man like Donald Trump appealed to so many is that progressives overplayed their hand. I feel no need to let those who pushed woke to this point off the hook. But if they have to own that, then you have to own making an amoral narcissist the most powerful man in the world.
When your prior comment says
I'm not sure how one could interpret this other than that you're full-throatedly defending the weakest of the weakmen.
Sure, if that's the hill you want to die on I'll cop that that was an overbroad statement. It is pretty common for Trump's supporters to demand maximal charity for every dumbshit retarded thing he says ('oh, that's not what he really means') while offering absolutely zero leeway for rhetoric or hyperbole in the statements his opponents.
I am pretty sick of being expected to give Trump orders of magnitude more charity than he or his supporters would ever give to me.
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Transparent false equivalence. Ostensibly respectable left-leaning newspapers of record spent years milking the "Trump = Hitler" comparisons for all they were worth. Russiagate was a nonsensical conspiracy theory elevated to the status of a federal inquiry. I'll grant that a lot of people who should have known better gave the birth certificate theory more credence than it deserved, but the only people I've seen claiming that Michelle Obama has a penis are extremely online far-right weirdos. If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.
Of course it's not realistic to expect everyone who dislikes Trump never to act histrionic or retarded. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to request mainstream, ostensibly neutral institutions to dial down the hysteria a smidge.
Why not? Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.
Agreed.
I don't have to own anything. I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way, I've personally attended at least one protest against a policy he enacted, and even if I had been eligible to vote for him in 2016, 2020 or 2024 (neither being a US citizen nor residing in the US), I wouldn't have.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
Fair enough, anyone who claimed that Trump was literally a Hitler 2.0 hell bent on a new holocaust went too far. Anyone who stopped short of that, including those who merely accused him of being a 'danger to democracy' has, I think, been vindicated. There were plenty of contemporaneous articles which evaluated Trump as a menace without descending into hysteria.
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole. 'Ha! you thought he was a wannabe mass murderer, but in fact he is just a wannabe imperialist and warmonger'. Wow, great point. This is definitely where the nexus of the conversation should be.
Fair enough. Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
As someone who voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Kamala in 2024, I second what Folamh3 responded about this apparent arguments-as-soldiers worldview. But I also want to add on that, we can combine the last 2 paragraphs of that comment to see that, from a purely selfish, power-hungry perspective, this sort of thinking is counterproductive. There's no shortage of very good, very well-supported, and very non-partisan reasons why Trump is and would be a terrible POTUS. Yet much of the messaging against him was so filled with hyperbole that even in 2016, calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" or whatever was considered cliche. Things have tended to escalate since.
And this has resulted largely in the discrediting of the people and organizations that kept up this hyperbole. When someone keeps demonstrating that they want to send a message in order to accomplish a certain goal instead of wanting to describe reality accurately (which, at a minimum, requires taking a highly skeptical view of one's own biases and welcoming criticism and feedback from people who disagree with you vehemently), then other people notice and lower their credibility accordingly. I believe it was a commenter here that described it as something like "Media keeps pressing the 'attack Trump/hurt own credibility' button" or something like that, and that's what I've been seeing play out over and over again over the past decade. And it's resulted in people seeking out and even creating alternative sources of information and commentary that mainstream news outlets used to be the primary sources for. Arguably, Musk's purchase of Twitter was also an effect. And this has tended to help Trump. And not just Trump, but also people who actually are the types of genocidal fascists that his critics make him out as.
Which, IMHO, has always been the biggest danger to this whole Trump thing that's been going on the past decade. Again, as far back as 2016, I recall reading someone, maybe on SlateStarCodex, saying that they're not afraid of Trump, they're afraid of who might come after Trump. Now, I'm somewhat afraid of Trump, but not that much more than any other Republican POTUS, but I'm definitely more afraid of what could rise up from the farther, even more extreme right wing due to much of the left having so completely discredited its ability to criticize such people.
I think the only way to gain back credibility is to demonstrate that there are very powerful, very influential internal controls that engage in self-reflection and self-criticism of one's own side, in a way that attempts at getting at the truth, especially if the truth helps one's opponents and hurts one's friends. Unfortunately, I've seen a dearth of such things over the past decade, though it's not zero.
I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson.
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No argument here, but specificity matters. Rapists and murderers are both dangerous people, but if you're accusing someone of being a rapist, you need to present evidence that they actually raped someone; presenting evidence that they murdered someone is irrelevant. If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way, rather than just saying "he is an extremely dangerous man". As I said previously, Trump only benefitted by baseless accusations of genocide-mongering. A little message discipline would have served his opponents well.
I find it kind of staggering, that you apparently don't see any kind of causal link between a politician repeatedly asserting that the mainstream media is "fake news", said mainstream media producing avalanches of hysterical and overwrought predictions about the horrors that are soon to befall the world if he is elected, said predictions conspicuously failing to come to pass, and the politician getting reelected.
I hate this Manichaean arguments-as-soldiers worldview, in which if I point out that some factual claim about Donald Trump is false, the only possible explanation is that I'm doing so because I admire him and think that he's awesome. It couldn't possibly be that I just value factual accuracy for its own sake and resent being gaslit by people claiming never to have made specific claims that they did in fact make, repeatedly, for years, in public. Not everything is an opportunity for partisan mudslinging and nothing more.
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I also recall much hay being made of Trump being a terrible racist. Even here in Germany. The next-biggest accusation was him being an Idiot, which always seemed extremely shaky. An idiot millionaire who manages to become POTUS? And in third place was a vague notion of "Orange Man Extremely, Uniquely and Urgently Bad" without further explanation.
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An attempt at synthesis of your point and FC's (plus some others, like Zvi's notion of the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster): Governments in the 90s (or whenever) were Right. SJ governments were Wrong. Trump and Musk seem to be Not Even Wrong.
At greater length: there used to be coherence-producing mechanisms in society that kept everybody on the same page and kept policy making sense. Then when SJ nucleated, it hijacked nearly all those mechanisms and put false stuff into them, leading to obvious falsehoods being promulgated (and multiplying due to the principle of explosion) and policies that didn't work. The Trumpian reaction to SJ realised that it could not restore neutrality in those mechanisms (because SJ did too good a job of installing political commissariats in them) and it was excluded from the Overton Window those mechanisms had produced, so it took a sledgehammer to their credibility and turned much of the right-wing against them. However, it failed to build new coherence-producing mechanisms to replace them*, leaving much of its base and apparently also Trump/Musk without any way of identifying and co-ordinating on truth and on rational planning; they're just saying things. And, well, a government that's working with no map at all is going to do worse at a large number of things than one with a map that loosely resembles but does not match the territory.
Of course, a little buffoonery until Trumpism can sort itself out wouldn't be the end of the world... except that we have a certain drooling dragon at the door watching our every move, which means it might actually be the end of the world as we know it. Oh, well, I live in Bendigo and have most of my prep done**; "I'm clear. Are you?"
@FCfromSSC, thoughts?
*There are rightist intellectuals capable of identifying truth, and there now is an alt-media apparatus capable of dispensing it. The problem is that one isn't plugged into the other - not in the USA, at least, although we seem to be doing a lot better in Oz (the UAP is showing some signs of Trumpian brain rot, but it's not even our biggest alt-right party, so I'm not very worried). A lot of us were counting on Musk and Vance to be lynchpins, but Musk appears to have gone nuts and I haven't heard much about Vance in all this.
**There's a reasonable amount that's best left to "when the war starts" because it's got downsides and/or a use-by date plus isn't panic-buying bait.
Good post, my only concern is that it goes too far in an attempt to make order out of chaos. Trump isn't flying blind because the sensemaking institutions he inherited are so corrupted as to be worthless. He is flying blind because he is an unrigorous vibes-based thinker. I too hoped that Elon would form some sort of intellectual foundation for this administration, but as you note, he has gone off the deep end. Vance is a clever guy, but he is also a suckup. I don't think he has it in him to actually stand up to Trump, and I think he knows that even if he does Trump will just burn him.
Scott, "Planet-Sized Nutshell":
In a sense it's both. The reason Trump is that way is because he's Trump. Why is Trump POTUS, though, rather than losing the Republican nomination back in 2016? Well, because all the sensemaking institutions said "Don't nominate Trump" and the Republican base treated that as an endorsement. "Be a huckster" was no longer a losing strategy to get the Republican nomination, because the Republican base no longer trusted the institutions that normally filtered out hucksters, because those institutions by then also filtered out anyone loyal to the Red Tribe; indeed, the base went so far as to anti-trust the institutions and deliberately do the opposite of what they said.
Well, as they say, reversed stupidity isn't intelligence.
It's just, it's probably not going to be stupid in the exact same way as the existing stupidity that it's trying to reverse. And a plurality of voters might see that as a good enough option to try out compared to the existing stupidity. This is roughly how I perceive most Trump supporters, especially the subgroup that was behind the shift of, I think, literally every single one of the 50 states shifting towards Trump in the 2024 election compared to the 2020 one.
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The problem is that there was no Good Populist. Something like the Trump base has been around for a while - but somehow, every candidate that appealed to them had big problems, ones that they should care about even by their own values. And this extends even beyond just american populists: populism is the secret political weapon that the likes of Orban can stay in power by fulfilling. Noone ever uses this tactic for good or even neutral ends. Noone decent ever gives populists what they want, you may at best string them along with empty promises and even thats kind of sus.
I dont see how you could have an explanation for the above, that doesnt change the meaning of "Dont you wish you had a better spokesman" into something unrecognisable.
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