This follows up on the immediately preceding post. Some comments below.
1. What one key thing explains the rise of Trump? It’s a great question. I’ve been asking it for a decade, and so, very probably, have you.
In my opinion, this onion has a whole lot of layers, but if you’re looking to identify the essence of the matter, I think MacWilliams—he’s a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts—has as good an insight as any: (a) Always and everywhere, there are a goodly number of people with authoritarian tendencies. (b) Trump found a way to trigger these folks’ natural inclination toward authoritarianism. (c) The triggering process was greatly facilitated by the rise of the internet and of social media.
2. Some more layers to the onion, you said? Yes, I did say that. Here are some of them:
Point: with the rise of social media, a whole lot of our fellow citizens have detected a permission structure to joyfully embrace their inner asshole. One of these ways, but only one, is saying hello to the Nazi side of their personality.
Point: although I don’t believe either Goldberg or MacWilliams mentions racism by name, I think a large part of Trump’s attractiveness is the fact that he is both a stone cold racist and a wealthy celebrity. It gratifies his unwashed followers that a person of such wealth and celebrity will openly share their racism.
Point: I strongly suspect that, when a definitive history of our era is available, we’ll find it wasn’t just underlying racism, it wasn’t just the malign ability of one man to appear charismatic, and it wasn’t just the rise of social media as such. I think we’re going to find there was a whole lot of conscious, clever, compensated manipulation of social media by intelligent people in the pay of some of our economic overlords.
3. Always look on the bright side of life. Trump is not Machiavelli. His fundamental problem is that he believes a lot of his own bullshit—not all of it, but a whole lot of it, and a lot of it that is relevant to pursuing his fascist agenda. In consequence, he is forever misunderstanding key facts about the politico-economic environment. He lacks, moreover, the ability to gather, evaluate, and apply important information. He regularly fails to predict how key actors will respond to his lies, his bluster, his threats, and his bullshit. And when people do not respond as he might wish, his severely limited skill set handicaps him in reacting to an unfavorable situation. He cannot, for example, construct a rational argument or distinguish between a plausible lie and an implausible lie.
4. A lot of people think that things have changed in the past month. Are they right? Yes, I certainly think so. Michelle Goldberg identifies some key factors, and I agree with her.
Trump dimly perceives (a) that L’Affaire Epstein is a serious challenge to his continued popularity among the one third of the country who are his core supporters, and (b) that his standing with his own people is further threatened by the economic chaos caused by his policies on tariffs and immigration.
In response, Trump is trying both to appease and to distract the worst of his own supporters with military aggression, domestic and foreign. Because if the worst of the worst desert him, who will he have left?
5. What is the best advice for decent progressives? When your adversary is screwing himself, hold his beer, and let him get on with it.
We must oppose fascist aggression. And we must be mindful that Trump’s gross incompetence is helping him to dig his own political grave.
Facing MAGA 