Clown car
Trump's kamikaze kakistocracy is just what his supporters voted for.
The list of misguided reasons people voted for Donald Trump is long. We could spend days dissecting how those fretting about inflation will find prices surging as a result of Trump’s proposed policies. How deporting millions of immigrants won’t lower the cost of housing or create jobs. How he’ll likely renege on his promise to veto a national abortion ban.
But the reality is Trump was elected by a majority of the 47% of the American population that voted. And in the two weeks since the election, the motivation of those supporting him has become clearer: a whole stack of Americans simply feel the system hasn’t been working for them, isn’t working for them, and don’t see it working for them any time soon. So they want to blow it up.
In Trump, they’ve found their saboteur. He’s moved quickly to stack his cabinet with a gaggle of crooks and charlatans who would struggle to find work anywhere with anyone, except in the Make America Great Again bubble where lickspittle loyalty is the ultimate qualification, no matter how cynical or crazy (paging JD Vance).
“Trump’s appointments briefly looked fine, normal even, with Marco Rubio to be secretary of state and Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the United Nations,” the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus wrote.1 “They went downhill from there, with candidates manifestly underqualified for the positions for which they were selected.”
That includes former New York congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, whose key qualification appears to be that he hates the EPA. Dog-killing South Dakota governor Kristi Noem to head the Department of Homeland Security. Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary. Oil executive Chris Wright as energy secretary. Gadfly possible-enemy-agent Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Anti-vaxxing, bear-corpse-dumping crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee the nations’ health. Everything pointed, Marcus said, to Trump’s “utter contempt for the government he is about to lead.”
And then there’s Matt Gaetz. I’m no fan of John Bolton, but his comment that Trump picking Gaetz as attorney-general was “the worst nomination for a Cabinet secretary in American history” seems, if anything, an understatement. Gaetz is not known in any capacity for competence, judgement, or legal expertise, although he does have deep personal exposure to the justice system.
“He is known for being investigated for, allegedly, having sexual relations with an underage girl,” the New York Times’ David French said (by resigning from Congress, Gaetz averted, at least temporarily, the release of a House Ethics Committee report into his behavior). “He is known for allegedly speaking quite openly and proudly about his sexual exploits, including, allegedly, showing pictures of women that he slept with, nude pictures to colleagues.”
Those of us in the reality-based world are appalled by Trump’s picks, especially considering his true motivation for trying to disrupt or even break the system. Here’s a hint: it’s not about helping his fellow Americans or addressing legitimate grievances around widening inequality and financial insecurity.
“It is a mistake to think that authoritarian leaders want to strengthen government. To the contrary, they want to weaken government’s institutions,” Robert Tracinksi wrote in
. “They want an unstructured government, one without rules and procedures, so as to leave fewer impediments to their whims. That is the point of Trump’s anti-government: to provide more scope for the exercise of arbitrary and capricious power. This has been the guiding impulse of Trump’s entire life. He is a man obsessed with gaining a sense of power over others—not necessarily the power to do anything in particular, just power for its own sake, power for the gratification of wielding it.”For those who voted for Trump, the end justifies the means. And I hope the soul searching Democrats have undertaken for the past fortnight leads them to first think carefully and then act boldly about what’s required to fix a nation that is increasingly working only for an ever-shrinking, ever-richer sliver of the population.
Almost three quarters of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. That’s an imperfect measure: you can bet the number satisfied with the country’s direction will jump when Trump takes office in January as Republicans rejoice. Yet it’s important, because people tend to prioritize feelings over facts. A case in point: rising prices became a national obsession, totally obscuring the Biden administration’s achievements in driving world-leading economic growth, job creation, and a soft landing from the smoldering wreck bequeathed by Trump.2
For young Americans, especially, life feels unsafe, devoid of opportunity, and fundamentally stacked against them. “The epicenter of the 2024 political earthquake wasn’t immigration, bodily autonomy, or democracy,” Scott Galloway wrote in a column worth reading in full. “It was the social contract between America and its citizens. The contract is straightforward: Work hard and play by the rules, and your children will have a better life than you did. For the first time in 250 years, that contract has not held.”
Last week, I revisited Michael Moore’s documentary Where to Invade Next. The premise is simple: after decades of invading countries with precious little to offer the United States, Moore pretends the Pentagon has tasked him with invading places with ideas worth stealing. It’s a journey that leads him, among many others, to Italy to capture their attitude and policies toward work, to France to overhaul school lunches and sex education, and to Norway to pilfer its approach to criminal justice.3
I first saw the movie on its release in 2015 and not only has nothing changed in terms of the critical issues afflicting the US, but it’s arguably become more urgent. This is a country with kids clueless about sex by design, leading to the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world. America spends more on healthcare than anywhere else, for worse outcomes. It has more prisoners than any country on the planet, in a for-profit system designed to punish rather than rehabilitate. Income inequality is astonishing, with America’s richest 1% averaging 139 times the income of the bottom 20%. The country is awash with guns and experiences mass shootings almost daily. Housing is increasingly unaffordable, as is college.
It’s no wonder so many feel let down and left out by how capitalism has evolved and the way the political system has actively accelerated it. “If it seems like we care more about senior citizens than our children, trust your instincts—recall that we let the Child Tax Credit expansion expire post-pandemic,” Galloway said. “Meanwhile, Social Security remains the third rail of American politics, with old people electing older people who vote themselves more money. To paraphrase Warren Buffet, there is a generational war in America, and my generation is winning.”4
At this point, there’s no sense in screaming that, on pretty much every dimension, the policies advocated by Kamala Harris would have done far more to advance the causes aggrieved Americans fixated on, especially young people who “generally want to go to class without worrying about shooters, to grow older without witnessing the planet’s demise, to pay rent without draining their whole paycheck, to believe they can make ends meet.”
“Trump campaigned on fear—he warned of an economy in shambles, crime and danger lurking, undocumented immigrants taking work from ‘forgotten men and women’,” Faith Hill wrote in The Atlantic. “Much of that wasn’t rooted in reality: Violent crime rates are down in the U.S., for instance, and undocumented immigrants tend to fill jobs that American workers say they don’t want. Still, fear resonated.”
Democrats have some advantages as they regroup, notably the likelihood that Trump’s presidency will implode in a miasma of incompetence, malevolence, and just plain insanity. But the party needs a reckoning. While there’s no doubt misogyny and other factors played into Harris losing and, in the process, failing to match Biden’s popularity of 20205, the fundamental reason is obvious: Americans consciously chose someone manifestly unfit in a primal scream for help.
It feels like a moment is coming for someone who can pull together a platform that hews more in the Bernie Sanders direction, but with a practical edge. Someone who acknowledges the system is broken, and proposes fixes that are far more aggressive than the usual policy tweaks. I’m not sure that means someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but certainly a Democrat who isn’t of or by the current party establishment.
In the meantime, the best thing Democrats can do is get out of the way and let Trump own his decisions in full. For far too long, Democrats have been the responsible adults in the room who then get no credit for it. If Trump falls into the “some men just want to watch the world burn” camp, they should let him. That’s what voters claim to want. And, with apologies to Napoleon, it’s always better to not interrupt the opposition when they’re doing something stupid.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful, all from the perspective of an Australian living in the United States.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
For two examples of lickspittle loyalty at the expense of dignity, you’d be hard pressed to find better (especially Stefanik). And that’s saying something.
Not to downplay the significance or pain of rising prices, but America wasn’t alone in struggling with inflation. It brought prices down more quickly than almost anywhere else. And the fact joblessness remains at the lowest point in decades means people actually had money to buy stuff, especially as real wages have grown faster than prices. But, again, if life feels shitty, no amount of data will change a person’s opinion.
America often seems determined to consciously do things differently for the sake of “exceptionalism,” or some such thing. My take is there are a lot of countries that have been around a lot longer than the United States. And they may have—just maybe—learned a thing or two over the millenia about what really matters.
A case in point: the stock market jumped on Trump’s win, making the reasonable assumption it will mean fewer regulations, tax cuts, and greater profits. The main beneficiaries? The rich: the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks.
Harris garnered almost 74 million total votes compared with Biden’s 81.3 million in 2020. Trump received 76.5 million votes two weeks ago, compared with 74.2 million in 2020. His popular vote total has actually slipped below 50% in the past two weeks as final votes are tallied.