What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Apparently the Trump administration is a bit chaotic internally.

[Admiral Yi]

It's pointless to try to tease out some coherent ideology from Yarvin. The "Dark Enlightenment" is not a political project, it's an internet troll meme with delusions of grandeur.  That the guy has obtained some measure of attention of celebrity beyond his allotted 15 minutes is just another symptom of the degeneration of American political culture and discourse.

That's reassuring.  For a while I was worried that private tyranny was something I had to try to understand.

[The Brain]

The US Embassy sent a letter to the Stockholm City Planning Department demanding they sign a contract about not hiring women or black people. Obviously the contract won't be signed. Apparently the embassy doesn't foresee needing any building permits or similar in the future.

[Valmy]

The Onion struggles to do satire in this ridiculous country.

[Valmy]

Trump thinks we don't do much business in Canada?

Um...

[Sheilbh]

Thanks, so not really a monarchist as that term is understood in countries that still have monarchies, like say Canada.  But a code word for totalitarianism?

I looked this up a little with the people being disappeared into El Salvador and ignoring court rulings because I knew I'd read something about some old English law.

And I had read something about this in discussions about Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition. So in 1679 one of the Restoration parliaments amended habeas corpus. In particular they prohibited sending anyone living within jurisdiction overseas, declared any such imprisonment illegal and gave the prisoner a right of action for false imprisonment against all people involved in their detention, allowed them to recover treble costs and damages of at least £500 (a big number in 1679), disqualified anyone responsible for or having anything to do with the detention from holding public office and removed the right of the King to grant a pardon to any perpetrators. (It feels like the sort of drafting where they're trying to block a very real possibility).

That section is still on the books. But when we talk about Trump as a monarch we don't mean Charles III or even George III but one of the Stuarts.

That's reassuring.  For a while I was worried that private tyranny was something I had to try to understand.

There are probably philosophers who have seriously thought about some of it but - and I've not read Yarvin - he's not one of them, but as Minsky describes.

But the thing I'm always struck by with memelords of the right is that it's less a "dark Enlightenment" than "dark post-modernism" because the first person I think of with "private tyranny" is Foucault who is probably not who they mean or are drawing on. And it's not the only example lot of the stuff on the American right's media just seems like a perverted, bastardised form of Baudrillard. I find it very weird and like the post-modern thinkers are the best for helping think through American politics right now - but not in any way I would have ever predicted

[Jacob]

That matches my perspective Sheilbh.

I think a few decades ago the right was railing against "moral relativism" and post-modernism because it meant there was no morality and no objective facts and people could just do whatever they wanted. And that was obviously no good.

Then at some point they had an epiphany and thought "oh wait so *I* can just make up facts too, and construct reality however I want it?" And then they went whole hog on that, with no regard for quaint things like facts or morality - it's all just empty Baudrillardian signifiers, constructed meaning, and Foucaultian means of control all the way down for the singular purpose of building up personal power.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - it's wild and I agree.

I'd add to that I can't think of a better example of a "long march through the institutions" than the American conservative legal movement. Additionally what I think is the key difference between Trump I and Trump II is that in the intervening four years people around Trump went out and built a party, they recruited cadres and apparatchiks to fill the bureaucracy.

It's like the only people listening to a century of left-wing philosophy were the worst people imaginable (while, sadly, too many liberals and liberal-left types basically thought we were all on the same side really).

[Tonitrus]

How do monarchists fit into those groups?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025

[...]

"If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictatorphobia," Yarvin said in the 2012 speech in which he described RAGE. Yarvin has since toned down the dictator rhetoric (he more recently called for a "monarchy of everyone"), but the underlying principle remains unchanged. For Yarvin, democracy is an illusion: elections make people think they have a say in what happens, but the Cathedral, his catchall term for journalistic institutions and elite universities, runs everything. Monarchy, in this theory, is the only honest government.

[...]

Yarvin's Cathedral takes this argument a step further, extending the cabal beyond Congress, the White House, and the courts; the media and elite universities are part of it, too. Where other right-wingers back efforts to take over universities and elite institutions and dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Yarvin has written that these tactics will likely only "reinforce progressive cultural power." He's kind of an all-or-nothing doomer; his ultimate vision is an American monarchy run by a "national CEO," or in Yarvin's own words, "a dictator." (Trump, famously, has said he would not be a dictator in office "except for day one.")

[...]

"Monarchy of Everyone"?  Has a very Hobbesian tinge...

[Savonarola]

"Monarchy of Everyone"?  Has a very Hobbesian tinge...

Au contraire, mon frère, it's very Huey P. Long.

(Randy Newman singing lead, off his album "Good Ole Boys", but the song was written by the Kingfish himself.)

[viper37]

Intelligence Agencies Step Up Spying on Greenland

"The U.S. is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America's spying apparatus into President Trump's campaign to take over the island," the Wall Street Journal reports.

"Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a 'collection emphasis message' to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland's independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island."

Fortunately, the DNI reuse the same weak password everywhere, and there are leaks everywhere.

[Jacob]

That information is pretty readily available. You just have to ask. In fact, attitudes towards resource extraction was the top election issue in Greenland two elections ago. And attitudes toward independence is one of the defining characteristics of every political party in Greenland.

[The Minsky Moment]

That information is pretty readily available. You just have to ask. In fact, attitudes towards resource extraction was the top election issue in Greenland two elections ago. And attitudes toward independence is one of the defining characteristics of every political party in Greenland.

It's well known to everyone capable of reading a decent newspaper, which explains why the Trump administration has no idea.

[Grey Fox]

Yarvin to me just sounds like a dude that read a bunch of Richelieu writings and just started rolling with it.

[Syt]

Trump supposedly plans to announce that the US will start calling the Persian Gulf the Arab Gulf during his trip to the region.

We're ever more living in different realities.