I hope this doesn’t come across as too tacky, but today is my birthday and I’m making a request. Namely, that if you find this newsletter worthwhile, you consider sharing it with someone you think might also find it worthwhile to subscribe.
Thanks for that, and thank you for reading.
About Trump’s announcement last night, since it’s always the same combination of falsehoods and preposterous bombast, I’m just going to share a couple of older pieces I’ve written about him, which remain relevant to understanding what we’ll be dealing with for the next two years (and hopefully not longer than that).
The first one is a piece I wrote for the INDY Weekly of North Carolina, in 2019, about Trumpism’s relationship to facts:
Since the beginning of the Trump era, however, nonsense has become the standard form of communication. Discussing Trump’s inauguration, then-press secretary Sean Spicer made the preposterous claim that it was substantially bigger than Obama’s. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer’s claim because, she said, he was just citing “alternative facts.”
It’s a nonsense statement that has become the leitmotif for the Trump regime.
Since Trump is a never-ending font of lies and nonsense, defending him at all costs requires in-kind utterances. In early November, Trump’s daughter Ivanka suggested that the Trump appointees now testifying against him were evidence that her father had assembled a Lincolnesque “team of rivals.” Thus, Ivanka concluded, this is just “history repeating itself.”
Explaining why this is the most ridiculous historical comparison imaginable gives it too much credence. After all, it’s not intended to be a factual statement. Indeed, had Ivanka been asked which president’s cabinet the impeachment inquiry reminded her of, it would have made as much sense for her to have answered, “Purple.”
In Trumpworld, they’re not even trying anymore. Nonsense is the whole game. And the consequences are utterly sinister.
Any engagement with their words should begin with the understanding that the goal is to subvert the ordinary rules of language—to spew nonsense to defend the indefensible.
And this, from the newsletter, earlier this year:
In fact, however, Trump has lived in a cocoon of astonishing privilege and insularity and has never experienced accountability for any of his endless ethical and criminal transgressions. That life experience has reinforced the lack of conscience that is surely a family inheritance. For Trump, there’s no reason to differentiate fact from fiction. All that matters is what serves his purposes at any given moment. Neither circumstantially nor characterologically has Trump ever been compelled to think otherwise. That includes having any moral compunction about inciting mobs to kill people. The only sensations he would likely have felt about his actions on January 6 were the titillation he surely derives from having such power and the fury he experiences whenever he doesn’t get his way.
Regrettably, this won’t be the final word.
Happy birthday
My very very favorite classical 20th-century composer was born on November 16, 1895. Paul Hindemith