Illustratively Pointless Lies: One Millionth of a Series

I still have not gotten around to the post I promised last time, about why the Trump regime should--at least by its lights--start forcibly deporting the politically conservative Canadians hiding among us. For one thing, Donald Trump prefers dealing with thugs over democracies, so I assume his focus will remain with his pals in Moscow and San Salvador. For another, every morning brings three fresh hells to absorb. (The best way, incidentally, to discern the views of a Trump apologist and/or office-seeker among the nominal intelligentsia is to note all the things they don't write about. If you are looking for the dregs and remnants of principle, decency, and a vestigial sense of shame among the Richard Riches of our time, look for the things they most conspicuously ignore.) 

Today's item is relatively minor but quite illustrative. It has to do with Trump's ruination of the Kennedy Center, a hobby that nicely combines his pathologically childish ego with his bred-in-the-bone vulgarity. Speaking to the clown's-car-full of board members he appointed, Trump boasted of his childhood aptitude for music. It may be so. But it wasn't enough. Asked to comment later, his communications director, Steven Cheung, had to gild the lily. Cheung said that the Don "is a virtuoso and his musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels." 

Of course this is a lie, and of course it's a trivial lie. That is rather the point. It's the very triviality of the lie that fascinates and repels me. In his eagerness to be liked by anyone he spoke to, Joe Biden famously, frequently exaggerated and lied about his own biography. Donald Trump, of course, lies about everything, but most of all he lies about himself--not to be liked or to find points of sympathy with others, but to exalt himself. (I would say he is the spitting image of Commodus, but Commodus came from a family of warriors and Trump...does not.) What is new here, and entirely in keeping with the norms and, no doubt, job-keeping imperatives of the regime, is that in more or less normal past administrations, press secretaries' sad role in such cases would be to ignore or make excuses for a presidential lie. (One could have set a watch by the last administration's invocations of the childhood stutter.) In this administration, the instinctive response for someone like Cheung is to lie more. It is to lie more fulsomely, more floridly, more brazenly, more pointlessly, more eagerly--after all, this was a thoroughly unnecessary, volunteered lie--and with an active indifference to the concept of the truth and an equally active contempt for the very idea of honesty.

A popular, although I think inaccurate, adage about the actions of the first Trump administration and the present regime is that "the cruelty is the point." (I would have thought that the ego was the point, and that ill-gotten gains would nose out cruelty as a motivation.) If I had to come up with a different decoder-ring for this regime, it would be online culture. The dominant attitude of the Trumpian political culture is the degraded-Clausewitzian view that politics is the continuation of Twitter by other means.

If we were to imagine social attitudes toward the online world over time, we might start with the early view, in which the online world was either seen as amusing or viewed with a utopian spirit. Then we might proceed to a period in which it was agreed that online culture is brutish, ugly, mean, and ignorant, but this was minimized by viewing it as a separate reality, something not "in real life." Yes, one might say, people are awful online; but that's just online, not the real world. Among finer people with more self-restraint than I have, it was responded to more stringently, by choosing to live as much as possible away from devices.

The Trump regime view, as far as I can see--and, looking as far as I can see, it pervades every aspect of the regime--is that the ugliness, dishonesty, self-centeredness, and mean-spiritedness of online culture is normative. It ought to be that way; it ought to be how people live and speak. And not just online. Far from being a separate and distinct thing, its ugliness, incoherence, illiteracy, and casual disregard for truth should be normative in every aspect of life.

The grift, the scam, the indifferent lie and the deliberate one, the vulgarity, the love of bullshit, the online distance from reality that makes getting "likes" from Putin or some fraudulent. on-the-make pseudo-scientist more palpable and important than the deaths of Ukrainian children or the spread of tuberculosis: These are baked into everything that Trump and his administration do. This is what the world looks like to them and what they want the world to look like. Only Cheung's relative literacy distinguishes his slavish lie from the hundred other lies and crudities that his boss and his boss's underlings utter every day. (For illiteracy, we must go straight to the top, or to people like the interim U.S. Attorney for D.C., whose innate mediocrity and lickspittle nature lead him perforce to parrot his boss's own mangling of the English language.) 

Of course, the online disease is not unique to Trump, to his inferiors, and to his cult. We live in a rude, vulgar, degraded culture and online-ness is its name. In politics, virtually every misstep and gross error of the last administration was connected to Biden's decision (or, perhaps more accurately, the decision of that administration's active decision-makers) to follow the views of those individuals and groups whose goals, focus, and rhetoric derived heavily from online debate. What was the tenor of the campus movement of the last year, and of a few years ago, if not Twitter made manifest? Having surrendered or never even entertained the notion of governing, every rising star in the GOP on Capitol Hill for the past several years, and a good many off the Hill--judges certainly included--has been someone who either lives only online or lives only as if online. Much of journalism and all of journalistic success have become subsidiaries of social media. This is our world, alas. We are a nation of trolls.  

But the Trump regime is not only the natural consequence and culmination of this culture; it is its apotheosis. And unlike normal politics or culture, it comes to us without the sense of hypocrisy, embarrassment, and shame that remind us to hope for something more from ourselves and others and to occasionally curb our worst tendencies. The regime wants this culture. It delights in it. It thinks people who expect better and hope for more are, like fallen soldiers, "suckers" and "losers." Its apologists think trolling is fun, that presidents who troll are most fun of all, and that "he's just trolling" is an actual excuse for presidential misconduct, lying, and hostility to democratic allies and one's own citizens. Their efforts to defend the indefensible inevitably resort to phrases like "stripped of the hyperbole" or "despite the crassness." But even more than cruelty, even more than greed, much more than partisanship, and leagues beyond anything like policy, the hyperbole and crassness are the point, are the whole thing. To strip Trump, or underlings like Cheung, of hyperbole, boasting, lies, and vulgarity is to misstate and mistake everything they do; it is to strip them past imperial nakedness and into non-existence.

Cheung's analingual lie about Trump's musical genius, trivial as it is, is as good an indication of the heart of this regime as anything else, in large measure because it is so trivial. Take a press spokesman who views lying as a regrettable and generally counter-productive necessity of the job and replace him with one who lies for the lulz. Take a more or less decent--or even gravely flawed--culture, one that is occasionally richly conservative and tradition-laden, put a landmine under it, and replace it with "Cats" and "the home-decorating taste of a third-world dictator." Take the idea that politics is the art of attempting to find a stable, predictable, and, if one is lucky, boring approach to governing social and economic relations, leaving some open space for private life, and replace it with randomness, whim, fealty, corruption, bullying, and naked vengeance. Take a dull but incrementally successful effort to make government more efficient and replace it with a Ketamine rush. Take the worst of online culture--the vulgarity, ignorance, and dishonesty, the crank amateurishness and mob rule, the ceaseless, more-than-half-sincere trolling, the "nothingburger defense" and the misquote of Lincoln, the active or actively tolerated Jew-hating and misogyny and racism and idolatrous, corrupted religion--and make it your normative vision of America. That is as good a heuristic as I can imagine for predicting what the Trump regime will do later today, tomorrow, next week, and every other chance it gets. Not because it lacks wisdom, decency, judgment, taste, and imagination. (Although it does.) But because that is its fundamental understanding of the world.