What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[frunk]

He also innately understands how sick people are of performative ceremonies, to the point that they'll prefer earnest nastiness over performative decorum.

Trump leans into performative ceremonies harder than any previous president.  See his Orb photo op with MBS, meeting Putin with great pomp and circumstance twice and his threatening war with North Korea just to get a sit down meeting with Kim Jong Un from his first term.  The US State fair nonsense, WWE at the White House, attempts to get a bunch of performers for July 4th that fell through, attempts to get the reflecting pool clean, the renaming of everything he can after him, the tearing down/conversion of the White House and his push for military parades.

It's not that he rejects performative ceremonies, it's that he sucks at them, they end up half-assed, and he tries to sweep them under the rug.  He desperately wants the ceremonies to be big important deals but can't make it work.

[Valmy]

He also innately understands how sick people are of performative ceremonies, to the point that they'll prefer earnest nastiness over performative decorum.

Trump leans into performative ceremonies harder than any previous president.  See his Orb photo op with MBS, meeting Putin with great pomp and circumstance twice and his threatening war with North Korea just to get a sit down meeting with Kim Jong Un from his first term.  The US State fair nonsense, WWE at the White House, attempts to get a bunch of performers for July 4th that fell through, attempts to get the reflecting pool clean, the renaming of everything he can after him, the tearing down/conversion of the White House and his push for military parades.

It's not that he rejects performative ceremonies, it's that he sucks at them, they end up half-assed, and he tries to sweep them under the rug.  He desperately wants the ceremonies to be big important deals but can't make it work.

Yeah that's true 

God that 250th Anniversary stuff was half assed shit. He could have easily gotten thousands and thousands of his fans to be up there turning it into a big festival to celebrate the glory of Trump but that would require some organization and planning and instead it was just all a mess. But a typical mess under his watch.

[The Minsky Moment]

Eric Fromm's Fear of Freedom made an impression on me when I first read it in my late teens, but I didn't think much about it since, until very recently.  It seemed like the political culture of the West had matured, and that the experience of fighting totalitarianism in WW2 and the Cold War had effectively inoculated it again open authoritarian appeals.  But the Cold War is old history now, and the entire WW2 generation is gone. The dynamic that Fromm discusses in relation to the politics of the earlier 20th century - how feelings of helplessness, anxiety, social isolation, and alienation fuel submission to authoritarian personalities - feels relevant again.  I think Trump is wrong man for the wrong time. He's no different from the Trump whose earlier political campaigns crashed and burned before liftoff in the face of mockery and indifference. It's the times and zeitgeist that changed such that Trump's brand of aspirational narcissistic authoritarianism strikes a chord; where a major party Presidential candidate can unironically declare "I alone can fix it" and be greeted with rapturous applause rather than a combination of disgust and derision.

[frunk]

Yeah that's true 

God that 250th Anniversary stuff was half assed shit. He could have easily gotten thousands and thousands of his fans to be up there turning it into a big festival to celebrate the glory of Trump but that would require some organization and planning and instead it was just all a mess. But a typical mess under his watch.

And I completely forgot about his stupid quest to get a Nobel Peace Prize, one of the most performative of ceremonies there is.

[HVC]

He's also got his signature on your cash.


Is he still trying to get on Mount Rushmore?