Pass the popcorn! Forget security, your family and friends, your future, don't let yourself get psychologically sucked into this fecal tempest, it's stinking blasts will blow you away! 2.0rump is what shiving Bernie in 2016 gets the PMC, unfortunately the rest of us get to be collateral damage. And 2.0rump is a real upgrade, a complete new operating system! Between Susie Wiles and Elon Musk, all the bumbling on implementation and personnel that bedeviled Trump 1.0 are gone, it's like the iPhone killing off the Blackberry! Think of it, what the iPhone did for teen suicide and adolescent attention spans, 2.0rump will do for America writ large! What may be a boon for the rest of the world won't do much, on present course, for the USA. I really should have studied Chinese and Russian, but I do identify as American, even with all it's problematic and newly re-forged, genocidal, colonialist baggage: we had a moment when we overcame ourselves and found true greatness, and that's the greatness I'll be chipping away at MAGA to try and find, or be fined for, or incarcerated, or whatever... I doubt anyone will notice.
Climate change has, of course, not gone away, any more than Covid has. Consigned for now to America's Id, perhaps we can stoke them there for the psychic energy our survival instinct has been denied with them out in the open. The Capitalism death cult has given them the FUD treatment making certain any climate or Covid action can only juice profits. Genocide is Kosher now, Danes in Greenland take note, it appears there's a plan for the last kill of Cancel Culture to be the 20th Century, leaving all the predations of prior epochs gleaming with amoral glitter. Tariffs rather than taxes, no Social Security, no FDIC, a new Gilded Age, but one shorn of any Progressive Movement, never again a New Deal. Abolition absolved by the absence of a Welfare State: now labor is completely disposable, you don't even have to feed and house it like you did with slaves. Human life as pure commodity, a feedstock for whatever your corporate con, whether you call it "health care", "transportation", "housing", "logistics", "education" or whatnot, people exist to be profited from and where that's not possible, discarded. Trump, the anti Teddy, the anti FDR of plutocratic recidivism.
Minted in NYC, in the crucible of Roy Cohn's 1970s, our second double struck President is embossed on both faces with Neoliberalism: government is the problem; either gold or bitcoin, money is the solution. The former precludes any public use of anything, the later blinds him to the real power he has as a head of State, a public figure and as such invisible to the imago of himself he embodies. So, real climate change, real public health failures, real military failures, real economic failures, and the real economic power of the State are pure absence to our new governing ideology. The vast teleology of social cooperation underlying the innumerable layers of technological, cultural, and social infrastructure on which modern existence rests, including the social relation we call money, vanishes into the personal relationships of the olgiarcs who've conspired to to steal all the upside from these generations of proliferating cooperation. It's already an incoherent cascade of collisions happening in real time, the early phases of a political Kessler syndrome, what stops it remains an open question.
Hope in the unlikely visage of Kash Patel raised, yesterday, the first real opposition to the Nerd Reich! He stopped the gutting of the FBI, one can only suppose to preserve his capability to wreak revenge on those of Trumps' antagonist now suddenly in his employ: the chaos of institutional dismemberment is a fabulous evidence shredding opportunity! One supposes the Democrats are looking hopefully towards some similar cleansing opportunity which they'll "fight" to prevent with the same fervor and success as all the other things they've been "fighting for" these last forty years. If they actually wanted to reinstate Constitutional government, if they really wanted the FDIC, Medicare and Social Security they'd shut the government down over the Debt Ceiling until the Administration agrees to behave Constitutionally. But that would require a quorum more committed to the body politic than career prospects. As I recall, it was only the Tea Party that prevented Obama from gutting all these with his "Grand Bargain".
In fairness to Trump, I don't find him worse than what he's replaced, he has, at least for the moment, stopped the Kosher Genocide, he's spoken with Putin, (if I believed in Liberals I'd have expected that to re-set the Doomsday Clock, but apparently the Atomic Scientists are all Democrats) and the cut-off of USAID has been hilarious, "independent media" in all the States we don't like suddenly begging for money or shutting down. He's proposed nuclear arms reduction talks with Russia and China and told the EU Ukraine is theirs to do with as they please. So far, a net positive for the world and Life on Earth, but a wrecking ball for the US Empire. And I do expect Trump to still be Trump: which of those famous names he's appointed are there for the episode closing, "YOU'RE FIRED!"? Ever the optimist, I dream the silence of Bannon in the wake of apparent H1B abandonment by 2.0rump stems from a sotto voce "Elon's toast once we control the Letter Agencies" from El Jefe. One can dream.
So, what do I think is really going on? I think we're in the middle of a smily-face purge, without show trials and thankfully without bullets to the head, just cancelling of incomes and intelligence access so far. This on the heals of a soft coup back in the summer when "the collective Biden" opted not to run, but neither to stand down. Who was behind that little mystery and what their motives were (did they really think they could force the "Joy" candidate down a disaffected electorates throat? Or was/is something else going on?) fades in intrigue against the question of who theorized and then implemented the Leninist decapitation of the US Government in the first three weeks of 2.0rump? As Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism observed, this is no modest technical accomplishment. Foundations have been shaken, we would be in a Constitutional crisis if there remained a party or Party independent of the "donor class", the Oligarchs, to contest power. It's early, but so far there's no such entity in evidence. It's something like a revolution, or something like a coup de'etat, but maybe more a low level civil war, so far contained within the multiple silos, the innumerable and anonymous verticals of the Alphabet Agencies of our secret government.
The Kash Patel move, linked above, suggests the DOGEbags may be little more than a fixing operation implemented to pin and immobilize the bureaucratic state before it could operationalize it's legendary knife fighting and trench warfare. Now with a Trumpean head and assistant head, FBI is more useful to Trump as an operational agency with bureaucratic paper trails to return the favor of Lawfare Trump enjoyed in the down time between his terms. But the cynic in me can't imagine a gangster like Musk getting into the Federal data structure and not compromising it for his own purposes. Like Netanyahoo, he's a sociopath running for his life right now. Of course, I'm writing the episode of The Apprentice I want to see, the one where when Musks utility to the Big Cheeto has arrived at its point of diminishing returns, the Don can walk in with a prima facie case of treason, toss him in jail and expropriate his State financed businesses. After a banner headline "You're Fired", turning to a smiling Bannon, ending H1B Visas and adding another brick in the wall.
Exactly what Witkoff thinks will get Hamas to exit Gaza remains, at least to me, elusive. Otherwise Trumps foreign policy position seems to be taking a classical "Realist" mien. MOABs perhaps? As I understand it Uncle Sam will have to personally deliver the really deadly ones to Gaza, which really would be the genocidal, racist colonialist icing on the cake for the whole Imperial Collapse theme that would inevitably weave itself through the melodies of all our other international relations. I find it hard to believe someone as egotistical as our President would be happy to have that as his epitaph, but plenty of GOAT Emperors predate Donald with that predilection. He's very transparently comfortable with Empire and his position at the head of one, one he'd like to make "great again", so all quite possible. But if he intends to really take on that challenge, the "great again" part, he'll need a lot of that machinery he just uprooted from USAID and dropped in a jumble on Little Marco. Bloated to the point I find myself theorizing it's having its own, invisible, infinitely siloed civil war, the inherent economy relative to war fighting of cybernetic control, which is the business USAID was in, is what conjured it into existence under Truman, cutting it's teeth under Eisenhower and Kennedy, hiving off from CIA, along with NED only after the Agencies embarrassments of the 1970s.
Defined as "control and communication in the animal and the machine", in "The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society", Norbert Wiener warned of the moral implications of integrating humanity into a cybernetic "control machine". It was a concern arrived at in the context of designing better mechanisms to destroy enemy aircraft, machines operated by men who were themselves guided by the machine to destroy other machines and men. From this nexus of technological death Wiener had a visceral sense of the potential amoral deadliness of the integrated control of animal and machine. And an equal understanding of what I've elsewhere referred to as "the naturalization of infrastructures", that property of the mind that normalizes experiences of complex, layered, and integrated technology, to the extent the expected outcome is delivered, accepting it as one of nature's givens. Wiener knew the tools of control he was creating would find their most avid users amongst the socio & psychopaths most interested in power, in control, people like those who made the war which itself called Wiener's insights into being.
Fifteen years later, Marshall McLuhan struggled to state what Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" would take another two generations to crystalize: McLuhan's "the medium is the message" asserts that optical displays engage with our oldest, fastest and most highly developed capabilities of mind, "heuristics" in Kahneman's terms, fast modes of perception/thought. Previously, constructed representations of what "slow" perception and thinking had systematized were painstaking artifacts to create and reproduce. The camera, film, and then video collapsed much of the work of "slow" systemic representation into a quick flow which mediation then structured into a recursive "feedback" machine built around the principles of Wiener's cybernetics. And because these visualizations engage heuristic thinking there is an inherent tendency to elide the signifier with the sign: perception and thought fuse, the minds visual heuristics internalize the sensory input, leaving critical analysis of contained thought content on the mental cutting room floor. Like Wieners anti-aircraft gun, the mediated image is a naturalized infrastructure, visible, and maybe even in our hands, yet out of mind as it steers us towards whatever purpose it represents.
Wiener was acutely aware by 1950 of the political intention towards which his insights were deployed. Between George Kennan's 1948 "The inauguration of organized political warfare" memo and and the 1967 revelation in "Ramparts" of Frank Wisner's machine, a “mighty Wurlitzer”, a big theater organ “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired”, Wiener was watching his ideas be implemented towards an anti-humanist agenda of imperial control. Ramparts revelation of the corrupting of a huge swath of American institutions and famous individuals through CIA subsidies was Americans' first look at the politics of institutional secrecy. This three paragraph digression is to point out what we are seeing now with Musk's Squadrizi shutting down USAID is a refrain of the same tune Ramparts was playing almost 50 years ago, and like that and the next one, "The Church Committee Report" of 1975, this refrain in all likelihood will simply lead to a new verse of the same old tune: once Hair Presidente has established loyalty and control within the implicated institutions, the cybernetic system will be re-funded and re-populated towards the foreign and domestic propaganda goals of whatever it is he's up to by that point. As artists of the earlier eras, from Frank Zappa with "I Am The Slime" to The Last Poets in "Mean Machine" saw, and as McLuhan and Wiener had anticipated, it's' too convenient for power, for control.
As for domestic policy, we appear to still be in the "shake the foundations" (and see what comes loose) phase. If he is really serious about cancelling the 20th Century, his browbeating of foreign central bankers makes little sense, on the other hand, if he's really set on adjusting the terms of trade through intimidation, current framing for a dramatic "Fort Knox is EMPTY" reveal could be his imagined trump card to collapse the dollar without lowering interest rates. While from a flow of funds and international trade perspective, there may be something to this, with the hollowed industrial, education, and public health bases fifty years of Neoliberalism has left The United States, as they say in Maine, "you can't get there from here." In any case, its way too early to have any sense of what his real intentions are. His "coalition" is a fissiparous amalgam of repulsive elements, in the chemical sense as well as the political one. Can the parasitic and destructive qualities of the various minerals and compounds be made to cancel one another out, yielding a coherent populist set of reforms that would empower the American workforce with the health, skills, mindset and confidence to take the decade or two it will take to become great again in stride? It seems unlikely, but then so did FDR.
