A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

Lewis Lapham

Being an American in these times is a bewildering and exhausting experience. The current Trump regime is both ridiculous and lethal at the same time, providing endless fodder for both comedy and terror. This tragi-comic reality, where the heights of laughable absurdity load onto the same landing page as the depths of despicable cruelty, is undoubtedly causing untold psychic damage to the American populace.

Consider these recent headlines:

• The vanity film “Melania” is released at the end of January, a bizarre wealth-porn tribute to gaudy excess and raw power — but more importantly, it produced a $28 million windfall for the sitting First Lady.
• Trump wears a gaudy white-and-gold branded baseball hat to the dignified transfer ceremony of the first American casualties from the invasion of Iran. After a substantial backlash, he skipped the second transfer event, perhaps to inspect some other new merch.
• Pete Hegseth bars certain photographers from his press briefings, because they published some “unflattering” pics of him.
• And lurking in the near future, UFC Freedom 250 is still on track for June 14th. In case you’ve just awoken from a yearlong coma, this is a mixed martial arts event slated to take place on the South Lawn of the…. White House.

Of course, it is no secret that one of the weaknesses of the first Trump term was that he did not populate his staff with enough made-for-TV peeps. Instead, he had a lot of traditional type people, Republican functionaries with experience at, you know, running stuff. And while those folks certainly didn’t lift America up to glorious heights of justice, equity, and fairness, they at least kept the lights on and prevented a full-blown slide into authoritarianism.

Not so with Trump 2.0. This regime is telegenic cosplay all the way down. Trump sees people he likes on TV, and that’s it, they’re in. Kash Patel, the departed Dan Bogino, Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and so on. Kristi Noem, another grossly incompetent but flowing-locked hack, is gone now, but her replacement will likely be Markwayne Mullin, another cranial lightweight who talks tough and loud about things he doesn’t begin to understand (like the “smell” of war — except it’s not a war — unless it is, or maybe isn’t)

We shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs, this obsession with image and clickability over expertise and experience. Trump himself has lived his entire life as a media product. From his playboy youth to his centrality in the wheeling-and-dealing 80s, and then onto movie cameos and his own TV shows, Trump has always craved the flashbulbs and red carpets, the latter preferably lined with leggy starlets. Even as president, he has always looked liked he’s just cosplaying as Commander in Chief, more concerned with suits and salutes than with substantive policy issues or the art of political compromise. And although there is no doubt that he craves the role of dictator, I believe he actually wants that not because of any historic, monumental mission he wants to complete, but simply because dictators look cool, getting (faux) praise and adoration from all corners. For dictators, all media coverage is glowing, all pictures are magnificent, and all public places are palaces, gilded in gold and draped in silk. As dictator, everyone will be “fair” to him, because they’ll have to be (what this says about his bottomless need for approval I’ll leave to the professionals).

But our current tragi-comic cosplay regime is really just the culmination of a much older project, one begun in the ancient days of Bill Clinton. In the 90s, Slick Willy pivoted the Democratic Party away from its traditional base (unions, city machines, blue collar workers, urban underclasses), instead “triangulating” over to the pursuit of big money. This created an identity crisis for the GOP, which had historically been the Big Money party. How would they distinguish themselves, now that Clinton was making it cool for rich folks to vote blue? The answer: move the Republican party out of socioeconomic reality altogether, into a newly-coalescing landscape of cultural warfare, a simulacrum molded out of talk radio, cable news, and the rapidly-expanding world of the internet.

Led by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Rupert Murdoch, the modern conservative movement, the grandfather of Trumpism, was born. Using the new media tools, these Three Horsemen created the polarized pond in which we all currently swim. Using the foundation of rural-vs-urban conflict, which is a phenomenon as old as civilization itself, layer upon layer of grievance and resentment was piled on top of the Country Mouse/City Mouse base, creating a new media universe where all things conservative were good, and all things liberal were evil. The information silos which are so ubiquitous today were birthed in this period, with 24-hour messaging about the horrific inhumanity of “the other side.”

The problem for the GOP, of course, is that while this media-driven, quasi-theological, cosmic warfare between righteous conservatives and demonic libs is going on, the actual mechanics of our economy and government remain unchanged, so that virtually all the spoils of economic growth and increased productivity are heaped onto the money-piles of the already-rich. In essence, politicians of both parties are simply the support staff for the plutocrats, spinning out stories for the masses, explanations for economic injustice and precarity that blame the other side for our troubles, instead of putting the blame where it belongs (after all, just look up if you want to see where all your money is).

This is not to say that Dems and Republicans are equally culpable for our current polycrisis. Despite the popular conception of conservatives as the adults in the room, it is actually liberals who are more rooted in reality nowadays. Yes, both “sides” are infected by the scourge of information silos, but Dems have to be more in touch with actual socioeconomic conditions on the ground, largely due to the simple fact that most economic activity and social change happens in blue areas, especially in large urban locales.

By contrast, conservatism under Trump has reached cosplay critical mass, with the president and his minions acting out their celebrity tough-guy fantasies in real time, at the controls of the most powerful and dangerous mechanisms the world has ever known. Detached from reality, these tragi-comic faux warriors are dropping billions of dollars of munitions on other countries, killing their children, kidnapping and assassinating their leaders, threatening annexation of other sovereign allies, bankrupting domestic businesses with masochistic tariffs, and playing economic chicken with the entire world, all while obsessing over how previous presidents looked while climbing stairs (Obama apparently “bopped” too much, which is “unpresidential”).

This juxtaposition of the most powerful country in the world doing incredible amounts of damage to its internal population and to the world at large, set against the petty teenage infatuation with image and forced flattery, is absolutely and infuriatingly disorienting. But that is our current state of affairs. The only antidote to this maximum universe of fantasy is to create a different concrete reality from the ground up. Other posts on this blog detail the kinds of things I think have to be done to create this new reality — so check those out at your leisure.