I can’t say I’m not happy that Trump has announced is re-candidacy. It’ vaguely reminds me of H. L. Mencken’s obituary for Ambrose Bierce, who, Mencken said, considered death to be “the last act in a squalid and rib rocking buffoonery.” In this case it’s not Trump’s death (yet), or — per Mencken/Bierce — human death in general. With the latest announcement from this aging buffoon we witness yet another act in the grotesquely fascinating decay of one of America’s two moribund political parties.
Trump is a recurring boil on the American body politic — a body covered in festering pustules and abscesses. This particular blain just happens to fester and pulsate in the middle of the Republican Party — a party now facing its self-infection by a growing lunatic fringe and an approaching demographic storm line. Were it not for the equally if differently pestiferous Democratic Party — captive to Wall Street and its own gerontocratic incompetence — the Republican Party would already be in an advanced state of decomposition.
Alas, here we are, trapped in an relentless cycle of electioneering of a sort that is itself the captive of American “culture,” an atomized and Disneyfied anti-culture, rendered stupid by its own successes. America is Trump; and Trump is America — shallow, rootless, self-absorbed, grasping, banal, uninterested prisoners of our own superficial appetites and our interminably compensatory narcissism.
I’m a boomer; I was here when it really took off. We watched the Mickey Mouse Club and rolled around in lawns treated with DDT. Maybe that’s what happened to us — Trump included. It happened to “America — the Sick and Stupid.” We’ve elected entertainment celebrities. We’ve embraced Q-Anon on the one hand and gender ideology on the other. Trump himself was elected in 2016 with ample assistance from his own rivals — yeah, the smart ones who came up with “the Pied Piper strategy” (to which they still cleave).
The rivalry between Trump and DeSantis is on. Let the entertainment begin. Trump is in a death spiral now, and this new announcement may be a scam to divert funds for his mounting debts and legal bills; but he still has enough of a loyal cult following to disrupt Republican unity — something he has only ever cared about when it yielded some benefit to himself. And DeSantis is formidable. He has all of Trump’s attractive red-meat cruelty and a Harvard Law degree — something for which Trump hasn’t even the native capacity.
One boil lanced, and a new one swells in its stead. Carbuncular America’s spectacle continued.
Astute, M. Goff. TYTY.