A Festering Symptom: Trump Lays Bare America's Worsening Problems

After all this time, Donald Trump and what he represents is still not fully understood. And that's terrible for us.

As per my Labor Day talk about labor and defeating authoritarianism, I wasn’t planning on writing today but this topic needs gotten into. I hope you’re having a good long weekend and taking some time for yourself and reflecting as we discussed.

In the meantime, I’m going to do a subscriber’s mailbag here sometime soon. Here’s an example of one of my past mailbags. Get your questions in by replying either to this post or emailing me at jysexton@gmail.com.

If you haven’t yet, become a subscriber. This is an independent media venture and depends on your support.

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I don’t want to talk about Donald Trump.

I want Donald Trump to go away. Permanently.

I don’t believe he’ll ever be actually held accountable for his crimes as our society has a tendency to protect wealthy, white men as a matter of institutional survival. And I don’t think, as long as he’s breathing, he’ll ever willfully leave us along because the vacuous, sucking hole inside him demands more of everything, including attention and wealth and power and adoration, despite none of it ever coming close to filling the void.

But Trump’s continued presence in our politics and in our culture demands attention. Why? Because it is, as I have said time and time again, a symptom of a much larger disease. Ignoring that and deluding ourselves into believing he’s simply an aberration only furthers the problem and ensures we’ll fall even deeper into it.

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard time and time again about Trump’s disgraceful trip to Arlington Cemetery in Virginia. In staging a disgusting photo opportunity, Trump violated rules against filming and allegedly roughed up an employee. You’ve heard about this because it is the quintessential kind of Trump scandal that our media cannot help but cover. It has it all. Disrespect for institutions, veterans, and a violation of norms.

This is what our media and political class value over anything else. Trump can demonize immigrants and vulnerable peoples, can inspire actual violence, murder, and intimidation, can, by sheer force alone, shift the discourse and climate of the country to the point where the Democratic Party, including Kamala Harris, the present nominee, embraces both approaches forged by Trump and actual legislation inspired by his rhetoric. But what matters, what really matters, are the symbols.

To be clear, Trump is repellent. And his behavior at Arlington should be disqualifying. As should almost everything he’s done in his public life. But I do want you to take a moment and think of when our media, which has aided Trump, gifted him billions in free advertising, normalized even his most extreme views and statements, and continually primed us to believe, okay, this time, we promise, maybe he’ll be different, has actually recoiled from his actions.

When he demeaned John McCain’s status as a war hero. January 6th. Skipping Joe Biden’s inauguration. Norms. Untouchable conventions that are, and have been, accepted gestures.

Meanwhile, what continues to be lost is the actual nature of Trump. Or, rather, what he represents. Crumbling civility. Unvarnished venality. Self-servingness devoid of even superficial veneers.

If Trump could only pretend a little better.

If Trump could only perform a little better.

That’s what they want. All of it, every policy, every radicalizing lie, every last drop of what Trump brings besides the grotesquerie.

And as this sad performance continues, something else begins to take shape that is completely and utterly ignored. That goes under the radar because it is as quiet as it is insidious.

This last week Trump stopped by to talk with Shawn Ryan, one of the most boring and sad Right Wing influencers you’ll find, and had himself quite a conversation. And, by that, I mean, a completely typical and stupefying yawn of a talk. But, within that slog, came something truly remarkable and telling.

On the subject of Elon Musk, Trump shined the oligarch’s shoes. This was expected. After all, Musk and Peter Thiel bought their puppet J.D. Vance’s way onto the ticket, and Trump has gone above and beyond in praising his tech fascist bankrollers. His number one job now, besides lazily running for president, is serving as a spokesperson for these losers and spouting off nonsense about “crypto” and “A.I.” that he doesn’t even begin to understand.

After some boot cleaning, Trump went on to say that he would be more than willing to appoint Musk to his cabinet, reiterating that Musk wants to get involved in “cutting some of the fat.” This is a reiteration of an idea that Musk planted in Trump during their lame Spaces interview. Musk repeatedly proposed being put in charge of an “oversight” committee with the intention of overseeing how the government funds programs. Essentially, this would give Musk unbelievable power without any actual accountability, and Trump is obviously keen on this proposal.

Of course, this incredible moment wasn’t covered in favor of the more salacious moments in the interview, but it is a massive thing. One of the world’s richest men, having bought a VP candidate and essentially the Republican nominee, manipulated Trump through flattery and attention in order to put himself on the precipice of unbelievable control over the federal government. And now, Trump is just openly flaunting the possibility while hardly anyone pays attention.

So, once more, you have the spectacle that is getting all the attention and will never lead to a single thing beyond the outrage of the moment, and the quiet, insidious development that has gone almost completely unnoticed. Trump, a lazy, incompetent, manipulable fool, long the servant of a wealth class piloting his faux-populist MAGA Movement, has once more given the wealth class an unbelievable present. And people are still focusing on the breaking of norms.