Kakistrophe

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Only a fool would try to keep pace with the chaos emanating from the wreckage wrought by President Donald Trump’s administration on the fabric of civil reality in the United States since Jan. 20. Suffice it to say, the notion in the beginning of February that we are living in a functional representative democracy, underpinned by the concept of the rule of law, is swiftly becoming a fiction. But our body politic is addicted to fiction, and Trump knows this perhaps better than any American personality ever has. He and his apparatchiks are well aware of the political power inherent in dizzying a populace with bullshit, and it’s working.

Protesters at a 2017 climate march. Photo courtesy of Joe Flood on Flickr

It works because we don’t know what he is or why he is the way he is. And, by extension, who we are and why we are the way we are.

Many descriptions, analyses and metaphors have been applied to Trump over the years. He’s been compared to the kind of carnival barker and snake oil salesman who rolled the rubes of Jacksonian America, when we were even more pigheaded and brutal than today (which is hard to believe).

To some observers, he’s a pin-striped Queens, N.Y. playboy-thug with wandering fingers; a strutting Mussolini-type malignant narcissist with imperial designs in direct, opposite proportion to his talent for statecraft; a pissy King John whose mediocre striving for absolutism is mingled with a half-addled King Charles I — bewildered that not everyone automatically believes his claims to divine right.

The most popular comparison is, of course, to Adolf Hitler.

That’s not unfair, considering that Trump once boasted of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed in one of his grotty Xanadus, where he no doubt had someone read them to him — and skipped on the bill for the service. Even Mike Godwin has said that Trump is fair game for Hitler comparisons.

Then there are the comments Trump’s made about lamenting that “his” generals weren’t as loyal to him as the warlords of 20th-century Germany were to their führer (and many weren’t, really). Witness the revelation from retired-Marine General John Kelly — who served under Trump from 2017 to 2019 — that the then-and-now president said Hitler had “done some good things.” Kelly opposed his erstwhile boss and just a few days ago lost his security clearance and security detail under the Zweites Reich von Trump.

Then there’s Pro-Consul Elon Musk’s Nazi-non-Nazi “Roman” salute. Mein Arsch.

While Trump has promised that he’d never read Mein Kampft, he borrows a lot from the Bohemian corporal’s playbook — even referring to immigration as “poisoning of our blood,” a clumsy metaphor employed by Hitler over and over to sway his own people to atrocity on the same subject.

It’s probably true that Trump hasn’t read Mein Kampf — maybe he absorbed it via osmosis while using it as a pillow? But I have read it, and of most interest to modern-day Americans living under the Trump II regime should be the passage on Page 180 in the chapter on the “Psychology of Propaganda,” wherein Hitler stated:

“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. …

“The art of propaganda lies in understanding the ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.”

Does that not sound like Steve Bannon’s injunction during the first Trump administration that, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”?

Does it remind you of your dumbest relatives, neighbors and the idiot who doesn’t feel like they need to follow the rules of a four-way stop? It should. And it’s happening now — it has happened.

As of Feb. 3, Trump has come for the FBI and Justice Department, perpetrating a bloodless Weekend of the Long Knives on everyone who participated in the various investigations into his Beerhall Putsch of Jan. 6, 2021 and 30-odd other felonies. The FBI — never a blameless entity in the world of domestic political vengeance — will likely soon be headed by Kash Patel, who has made no secret that his Bureau will be an even more virulent political police force, targeting anyone who even stood next to a Trump investigator. And that will more than likely be broadened to include anyone else who doesn’t align with the “President’s priorities,” as the rescinded-not-rescinded Office of Management and Budget “funding freeze” memo of Jan. 27 put it.

Guess who’s not aligned with the “President’s priorities”: Whoever doesn’t or hasn’t kowtowed to his constellation of grievance-fueled thieveries, bloviations, treacheries and melodramatic authoritarian twitches.

To be sure, there’s more money behind this kakistocratic coup of kleptocrats than any banana republican in history could dream of. Lest we forget, Trump, like Hitler, leapt into the arms of the oligarchs who reign over a perverse economic system in order to tighten his famously tiny hands on the levers of power that only they can afford.

Any person remotely informed of 20th-century history will know that the National Socialists relied on the acquiescence and collaboration of industrial titans no less than Henry Ford, IBM, IG Farben/Bayer, Mercedes (Daimler)-Benz, Porsche, Thyssen and Krupp etc., to bankroll their “revolution” to Make Germany Great Again. Today, the robber barons are in the business of controlling tech and media and, by extension, society — it’s Page 180 of Mein Kampf writ larger than Joseph Goebbels ever imagined.

But, all that said, I do not think Trump is an ersatz Hitler fit to bill for an American context. I think he’s too sybaritic and stupid for that. Trump shares few of the “qualities” that Hitler had — for one thing, Hitler was an OK painter (despite what the critics say), could and did read, and he liked dogs. Well, at least he liked them more than Trump apparently does not.

All that aside, we’re sleepwalking into a dictatorship and that’s disturbing enough; our smartest people are dumbfounded when they’re not shouting into the void. Based on the trajectory of Trump’s recent executive orders, anyone who writes these kinds of things will soon be frog-marched off to a concentration camp.

That’s no hyperbole: Trump’s already bullheading his way to mass political incarceration, with a plan to corral “illegal” people in Guantanamo Bay — itself a disgrace and “hideous blot” on America’s already dire history of internment (to borrow a phrase from the also-problematic populist mansion-owner Thomas Jefferson).

And the crushing shame of it all is that it’s not being perpetrated for any higher philosophical tenet than getting rich at others’ expense.

The Trumpian takeover and dismantling of what we’ve called “The Great Experiment” — established imperfectly in 1776 and reaffirmed just as imperfectly in 1865 — is the greatest caper in history. It’s bird-brained mafioso garbage that only a professional wrestling scriptwriter would dream up for the world’s biggest heel, which is what Trump really is.

He and his Know Nothing plutocratic pals are maneuvering to make off with the wealth of this nation by tearing down every institution that has contributed to its success — and even some that haven’t — in a corporate raid of world-historical proportions.

If that doesn’t bother some people, then those people are deficient in intelligence, morality or (more probably) both.

As a concept, the United States is both a challenge and an opportunity. Some people see it as an opportunity to meet the challenge of the nation’s essential anti-autocratic vision of a people granted equal rights under the law (in short: “diversity, equity and inclusion”), and exercising those rights with educated prudence toward a common goal of collective uplift — to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

We have failed to meet this challenge innumerable times, but we’ve also made progress to a “more perfect union” on many occasions. And the kinds of people we’ve produced in this country who have striven toward that impossible but still essential perfection are the ones we celebrate — or did, until Trump told federal agencies on Jan. 31 to ban 11 “special observances,” from Martin Luther King Jr. Day to Black History Month to Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month and Women’s History Day. He’s even axing Holocaust Remembrance Day. Let that sink in.

Then there are the people who see the United States as a challenge to seek opportunity. They are the cynics who seek any angle for personal enrichment, damning their fellow citizens in the process for their short-term gain. The grifters, scammers, scofflaw con artists and mobsters — that is, Trump and his goon squad of malefactors masquerading as “made men” in a criminal soap opera of their own making.

We’ve been taken by our lesser angels, and it’s going to be the work of a generation just to undo the harm inflicted in the past two weeks. But that generation is going to need a shovel fit for the heap of bullshit that’s been dumped on it — and We the People.