Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

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Trump Diary 8: Pseudonormalization Prevails

22 April 2017 / / 0 Comments

How far we are from a month ago. One of the reasons I started writing these entries, and probably the main reason, was because I was certain the high emotions and crisis mentality of the election and inauguration would not endure in the same form for long and would quickly turn into something else. Some aspects of the dominant narrative (on all sides) would fade into the background, while others would be decay into more stable forms like radioisotopes. I wasn’t sure which, but I wanted to take my own snapshots of the world in its highly unstable form.

Sure enough, I look back at the early Trump Diaries and they read like missives from a different world. The seething paranoia bred by the travel ban has died down. There have been no mass mobilizations like the one spurred by the initial travel ban, which was the moment the shoe dropped and Trump had to make a decision on whether or not to flinch. Trump flinched.

Fewer people are concocting conspiracy theories about Trump consolidating power in a “coup,” especially with Steve Bannon’s apparent marginalization. Bannon was reduced to allying with his sworn enemy Reince Priebus in order to retain influence, after Trump’s other advisers became disgusted with the Priebus House Republican faction (over the health care bill disaster) and Bannon (over all the other disasters). The supposed Bannon quote, “I love a gunfight” looks like embarrassing posturing now. I assume the people who leaked the quote knew it would, just like leaking that Bannon called Jared Kushner a “globalist cuck” signals that Bannon is no smarter than the idiots who thought Trump would give them a white ethno-state.

In money terms, Robert and Rebekah Mercer (Bannon’s biggest backers) are out, and the Koch Brothers (who back Bush/Romney-style corporatist Republicans) are back in.

Trump is tweeting a lot less, having given up on the inauguration crowd size and mass voter fraud windmills. Putin and Trump are no longer BFFs. (The Syria strike put a definitive end to that.) Trump now likes NATO. Trump has either abandoned or sidelined his most radical anti-establishment stances, to the open dismay of his core. The narrative of narcissistic megalomania has been replaced with the narrative of incompetent failure, at all levels.

I said in February that Trump would not want to give the establishment the satisfaction of admitting they were right:

To stop the flood of leaks and trash talk, all Trump would have to do is to give in and agree to do things their way (that is, the way they’ve been done since Eisenhower, loosely speaking), but because he believes he’s suffered injury at the hands of the CIA, the State Department, the news media, the Democrats, most Republicans, and more or less anyone who’s ever had to deal with him, he doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction.

I also said in February that Trump was doomed to lose his battle against the establishment, because he could not amass allies for that battle. He lost. So the flood has stopped. With the sidelining of Bannon, at the urging of nearly everyone else in the administration, the number of stories about White House dysfunction has severely dried up.

I am certain that there is still great dissent within the ranks. You can’t get rid of sentiments like these so quickly:

Politico: “The various warring fiefdoms and camps within the White House are constantly changing and are so vast and complicated in their nature,” said one former Trump campaign aide, “that there is no amount of reporting that could accurately describe the subterfuge, animosity and finger-pointing that is currently happening within the ranks of the senior staff.”

What has happened, I believe, is that White House staffers now have an incentive to keep their mouths shut and not talk to reporters. And I think that’s because there is no longer quite the constant stress of random chaos imposed by (a) Trump’s going off message on Twitter and elsewhere, and (b) Steve Bannon. They now feel they have a chance of survival, and they are more willing to bury hatchets and stick together. They’re still miserable but they are engaging in less friendly fire.

In the place of civil war is a very familiar combination of (a) corporatism and (b) the military-industrial complex, one which has been with us since Reagan and to a lesser extent since Truman. The military-industrial complex side is represented by National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who replaced Michael Flynn. McMaster consolidated power quickly. Though Trump promised Flynn deputy K. T. McFarland that she could stay on with McMaster, it wasn’t long before McMaster got her fired and replaced her with the ultra-establishment Dina Powell. McMaster also kicked Bannon off of the National Security Council, instigating Bannon’s subsequent fall.

The corporate side is represented by Gary Cohn (Goldman Sachs), Dina Powell (Goldman Sachs), Steve Mnuchin (Goldman Sachs), and Jared Kushner (Goldman Sachs) himself. Cohn, Mnuchin, and Kushner are Jewish, while Powell (née Dina Habib) is an Egyptian Coptic. Predictably (well, I predicted it), Trump’s white nationalist fans are complaining of a “Jewish coup.” Sorry, racists: if you wanted to dislodge Goldman Sachs, you should have found a brighter revolutionary than Steve Bannon and a more loyal demagogue than Trump. Trump ultimately had to side with the people who were nominally capable of doing their jobs. Bannon brought nothing but losses.

Just as I feared excess paranoia in the early days of Trump, I now fear excess normalization. I think we are going to see an increasing number of “Trump has been tamed” editorials from the right, which will be tacitly accepted by the mainstream. Trump will still be awful, just as George W. Bush was awful, but he won’t be the walking constitutional crisis he’s been portrayed as for the last year. Too many people are looking to escape that narrative, because it’s exhausting and unsustainable. When we heard this after Trump bombed Syria–

Fareed Zakaria, CNN: I think Donald Trump became President of the United States last night.

It was an exercise in wish fulfillment. It was because Zakaria wanted Trump to become President of the United States. It was because Zakaria wanted things to return to normal and to sanity.

So expect a lot more of this:

Ed Rogers, WaPo: Yet, a lot of left-wing commentators are saying don’t try to normalize Trump, he is not normal, and there must be resistance to his presidency and anyone working in his administration. Well, bad news for them: The normalization of Trump’s presidency may be happening on its own as reality and a sense of responsibility seeps into the Oval Office and those around it.

Rogers is an old-school Republican politico, but on the very same day (April 13), we have this from two of the Post’s own reporters:

WaPo: Donald Trump campaigned as an outsider who would upend years of Washington orthodoxy in matters of both war and peace — an approach that helped him assemble the unconventional coalition that ultimately won him the presidency. But in recent days, the president has done an about-face and embraced many of the policy positions he once scorned as the trappings of a foolhardy establishment. Trump voiced support for NATO, which he called “obsolete” during the campaign. He walked back his pledge to label China a currency manipulator and ­endorsed the Export-Import Bank, which he had opposed. These and other recent flip-flops have soothed the nerves of many Republicans who worried he was looking to upend too much of the status quo. “I would say this is looking more now like a more conventional Republican administration,” said Elliott Abrams, who served as a foreign policy adviser in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. “To me, that’s a very good thing.”

The reason for this normalization is that much of the anti-Trump narrative, from the right as well as from the center-left, was less about Trump’s actual policies than about his anti-establishment tone, boorish personality, and agonistic tactics–as well as the constant chaos emanating from such. What was ideologically permissible from Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, and Dick Cheney was not permissible from Donald Trump. Ultra-establishment Republican Peggy Noonan (who just won the Pulitzer Prize) made a telling point at the end of March, after Trump lost his showdown with the Freedom Caucus over the healthcare bill:

WaPo: Once you use the stick, it is hard to start handing out carrots again. If the Freedom Caucus caves at this point, they will look weak. Trump has become the boy who cries wolf. If he doesn’t follow through after drawing this red line, his words will seem hollow. Bluster works better in business than politics. Peggy Noonan argues artfully in her column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal that Trump’s mishandling of this Obamacare fight, including the latest attacks on the Freedom Caucus, shows that he really doesn’t understand who makes up his base or how to pass legislation. “Whenever I used to have disagreements with passionate pro-Trump people, I’d hear their arguments, weigh their logic and grievances. I realized after a while that in every conversation we always brought different experiences to the table,” Noonan writes. “I had worked in a White House. I had personally observed its deeper realities and requirements. Their sense of how a White House works came from … TV shows such as ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Scandal.’ Those are dark, cynical shows that more or less suggest anyone can be president. I don’t mean that in the nice way. Those programs don’t convey how a White House is an organism demanding of true depth, of serious people, real professionals. A president has to be a serious person too, and not only an amusing or stimulating talker, or the object of a dream.”

Noonan’s implicit point here is that The West Wing is the standard, not House of Cards. And indeed, no administration could survive the level of melodrama portrayed on television. But not being House of Cards does not make you The West Wing, just as not being Chicken Little doesn’t make you Pollyanna. Anyone who lived through Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld should realize that. When it comes to gravitas, It’s not professionalism, or seriousness, or depth that matters, but having the right connections and speaking the right language. FEMA, the CDC, and the EPA may have turned into a joke under Bush, but Bush could not be dislodged from being “serious.” Noonan, without realizing it, is making the classic elite argument: Donald Trump cannot be president, but George W. Bush can. I do not find this especially reassuring. There is a similar irony in the fact that David Frum, the coiner of the “Axis of Evil,” is now being elevated by The Atlantic as the principled conservative warning of Trumpian autocracy. (In fact, he called it the “axis of hatred” and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson dubbed it the “Axis of Evil,” but I think my point stands.)

So we have the Trump administration going through a false normalization. Jeff Sessions will still quietly be rounding up more immigrants; the EPA will still be gutted; neocon hawkishness is re-ascendant (with bipartisan backing). The administration, if not Trump himself, is speaking the language of DC better. 39 out of 47 major newspaper editorials supported the Syria strike. (See the breakdown here. Was it a good idea? I, like the authors of these editorials and like Trump himself, do not know.)

So these dismaying trends will not seem egregious in the way that the travel ban did, which makes them that much more likely to succeed and endure. There will probably be few legislative atrocities due to internecine Republican warfare; Trump’s largest impact will be through the executive branch.

Two major differences remain, however.

First, the administration is wildly understaffed and non-functional, with only 22 political appointees confirmed, another 60 in the pipeline, and nearly 500 positions without even a nomination. (Trump is not behind most presidents in confirmations, but he is way behind on finding actual candidates.) HUD, Interior, State, Agriculture, Labor, Interior, Energy, Education, and of course the EPA all look to be running ghost crews for some time. It’s hard to measure the effect this is having, and whether it’s resulting in Obama-era continuity or actual stasis. Either way, though, the overall effect will be entropic. In the absence of leadership or direction, things will stop getting done. They will be little things, but they will add up. It will be hard to assess the consequences directly, unless mid-level staffers leak, but I believe the overall result will be a notable decrease in government functionality and efficiency, without any decline in its cost. With it looking less likely that Trump will get his major government funding cuts, the federal government may just become sclerotic for the next few years. The difference will be most noticeable in times of crisis: FEMA, for example. A repeat or two of Michael Brown’s performance during Hurricane Katrina seems inevitable. But I think the overall damage will be far greater than under Bush.

Second, there is Trump himself, hobbled, humbled, and humiliated, but still defective and unpredictable. For now he seems to be guided by Jared Kushner above all in his desperate turn toward Goldman Sachs and McMaster, but when this turn fails to yield him love and success, as it will, it’s difficult to predict what will come next. At the center of the Trump administration remains the void himself, reluctantly allowing himself to be remade in the establishment mold, but still fundamentally incompetent and narcissistic and stuck in the midst of a party at war with itself. If he goes with the flow, the elites may begin to ignore this fact, especially with his tweets seemingly drying up. But what if he changes his mind?

Why Social Construction Is True

1 April 2017 / / 6 Comments

The term “social construction” and its cousin “cultural construction” get casually tossed around a lot these days. Sometimes it’s used negatively, as a pejorative way of referring to those damn relativistic lefties. Sometimes it’s used approvingly, as a potted rejection of someone else’s position by saying, “Oh, that’s just your truth.” Either way, there’s almost always a sloppiness that tends to equate belief in social construction with relativism–especially the dreaded moral relativism. And that’s simply not the case. What follows are cribnotes on why truth is indeed socially constructed, but why relativism does not follow from it.

The real meaning of social construction is linguistic. What it means, in a nutshell, is that we could all agree tomorrow to call the sky red instead of blue, and that would not cause any problem for us. Now, this wouldn’t change in isolation. Lots of other adjustments would have to be made in order to start calling blue things red and red things blue (or some third color, in which case lather rinse repeat). So while this would be a logistical nightmare, it is still potentially possible. Adjust language in the right way by shifting enough terms, and we can go on as we did before without anyone being the wiser. By consensus, we have now changed the truth from “The sky is blue” to “The sky is red.” That is social construction.

But, you may say, the real truth hasn’t changed at all! What real truth? “The sky is still blue!” you say. No, it’s not. The sky was blue yesterday, and today it isn’t. Truths can only be expressed in mutually intelligible terms, and if you want to be left behind still calling the sky blue, you can, but now it’s you who is wrong. Social construction is not about reality, it’s about words. We don’t choose our reality, but we do choose our words–collectively.

The tricky part comes when people don’t agree on the truth. If some people say the sky is blue and some people say the sky is red, now you have to do the work of figuring out why they disagree. Maybe they just have different words for the same color. Maybe one group of people has different cones in their eyes that actually make the sky look like a different color. All of these things can be experimentally tested, because truths have to fit together with one another. If both groups agree that the wavelength of blue/red light is 475nm, then clearly it’s the same color, and there’s just terminological confusion (unless they don’t agree on numbers either, but you get the idea). If one group says the sky is blue and 475nm, and the other group says the sky is red and 730nm, then science has got some work to do in order to decide which of them is totally wrong. Naturally, the two groups have to agree to the rules of science and agree to abide by the results and agree on what abiding by the results means…but at the end of the day, cultural construction is not some free-for-all. It’s just the contract we make in order to be able to agree on anything.

On the other hand, it also means that there’s very little meaning in being right by yourself. If you think the sky’s wavelength is about 475nm (which it is), and everyone else thinks it’s 730nm (which it isn’t), you have two options. You can try to convince people that you’re right, marshaling the evidence and arguments to do so, or you can sit quietly and wait for vindication beyond the grave when someone else figures out how wrong everyone has been. But what if they never do? I’m afraid you’re stuck. You can’t be said to have been right because no one will be around to say it. Truth is linguistic, which means that unless there later comes to be a consensus that you were right, you weren’t. That’s not relativism, that’s just how the game is played.

Contrariwise, even if the entire world believes that the sky’s wavelength is about 475nm, there’s nothing to say that at some point in the distant future we won’t be proven oh so wrong and people will look back on us and say, “What fools they were!” In exchange for the pain of truth requiring some kind of social consensus, you get the pleasure of being able to doubt anything anyone says due to the possibility, however distant, of it being overturned in the future. And so the lumbering human process of truthseeking rolls along.

I began with the most objective and “scientific” examples because things get far muddier when it comes to morality and valuation in general. If there is no scientific fact to discover, as people generally assume when it comes to ethics, does that mean that morality really is relativistic? You don’t really need to answer that question, because it comes out in the wash. Social practices will inevitably spit out moral systems, which will argue with one another and end up settling on some set of values. We don’t know for sure whether a particular moral system is correct–but how is this different from science? Because, you might say, the methodology is totally different! You don’t conduct experiments to test moral hypotheses! (Unless you’re one of those analytic philosophers, that is.) That’s true. But just because there’s a different adjudication process doesn’t mean that it’s somehow more relativistic. Rather, it means that morality is only as morally relativistic as we say it is. If everyone in the world were to agree that morality is absolute, then it might as well be, because who’s going to disagree?

Admittedly, that’s not a very satisfying answer when it comes to morality, but it gives some hint of how empty absolute relativism is. At the bottom, you have to agree on some purported absolutes just to get along in the world. Most of them won’t be moral laws, but there’s no intrinsic prohibition on them being absolutes–at least, not according to social construction. All social construction dictates, rather, is that the limits of what we term the “absolute” stop at what we collectively agree to be true, because how could we possibly get more absolute than that?

Trump Diary 7: March 14, 2017

14 March 2017 / / 1 Comment

Donald Trump’s business pattern is to leave behind a burnt-out husk where a viable institution once stood. With the audacious but messy moves of the first month out of the way (the travel ban chief among them), Trump is reverting to form.

The State Department is running a barely-functioning ghost crew, with Tillerson invisible. This anonymous quote eerily mirrors my earlier statement that Trump’s administration looked like the end of a ruling junta, with paranoia preventing delegation of authority to anyone beyond the most trusted inner circle:

Atlantic: “They think Jared [Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law] can do everything. It’s reminiscent of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.”

Huge numbers of appointed government positions go unfilled because Trump’s administration can’t find loyalists to staff them. I guess they can’t just put random Trump-supporting hacks in there because the vetting on them will fall apart. So given Trump’s 100% Loyalty or Else policy, the administration is probably literally incapable of staffing their own government. The great exception is the military, which Trump has not messed with and where he has appointed clearly competent people–and even fired some incompetent ones, like Flynn.

And most of all, Trump is scapegoating his own. I’ve lost track of the times Trump has blamed Obama for one thing or another, but the “Blame your predecessor” tactic only goes so far, and it’s pretty useless when it comes to actual legislating. So now that the ACA repeal attempt is going very badly, Trump’s standard operating procedure deems that the blame be placed on a convenient scapegoat, and today’s scapegoat is Paul Ryan. WaPo summarizes the narrative being advanced by the Bannon faction:

WaPo: Poor Trump only backs the Republican health-care plan because that dastardly Ryan has conned him into thinking the bill repeals the Affordable Care Act and can actually get through Congress. Don’t blame Trump for supporting the bill; blame Ryan for fooling Trump into supporting the bill. Also, Ryan is a loser…White House press secretary Sean Spicer “is working internally as hard as he can to help Ryan on this front, regardless of the impact on Trump, along with a handful of other White House aides who came from the Republican National Committee and are not Trump loyalists.” Traitors! All these establishment types are undermining the president, according to Breitbart. When the GOP health-care bill fails, it will be their fault, not Trump’s.

Well, Bannon and Co. certainly know how to play to Trump. Giving him a reason and target in advance is as sure-fire a strategy as any. It’s bad news for the Republican Party, and for me it’s possibly a bit of good news, since the likely end result appears to be Ryan’s fall and subsequent replacement with some Trump-complicit stooge, who will then be completely unable to deliver House votes for any of Trump’s priorities. That is, unless House Republicans decide to stick with Ryan and turn on Trump–but that would be a pretty tall order, especially given how awful Ryan’s bill has turned out to be: not draconian enough to satisfy the wingnuts, but electorally disastrous enough to alienate anyone concerned with their re-election. (Ryan, it seems, really believes that magic will happen if you just deregulate and eliminate government.) Regardless, the circular firing squad is not conducive to legislation, and once again validates my thought that Trump will only accomplish things through the executive branch.

Trump, meanwhile, is driven by insecurity and narcissism to the point of constant distraction. Even leaving aside the wiretapping craziness, he apparently has a great man chart comparing himself to Obama, and he doesn’t feel he’s stacking up well.

Robert Costa: He truly thinks day to day about President Obama and he compares himself to how much President Obama was able to accomplish in his first few months in office. Why? He is somewhat haunted, as some put it to me, by President Obama’s first term. I’m not sure, I’m not a psychologist. But he does often talk about what President Obama was able to do with a Democratic Congress back in 2009.

Trump entitlement complex remains a huge weakness, where apparently he’s already done great things and isn’t being credited for them–the great thing in question being that he delivered a vaguely “presidential” speech:

CNN: Trump is upset because he doesn’t believe he is getting the credit he thinks he deserves for his time in office so far because of self-inflicted wounds and missteps, the source said. President Donald Trump is extremely frustrated with his senior staff and communications team for allowing the firestorm surrounding Attorney General Jeff Sessions to steal his thunder in the wake of his address to Congress, sources tell CNN.

When it came out that Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the Russia investigations on his own initiative, rather than on Trump’s order, I wondered if Sessions had switched into self-preservation mode. Trump really hates it when other people try to protect themselves, though. Trump threw a fit and tossed Priebus and Bannon off his plane as he stormed off to Mar-a-lago for the weekend.

Bonus points to Trump for playing the self-pitying “I’m misunderstood” card two months into office.

NYT: “I think I’ve done great things, but I don’t think I have — I and my people — I don’t think we’ve explained it well enough to the American public,” he said. “I think I get an A in terms of what I’ve actually done, but in terms of messaging, I’d give myself a C or a C-plus.”

It’s just pathetic. As I said before, comparisons to Mussolini are off the mark because Trump really doesn’t seek power, just adulation. He doesn’t even seem to see power as a prerequisite to adulation (money, yes, but not power). If there’s a past figure he resembles, it’s probably Nero. America’s burning.

Milo Minderbinder

Trump Diary 6: February 21, 2017

21 February 2017 / / 0 Comments

Milo Yiannopoulos’ fatal flaw was being English. I’ll explain.

I’m breaking my No Milo policy because while I maintain that Milo Yiannopoulos functions as a decoy to distract his opponents from things of actual importance, the story of his downfall is of some importance for understanding the state of the Republican coalition today. Beginning with a tweet from the anti-Trump ReaganCoalition and an article in Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, Yiannopoulos’ fall took place over the course of late Sunday and Monday: he was disinvited from the CPAC conference, he lost his much-criticized book deal with Simon & Schuster, he has resigned from Breitbart, and there’s generally been a feeding frenzy. Meanwhile, Trump announced a draconian plan for deporting illegal immigrants, particularly non-criminals, and Yiannopoulos is doing a fine job of distracting people from it. So even now he is serving his purpose.

The attack seems to have originated with the NeverTrump wing of the media, though it was quickly taken up by mainstream media as well as some erstwhile allies of Yiannopoulos. (Six employees of Breitbart reportedly threatened to quit if Yiannopoulos was not fired.) And the attack is clearly a product of organized, right-wing research and publicity. This clip had been readily available for a year and somehow only came to prominence just before he was going to have a beachhead into mainstream conservatism via CPAC. Yes, it was a hit job. Since this is the game Yiannopoulos himself plays, the question isn’t whether he “deserves” his present misfortune (you pays your money and you takes your chances), but why a canny operator such as him didn’t see this coming. And the reason is because he’s English. Again, I will explain….

Yiannopoulos’ speech is not uniquely horrible among right-wing pundits. The bulk of Yiannopoulos’ writings remains undifferentiable from that of many other conservative pundits and even other Simon & Schuster authors. If you look back at Robert Bork’s later books, they’re filled with conspiracy theorizing and sweeping attacks that make Yiannopoulos look like an also-ran. (“Feminists within the [Catholic] church engage in neo-pagan ritual magic and the worship of pagan goddesses.”) If you look at CPAC speakers this year, well, they’ve got a guy representing the purported reincarnation of the Buddha. (Thanks to Brett Fujioka for that tip.) They’re a reminder that we’ve been here before.

Simon & Schuster’s other right-wing authors (mostly through their Threshold imprint) that didn’t provoke this sort of outrage include:

  • James O’Keefe
  • Rush Limbaugh
  • Michelle Malkin
  • Laura Ingraham
  • Glenn Beck
  • Karl Rove
  • John Bolton
  • Dick Cheney
  • Donald J. Trump

Did Yiannopoulos really cross some boundary, any boundary, that none of these others did? None of these authors caused Roxane Gay to leave Simon & Schuster, peppered my Facebook wall with calls for boycotts and marches, or resulted in Berkeley getting its campus torched. Excluding Trump, these authors kept a low profile outside of the conservative community. (Ann Coulter, who has had more of a mainstream media presence, has suffered some of the same ostracism from the right that Yiannopoulos is now facing, though not to this degree.) So even things like Limbaugh’s attacks on Sandra Fluke (whom the Daily Caller is still attacking) or O’Keefe’s cons didn’t raise the level of ire that Yiannopoulos did on a regular basis.

What was unique about Yiannopoulos was his audience, which constituted something of a vanguard. Most of the people who listen to right-wing media sources are firmly ensconced in the right-wing bubble. You don’t see Rush Limbaugh fans posting his picture on Twitter and Facebook, nor do you see Pamela Geller getting banned from Twitter. Milo was extremely talented at attracting positive and negative attention from a far younger (and louder) generation than right-wing apparatchiks usually ever manage. He had a legion of young trolls aggressively pushing him, and he had a legion of mindlessly outraged leftist pod people giving him more publicity than his fans ever could. It wasn’t until the Berkeley fiasco that his book shot to the top of the bestseller list.

But speaking at CPAC was a bridge too far. And this is where, I believe, Yiannopoulos lacked a true understanding of America. He only arrived here in 2015; prior to that his experience was entirely in the UK at Breitbart UK, which pushed the UKIP/Farage point of view but lacked any appeal to the vast majority of American Republicans, who care somewhat about immigration but care just as much if not more about abortion, guns, African-Americans, terrorism, Obamacare, and deviancy. That last one is the crux.

Within Tory circles, homosexuality is simply not a dealbreaker, and hasn’t been for a long time. While Michael Portillo’s rejection of his camp, gay past and declaration of present straightness might seem a bit forced, is there a single Republican in America who even has such a past? That’s not to say the Tories haven’t pushed anti-LGBT policies. It’s a cultural issue, not a policy one.

For contrast, the vast majority of Republican voters and Republican leaders look at Yiannopoulos and do not see a right-wing firebrand forging a new alliance with young Americans. They see him as a repulsive gay foreigner first and foremost, and that is all they will ever see him as. Those in the leadership are not so dogmatic as to think that he can’t be useful as the sort of decoy that he had become, but they do not want him anywhere near their parties. They don’t want him hanging around CPAC, or CCC, or really anywhere in middle America. They want him on university campuses and in liberals’ faces, where he belongs.  There’s already reports that the CPAC board was unhappy with Yiannopoulos being invited in the first place, and I wouldn’t be surprised if CPAC’s chair Matt Schlapp actually loses his job over this.

I have met many foreigners in my time who were shocked at the sheer degree of intolerance displayed by Republican politicians toward traditional objects of Republican ire (queers, minorities, atheists etc.). They tend to think that such rhetoric is just for show and that among the political elites, common sense and tacit tolerance prevail. They are very surprised to find that in fact, those beliefs go very deep indeed and have only been strengthened by the Tea Party’s ascent. They’re shocked that many Republicans genuinely are fanatics, rather than craven hypocritical politicians.

I think that this is where Yiannopoulos being English hurt him.  I think he truly underestimated the degree of intolerance he would face among Republicans as a self-declared cosmopolitan homosexual. Being Catholic (and of Jewish descent) did not help him either, since Republican elites (and Republicans in general) are deeply Protestant. They were willing to overlook such matters in the very special case of heterosexual atheist Trump, primarily because born-again evangelical Pence was on the ticket, but Yiannopoulos is not Trump. And when Yiannopoulos’ remarks on pedophilia/ephebophilia came out, they instantly confirmed every suspicion God-fearing Republicans harbor about Those Homosexuals and the “depraved, decadent” Yiannopoulos. I do not see homosexuality as having any relationship to pedophilia, but a significant swath of Republicans very much do. They still think we are, in Robert Bork’s terms, Slouching Toward Gomorrah. Recall the infamous 2009 DOMA brief (apparently written by Bush administration holdover W. Scott Simpson) that argued that banning gay marriage was merely akin to banning incest and pedophilia. And while pedophilia in particular is, if anything, more alarming to Britons than to Americans, Yiannopoulos would not have faced such powerful forces agitating for his destruction in the UK.

The irony is that for someone who played so well to the stark left/right divide in American culture, Yiannopoulos himself underestimated the width of that divide, thinking he could stake a hip beachhead in liberal youth culture without losing his conservative bona fides. He couldn’t. I don’t think anyone could. You are either of the body or not of the body, and Yiannopoulos was definitely not.

There’s a lesson to be learned here about the limits of the Republican coalition as it stands and the dilemmas it will face as it tries to sustain that coalition in the years to come. Trump turned out to be a one-time gift from God, mobilizing disparate forces against the capital-e Establishment. But I think that the strength of social and religious conservative forces has been underestimated recently in favor of the so-called “alt-right” nationalist and nativist forces, just as social and religious conservatism were overestimated in the wake of George W. Bush. It used to be that these two attitudes were united in the form of people like Pat Buchanan, but decreasing trust in the establishment has fractured the Republican base into more traditional far-right conservatives and the more radical anti-establishment reactionaries from whom Trump draws his most fervent support. Like Trump, Yiannopoulos appealed far more to the latter than the former, but Yiannopoulos was never at home with either. (White nationalist Richard Spencer was celebrating Yiannopoulos’ fall as loudly as anyone, having long derided him as “Alt Lite,” i.e., not sufficiently racist.)

Because of the current polarization, neither side has anywhere else to go. But Yiannopoulos’ success among a bizarre cross-section of America–and the unacceptability of that success to the political establishment he himself promoted–is a very significant indicator of the deep dissatisfaction felt by members on both sides of the political divide. Yiannopoulos may or may not return, but the forces he stirred up definitely will be.

Trump Diary 5: Feburary 15, 2017

15 February 2017 / / 1 Comment

Michael Flynn (office 9 in the above pic) resigned under pressure yesterday. The supposed reason being given is that he repeatedly lied to VP Pence about not having discussed sanctions with the Russians last year. Who knows if this is true? Firing Flynn makes Trump look doubly weak, first for having trusted him in the first place, and second for appearing to give into outside pressure days after saying all was hunky-dory. For a “The buck stops everywhere but here” guy like Trump, he’s going to need a scapegoat for forcing him to make Flynn a scapegoat.

And Trump definitely backed down. When the CIA rejected a security clearance for Flynn’s aid Robin Townley on Friday, it was tantamount to a declaration of war by the CIA on Flynn. Honestly, Flynn and Trump had already declared war on the CIA by denigrating it publicly, accusing ex-director John Brennan of leaking fake news, and generally being an idiot. It affirms what I said last time: if the far smarter Lenin was vexed and foiled by the primitive Russian bureaucracy he inherited after the Russian Revolution, what chance do Trump and Bannon stand against the far larger and more sophisticated American bureaucracy in their supposed revolution?

Here’s where this stops being a purported diary, because there’s a specific reason that makes me quite relieved that Flynn in particular is gone, but I can’t talk about it in public. So I have to break the illusion of writing just for myself and self-censor here. But this anecdote about Flynn speaking to the DIA in 2012 seems to encapsulate as well as any why I think it’s good he’s gone:

NYT: Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. Some also described him as a Captain Queeg-like character, paranoid that his staff members were undercutting him and credulous of conspiracy theories.

The larger question is how it relates to Russia and Trump’s bizarre inability to say anything bad about Putin. (Update: oops, he just told Putin to return the Crimea. That was a quick turnaround.) I think that’s a question for another day. There’s clearly a lot going on behind the scenes.

What happens next is hard to predict. The administration is already in permanent crisis mode, lines of communication are breaking down, and no one is in charge. As I’ve said before, it more closely resembles a junta at the end of its regime rather than at the beginning. At the center of it is the defective Donald Trump, walking around the White House like a zombie in the evenings, subsisting exclusively on a diet of cable news. And that’s the oddest thing about this spectacle, which is that the spectacle and its spectators are often indistinguishable. Take this:

Were there leaks from inside the NSC? Of course there were. “But the notion that these are political is wrong. These are patriots,” argued a former Obama administration official in comments to The Daily Beast. “They are all staff, from CIA, the State Department and Defense Department. They are…the all-star team from their respective agencies.”

“The reason why they are leaking is because they are cut out of the process and the process is dysfunctional,” the official said of conversations he had with such staffers still working at the NSC. “They are horrified. The general sense that the only way to impact policy is to get it on a morning show.”

So much of this is playing out in public because of Trump himself. Because he reacts to appearances, and cares only about his own appearance rather than accomplishing anything in itself, an issue truly does not register with him until it is public. And once it is public, he can’t let it go, whether it’s his 3 million popular vote loss or the size of the crowds at his inauguration. The news media, in turn, mindlessly feed this bottomless hunger by magnifying whatever the object of Trump’s angst is so that he sees it even more. It’s a codependent feedback loop, and it would be pretty funny if it weren’t such a gift to everyone Trump isn’t paying attention to.

But it’s also a comment on the strange medium that is news today. I’m not just talking about CNN here, but about the entire DC news media establishment. What we are effectively witnessing is not a war between the media and the Trump administration, but between the governmental establishment and Donald Trump himself, with the media being used as the vehicle for that conflict. (Some of the establishment is even in the White House: Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, VP Mike Pence, and Press Secretary Sean Spicer all have divided loyalties to say the least.)

Most of what constitutes political “news” in this day isn’t really related to investigation. Rather, it’s about connections and sources. There are reporters who come to be strongly identified with a particular set of sources. For example, during the Iraq War, there was Judith Miller on the side of the neocons and Walter Pincus on the side of the CIA veterans. David Farenthold’s much-hailed scoops on Trump’s finances last year were little more than actual reporting; the most remarkable thing about them was that a person such as him got into a position to get them printed by a major paper. I had a few significant scoops during my time as a journalist, and they were studiously ignored by the rest of the press, and others have told me the same thing. National journalism today is about access, not research.

Here are a couple striking recent examples of this sort of journalism:

NYT: Tony Thomas, head of the military’s Special Operations Command, expressed concern about upheaval inside the White House. “Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil. I hope they sort it out soon because we’re a nation at war,” he said at a military conference on Tuesday. Asked about his comments later, General Thomas said in a brief interview, “As a commander, I’m concerned our government be as stable as possible.”

NYT: Two people with direct access to the White House leadership said Mr. Flynn was surprised to learn that the State Department and Congress play a pivotal role in foreign arms sales and technology transfers. So it was a rude discovery that Mr. Trump could not simply order the Pentagon to send more weapons to Saudi Arabia — which is clamoring to have an Obama administration ban on the sale of cluster bombs and precision-guided weapons lifted — or to deliver bigger weapons packages to the United Arab Emirates.

Buzzfeed: “I was hoping you could tell me what the fuck is going on over there,” said one European Union intelligence official. “There’s no guide for handling this sort of situation, happening with such an important and powerful ally,” the official said. “If anything, it’s a wake up call to European leaders that counting on America isn’t currently a smart policy. Of course this is exactly what Putin wants — to destabilize the Atlantic alliance — but I have to counsel my policymakers the best I can and right now it’s, ‘Prepare to handle some crises without US support.’”

Politico: Trump often asks simple questions about policies, proposals and personnel. And, when discussions get bogged down in details, the president has been known to quickly change the subject — to “seem in control at all times,” one senior government official said — or direct questions about details to his chief strategist Steve Bannon, his son-in-law Jared Kushner or House Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump has privately expressed disbelief over the ability of judges, bureaucrats or lawmakers to delay — or even stop — him from filling positions and implementing policies.

Politico: If there is a single issue where the president feels his aides have let him down, it was the controversial executive order on immigration. The president has complained to at least one person about “how his people didn’t give him good advice” on rolling out the travel ban and that he should have waited to sign it instead of “rushing it like they wanted me to.” Trump has also wondered why he didn’t have a legal team in place to defend it from challenges.

WaPo: Former officials with deep knowledge of the presidency describe Donald Trump’s White House staff as top-heavy, with five or six power centers and little vertical structure. “The desire to be a big shot is overrunning any sense of team,” says one experienced Republican. “This will cause terrible dysfunction, distraction, disloyalty and leaks.”

WaPo: [Trump friend and Newsmax CEO] Christopher Ruddy went on to detail his critique of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus: “It’s my view that Reince is the problem. I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff — and Donald trusted him — but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work. He botched this whole immigration rollout. This should’ve been a win for Donald, not two or three weeks of negative publicity.” [Ruddy later backed down.]

These are killer quotes, but they’re not really “news” in the traditional sense. All such accounts and quotes from anonymous or even non-anonymous sources are given with some agenda in mind. They may be true, but they’re certainly all spun. And most of the spin these days is in a distinctively anti-Trump direction, because Trump scares the living daylights out of them and is incapable of reassuring them. They’re also given with a specific audience in mind, and that audience is sometimes Trump himself.

To stop the flood of leaks and trash talk, all Trump would have to do is to give in and agree to do things their way (that is, the way they’ve been done since Eisenhower, loosely speaking), but because he believes he’s suffered injury at the hands of the CIA, the State Department, the news media, the Democrats, most Republicans, and more or less anyone who’s ever had to deal with him, he doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction. So he’s stuck with Bannon and Miller’s vague ideas of taking on the establishment, just so he can show them all. I have been quite critical of the intelligence establishment over the years, and yet I find it incoherent to think of siding with Trump against them because Trump doesn’t stand for anything except his own self-aggrandizement. He doesn’t even pretend to care about anything else. The man is a void.

So now Trump is stuck getting angry at the media for printing verbatim words of executive branch employees. This is classic authoritarian paranoia, and it quickly will make any government sclerotic. With Trump, though, it takes on an ironic dimension because it’s only through the media that anything gets through to him at all. He has no interest in anything other than the vision of himself reflected through the television screen, and all the TV says is how that vision is screwing up royally. That moves him to action, but unpredictably. I imagine it as being like Hamlet if all Claudius ever did was watch plays. Suddenly Hamlet’s ridiculously circuitous plan to ascertain Claudius’ guilt is now the only way to get through to him.

And yet there’s a hollowness to it all, because all these news accounts are not striving to ascertain the facts or determine the truth, but are themselves mere receptacles for the parroting of other people’s images of the world. Reporters don’t fact-check these statements, because it’s not their claim, it’s just what a source said. If they can get nine sources to say it, that’s not an insignificant detail, but at the end of the day the assurance provided by papers of record is only that their sources are who they say they are and that they really said the things they are saying. It’s not that what the sources said is true.

Next to Trump’s view of the world, almost anyone’s will appear more convincing, but at the end of the day we are only eavesdropping on telegrams delivered between two distant planets at war with one another, without ever being able to see the actual combat. The thing is, I suspect even a lot of people in DC feel this way as well. In the short time I spent in DC, it was the land of cocktail parties and dinners, where everything takes place in person and people communicate through backchannels. It is an island working with its own vision of the world–or more accurately, multiple competing visions of the world. It is the world of governance, but not of the governed. It’s perfectly fitting that DC itself has no Congressional representation.

But we just elected a president whose world vision is at odds with very nearly everyone in DC (very nearly everyone period), so now a lot of those internecine fights (about health care, for example) are taking a back seat to dealing with the sheer clash of competing realities. Maybe it’s not fair to call Trump’s vision a reality at all, since it’s so premised on the presentation given him through the news. He’s a man who would rather watch CNN than read classified briefings, so making informed policy requires him to pull himself up by his bootstraps. He wants to hear about how great he is before he does the thing that’s going to make him great. This may explain why he has already made two humiliating climbdowns on the travel ban and on Flynn: nothing (neither principle nor ambition) stops him from deciding that something was always a bad idea once it starts making him look bad. So despite the damage Trump is evidently capable of doing through negligence if nothing else, I don’t see how his “reality” wins. It literally has nothing to offer anyone but Donald Trump.

There are two types of people in the world today: people who Donald Trump doesn’t care about, and Donald Trump. DC is going to increasingly see itself in the first category.

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David Auerbach

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