The Biggest Fool That’s Ever Hit the Big Time
“Might win an Oscar, you can’t never tell…”
Buck Owens, “Act Naturally”
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true...mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism
Is anyone with actual common sense surprised that Trump needed only the first minutes of his next-morning press conference to butcher the integrity of the just-begun proper NTSB investigation into the terrible January 29 crash into the Potomac?
If you missed it, and missed the many commentators testifying as to how unraveled the just-inaugurated President’s psyche has become, he went on various speculative benders as to how the crash happened, falsely and without evidence singling out out DEI recruiting practices for flight controllers by the FAA, the just-departed Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, and worst of all, throwing shade across the pilots of both the downed Blackhawk and the cockpit crew of regional jet the helo impacted.
I had thought to save this space for a take on the welcome embarrassment of riches both musical and theatrical that movingly played out in two arenas and various streaming services for the Fire Aid benefit on the 30th. It had seemed that what mattered most to the nation just days ago was finding the spirit and the resources to clear away the debris, and address the heartache, of the Los Angeles firestorms that laid waste to so many thousands of homes. (And Trump, to sling him a share of credit, held his nostrils pinched long enough to surprise us all by showing up and keeping his crackpot, California-can-go-f*ck-itself theorizing under his black-edition MAGA hat long enough to actually show some support to the state and its beleaguered populace.)
Ah, but…within the week, even as the news landed that none of the 67 souls who had been airborne that night had survived, he launched a full-on screed. Operating with putative inside information that only a stable genius such as he could access, he began blaming his Democratic Oval Office predecessors, parceling out abuse and bogus theories so sketchy and bitter that any and all credible aviation and investigative agencies and experts immediately stood up and trashed his takes as reprehensibly egocentric, partisan, and stupid.
But then what, at this stage, might we expect? Let’s review what the pestilential autocrat-in-the-making has done in just a few days of slathering his egomaniacal sub-spiritual crud all over the democracy...
By now we’ve half-forgotten his take on the awful New Orleans ramming incident which he blamed on immigration (although it was a natural-born Texan and service vet who committed that.)
Some of his ill-conceived—or maybe, sedulously clever—postures and crank schemes: An across-the-board federal funding freeze across nearly the entire spectrum of federal spending (soon held off via an injunction) that would scuttle various aid programs already dealing with shortfalls of their vital resources and funding; a smashing of birthright citizenship, soon drawing an injunction from a Reagan-appointed judge as blatantly unconstitutional; the declaration and over-hasty implementation of mass deportations that increasingly smell of racism; banning the CDC’s cooperative work with the World Health Organization; pardoning 1600 members of his ad hoc January 6 militia, including those accused of sedition and all manner of mayhem against police officers; purging all manner of federal employees, most notably on attack on the F.B.I.; and the proposed elimination of any recognition of anything relating to empathy for gender issues.
Then there’s the clown car—make that a party bus, but please don’t let Pete Hegseth drive--—of ill-equipped, politically and personally compromised Trump loyalists and attack dogs shoved into positions for which they have little capability. Most notable was handing Secretary of Defense was inked-up, reportedly dipsomaniac, woman-hating (and woman-pawing) Hegseth, though submitting Assad, Putin and Snowden-loving inexperiencd hellcat/hands-on dog-slayer Kristi Noem to head the Department of Homeland Security and soon kitted herself up with an ICE vest to join an immigration raid in NYC to “get these dirtbags off the street”. It drones on... Little Marco Rubio, having been re-educated at Mar-a-Lago as a Trump loyalist (plenty of foreign policy reading matter if you know which bathroom to look in), was given the State Department and implemented a freeze on foreign aid, including to Ukraine, while head of intel service aspirant Tulsi Gabbard was perhaps the actual worst fit for the job.
Also: The renaming of Alaska’s Denali as McKinley and the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. And a total non-starter notion of sending Gaza’s displaced residents to resettle in Egypt and Jordan (“Clean out the whole thing”) and the appointment of pit bull Elise Stefanik, a Bible-quoting advocate for Israel taking over the West Bank.
Let’s see, any other bright ideas? Oh yes, the tariffs that economists say stand a better than even chance of tanking our economy; the kerfuffle with Colombia over receiving a a military jet full of deportees; the petulant hazing (portrait removed, fourth star in jeopardy) of much-decorated General Mark Milley for astutely ID’ing Trump as “Fascist to the core”.
“Societies can break,” Yale professor Timothy Snyder says in the prologue to his currently and properly popular “On Tyranny,” “Democracies can collapse, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
Similarly, Arendt’s words of many years ago sum up the modern departure from the mass exterminations of Hitler and Stalin to something subtler but almost as frightening (see: Charlottesville and the pernicious works of Stephen Miller) as she preordains Trumpism with even keener insight: “A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships all other tyranny in the past is terror is no longer used to exterminate and rule frightened opponents but is an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.”
Enough already. As we await what most think will be an inevitable and nasty decoupling of Trump from Wack Boy Genius Elon Musk, the latter threw up a goofy if vile simulation of a Nazi salute. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, with his new book laying Trump’s vagaries at the door of a never-ending scream for notoriety, opined about the supposed cost-cutting promised from the Musk-led DOGE: “What is the point of efficiency if you don’t believe in what government does?”
Just as his cousin Caroline Kennedy for RFK Jr. to be a self-engineered doltishness bot who happens to be dangerously predatory, Trump’s niece Mary has said that “Cruelty was a currency” in the family as they grew up. “Trump will take attention wherever he can get it,” Hayes said recently on air.
One doesn’t want to overpraise Sebastian Stan for his portrayal of Donald Trump in the movie “The Apprentice,” which is now bearing two acting Oscar noms when you add in Jeremy Strong’s brushed-with-tragedy work as Trump mentor Roy Cohn.
The film is not so much a satire or warning call as it is a psychological portrait of the making of a predator under the cheerleading and seamy flirtation of the once more famous carnivore and Joe McCarthy sin-eater, the vampiric Cohn. Though some have speculated that the Academy members who nominated Jeremy Strong (an easy call) voted Stan into the running as a rebuke to Trump’s ongoing putsch, the film pulls many a punch. (A key scene showing Cohn’s attraction to the pouchy-faced Trump was reportedly cut at the demand of key film financier Dan Snyder, a right-leaning sometime owner of the team he wanted to keep calling The Redskins).
But if Stan’s work is in part and impersonation, he does capture a lot of attributes we see in the man some online wags call Shitler. In alphabetical order, they include arrogance, bullying, corruption, debility, um….evil, flatulence, grotesquerie, homophobia, inexactitude, jabbering, kleptocracy, loathsomeness, mendacity, nastiness, obtuseness, pettifoggery, queerbaiting, racism, stupidaggine, termagancy, ugliness, vanity, weaseling, xenophobia, yattering, and zealotry
A win for Stan would be a surprise—between Chalamet, Brody, Fiennes and Domingo, it’s a strong field—but might send a message, one that Hannah Arendt bade us heed long ago:
“Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.”
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