This Week: The Single Cringiest Moment of the Cringey Trump 2.0 Era |
This Week: The Single Cringiest Moment of the Cringey Trump 2.0 Era
Speaker Mike Johnson gave the president a new award Wednesday. How did this ridiculous cult grow around this ridiculous man?
In every age, there are moments large and small that somehow manage to capture the regnant ideology in all its proud and decadent vulgarity. You know these moments when you see them because your first reaction is not intellectual but physical—you feel that involuntary revulsion not in your brain but somewhere down around what they call in the Yiddish language your kishkes. I believe the modern word for it is cringey. It’s like watching the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office, except it’s not played for laughs. Those involved couldn’t possibly be more serious—and oblivious to how they look to the rest of the world.
A lot of important and appalling things happened this week that ought to be preoccupying me, but somehow, I have not been able to free myself from thinking about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s presentation to President Trump of the first annual “America First” award on Wednesday night. Future historians will ask, as many of us have asked in our own time, how this ridiculous cult could have grown around this ridiculous fraud of a man—how these Republicans could have decided that their pride, their virtue, their consciences are so worthless to them that they willingly participate in such staged exercises in hollow flattery.
There are longer clips floating around of Johnson discussing this award and praising Trump, but in the interest of sparing your mental health, I’ll expose you only to the brief, 30-second version here. Trust me, it’s enough to make the point.
“The president has done so much for the American people, and we want to honor him in some small way, some token of our appreciation for his leadership,” Johnson beamed at the fundraising dinner of the National Republican Campaign Committee in Washington. “And so tonight, we have created a new award. We’re going to do something we’ve never done before. We are going to honor him with a new award that we will present annually from this point forward. But he is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first ever America First Award. We can think of no better title for what that is. That’s this beautiful golden statue here; appropriate, for the new golden era in America.”
Disappointingly, the golden statue was not a calf. But these people lack the sense of humor and self-knowledge to have done that. It was, predictably, an eagle—wings spread, talons exposed, prey about to meet its fate. Kind of like Trump imagines himself vis-à-vis Iran, with the difference that eagles have been known to stalk prey for hours, whereas Trump can’t keep any single thought in his head for longer than 10 minutes and has, in the month since the war started, announced about four different rationales for the war and changed strategy roughly every half hour. Any eagle with Trump’s attention span would starve to death in a matter of days.
That aside, there are two points to make about this. The first concerns Johnson’s oleaginous sycophancy. The quote above in print doesn’t quite do it justice. You have to watch it, experience his self-satisfied smarminess, his bottomless self-abasement. Remember, this is a man who has compared himself to Moses. If Moses had behaved toward Pharaoh the way Johnson does toward Trump, his people would have needed to wait for another deliverer.
The second concerns the need to treat Trump like a 5-year-old. It’s a need the corrupt FIFA head Gianni Infantino recognized when he awarded Trump the preposterous FIFA Peace Prize in December, and that Trump’s Cabinet members intuit at those laughable meetings where they try to top one another in offering him false and flatulent praise. It’s hard to know, of course, whether these people have no idea how pathetic they look to the rest of the world, or they do know and just don’t care.
Either way, it’s a sight to behold: the awarding to the president of the United States a series of participation trophies. I thought conservatives hated participation trophies, which derive from that oh-so-liberal instinct to protect children’s feelings. This is one point on which I actually kind of agree with the conservative position. No, every child who participated in the swim meet didn’t win. Someone won. The others lost. The winner should be recognized. And kids are smart; they pretty quickly cotton on to the fact that if everyone is getting the same trophy, the trophy is worthless. Trump is either too vain or too dumb to understand what most 7-year-olds grok after about three swim meets.
We also learned this week that Trump will add his signature to our currency. This comes on the heels of last week’s news that the United States will mint a Trump coin, which the Commission on Fine Arts, a seven-member panel appointed by the president, recommended be made “as large as possible.” Said Vice Chairman James McCrery II: “In terms of the diameter, I think the president likes big things. Generally, I do too.” I’ll let that one pass.
All this is happening, of course, while Trump’s poll numbers are tanking—even over at Fox News—and the country is in collapse. This war is a mess. You’d hardly know it from most news coverage, but Iran’s attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East have been successful enough that many troops have had to evacuate, working remotely from nearby hotels and office buildings. Trump thought the war would be over by now, but it isn’t, and he’s at sea—tugged in one direction by Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman to level Iran, and in the other by his desire not to go down in history as the man who brought the world economy to its knees. And then there’s the airports, inflation, immigration, and everything else on which the American people are giving him failing grades.
What a perfect time for a new award! Actually, by fascist logic, it is: As material conditions for the people worsen, the leader must be praised all the more fulsomely, the make-believe enforced all the more vigorously. Will anyone come along to shatter the myth—to be the Jan at the dinner party, throwing Michael’s Dundie against the plasma TV screen? Not likely, anytime soon. Cults only intensify until the moment they explode.
Yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome Exists; but It’s Among His Supporters
That Pearl Harbor comment: Aside from being a fascist, the man is a national embarrassment. The deranged Americans are those who still support this charlatan.
I don’t understand why everyone is so upset about Donald Trump’s invocation of Pearl Harbor during his tête-à-tête with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. I mean, we learned that Trump actually knows who bombed Pearl Harbor. Shouldn’t we just take that W?
All right. Yes, it was a mortifying moment on so many different levels. A Japanese reporter asked him why he didn’t inform U.S. allies before starting the Iran war. Trump muttered a couple sentences about the element of surprise and then said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
First, of course, is how deeply offensive this was to an ally of 80 years—an ally that lived under American occupation, albeit in a comparatively benign form, for seven years. Takaichi said nothing, and indeed later in the day she flattered Trump in the appallingly fulsome way world leaders have learned they need to do, as with a small child. Reaction in Japan seems to be what we’ve come to expect: a combination of outrage and resignation that the president of the United States is both an idiot and a moral eunuch, from whom such simultaneously tedious and offensive bilge is expected.
For my money, one word in particular jumped out: “me.” Really? On December 7, 1941, Trump was four and a half years short of being born. But that small detail didn’t prevent him from conflating himself with the state. Someone else once did that. The Parlement of Paris contested certain royal edicts in 1655, and that’s when Louis XIV supposedly delivered his famous “L’état, c’est moi”; we knew that Trump believes he is the state, but he’s never expressed it quite so nakedly.
Then there’s the fact that the United States wasn’t an ally of Japan in 1941. Kind of an important difference. But most of all, in likening the U.S. attack on Iran to the Japanese attack on Hawaii, Trump was saying it was a good thing that the United States emulated the actions of a fascist regime that had killed millions and raped infants in China. Still, the details of history mean nothing to Trump. History is only about great men, and whether they win or lose.
Speaking of which: Trump’s reliably windy and adipose rhetoric notwithstanding, this war is not going amazingly well. The American and Israeli militaries are good at what they do. We know that. But what, exactly, are they doing? And are they actually seeking the same objective? Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does, and it likely involves occupying big chunks of southern Lebanon and toppling the Iranian regime, which will almost surely require the ground troops Trump has gingerly begun to mention.
The potential lack of coordination between these two armies and their governments opens the way for some huge problems ahead. Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field provoked a rare rebuke from Trump because Iran responded to the strike by hitting Qatari natural gas facilities. The attack wiped out 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas export capacity for the next five years. Experts say this is likely to impact many kinds of energy-related expenses, and for a lot longer than three months.
Look: For the sake of the people of Iran, I hope Trump’s gamble ends up paying off. But history tells us that all kinds of unexpected things happen in war. That’s why democratically accountable leaders generally don’t launch them without having really thought matters through (that the United States has defied this dictum twice in this century will linger as a dark stain on this country’s reputation for many decades to come).
Trump doesn’t think of himself as democratically accountable (and we can thank the Supreme Court for furnishing jurisprudential backing for that belief). The state, it is he. Any hope that he might learn something from history is of course delusional; to learn from history, he’d have to care about it. So he believed, or was convinced—and with the flattery that undoubtedly accompanied the advice he was getting in mid-February, it surely didn’t take much convincing—that he, the mighty Trump, the god-king, the Jesus-touched general in the Armageddon war against lunatic Peter Thiel’s Antichrist, could topple a government by sheer dint of his will.
That’s precisely the kind of thing you come to believe when you’ve cheated your way through life and never been caught; when you’ve fleeced hundreds of people and gotten away with it, with prosecutors deciding, as longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did, that you’re too powerful to indict; when you’ve lied habitually and seen that lying, far from imposing any price of social ostracism, actually works to your benefit virtually every time; when your social world consists solely of flatterers who marvel over your tacky taste and congratulate you when you insist your triple bogey was a par; when the founder of a leading network in a multibillion-dollar media apparatus essentially acknowledged under oath that said network’s stars lied on your behalf about a matter as consequential as a presidential election result; and when you and this armada of sycophants have duped millions of people who checked their common sense at the door that you have the unilateral power to lower gas and beef prices.
Am I overstating things? Do I suffer—gasp—from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Elsewhere today on this site, Simon Lazarus issues a sharp and necessary reminder to liberals not to get overly obsessed with Trump himself—to bear in mind the movement and the intellectuals that support him.
He’s right about that. At the same time, though, I’d say that we shouldn’t even accept the presumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome applies to people like us. It does not. The people who suffer from TDS in this country are the ones who support him. And it’s getting worse: This week, Nate Silver found Trump’s approval slipping into uncharted territory, and approval of the war generally polls in the 30s—but at the same time, an NBC News poll discovered that among self-identified MAGAs, Trump’s approval stood literally at 100 percent to zero.
They’re the ones with TDS. You and I have Trump Awareness Syndrome. We see his un-thought-out war—and by the way, if it’s almost over, why is he asking Congress for $200 billion?—and we hear him utter vacuous and offensive statements like the Pearl Harbor remark, and we know all too well what he’s doing to this country. Awareness is a far heavier burden than derangement.
War and Football? What Kind of Sick Mind Thinks That Video Is Cool?
The White House’s videos mixing football hits with bombing footage tell us: We have some twisted people running this country.
You’ve surely seen or read about the video the White House put out last week that interspersed bombing footage from Iran with punishing hits from NFL and college football games, over AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” You can see it here. You will also see that it was posted on X from the official White House account, which added one word to the visuals: “Touchdown.”
Football can be an ugly business, but it does not as yet involve the bombing of schools and the killing of innocent schoolgirls. Fortunately, several of the players highlighted in the White House post have decried the use of their images in this way. Former Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis told HuffPost: “I did not approve my image or football highlights being used to compare football to war. The game I love is about discipline, brotherhood, and respect. War is something entirely different. Lives are at stake. God bless our troops and their families.” His old teammate Ed Reed, after being alerted to the use of his image by journalist and Ravens fan Ben Jacobs, wrote on X: “I do not approve this message.” And former Nebraska Cornhusker Kenny Bell told The Washington Post: “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick. I don’t want anything to do with images like that.” The cowardly NFL has yet to speak.
You may say it’s just a 30-second video and it’s about what we’d expect from these people. And you’d be right on both counts. But it seems to me this video is worth a little more exploration than that because it reveals a lot about what these apes are doing to our country. Actually, that’s insulting to apes, who live in quite sophisticated and empathetic societies. Let’s just call them vermin, although that’s probably insulting to rats too, but since it’s one of their favorite insults, let’s just turn it around on them.
Imagine being the juvenile White House staffer who came up with this idea. Imagine thinking that that was cool. How can that even happen? You have to have a love of gladiatorial violence. You have to believe that the lives of the people you’re killing have no value whatsoever. You have to revel in causing death. You have to see it all as a big joke. And you have to subscribe to a view of the world in which power, the ability to dominate and to rain down violence in extreme cases, is the only thing that really matters. And then you run it up the flagpole for approval, and everyone else thinks it’s cool too. How did we get here?
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