Iron Dome

Trump and the Magda factor

It’s not some unique conjuncture in human history that people are vulnerable to swindlers. Ellen Peck, a con woman of the Victorian era, is believed to have tricked others out of $30 million (in today’s dollars) during her lifetime. I’m quite confident that on the back streets of Imperial Rome, there were some Classical antecedents of card sharps and three-card monte scammers. Likewise, it’s probably always been true that the more innocent the victims, the more successful the con.

I suspect—and this is just historical speculation—that during most of the past this was a more or less urban phenomenon. In the premodern countryside, social bonds were more fixed and durable. Kinships, friendships, traditional lines of authority, and shared worldviews formed matrices of interpersonal surveillance and accountability. When I was bunked for three months once in the Commune du Fort Liberte, Haiti, a town around the size I live in now in Michigan, our team hired a local woman, Magda, to do market runs and some cooking.

Within a day, we had a dozen people drop by to warn us: “Magda is a thief.”

It turned out to be true, in fact, but we kept her on—with due caution—for a while, just because she had kids. The point is—because interrelational bonds were abundantly stronger there than they are here in Adrian, Michigan—Magda’s propensity for theft was well-known. The more “urban,” and I guess by that I mean atomized, the environment, the easier it is for the mountebank to peddle his or her line of bullshit. A lot of people—unlike Magda—are not known.

Looking now at the polity of the United States, it’s nothing new that our “constitutional democracy” with its gimmicked electoral systems has vaulted thousands of grifters and nincompoops into public offices large and small. In terms of scale, however, the probability of electing a crooked bastard increases with the altitude of the office. It’s just math. With greater numbers voting comes greater personal anonymity. Call it the decreasing Magda-factor. The power of mass manipulation runs past the power of interpersonal surveillance and accountability.

So far, I’m just spouting a kind of social metaphysics—tendencies built into the quadralectic between human social environments, our disordered desires, our thought processes, and our actions. From the title, as you dear reader have already ascertained, it obvious that we’re here to talk about Trump’s “iron dome” rant in Iowa yesterday, during a winter storm that massively suppressed turnout, as he ran off three sickly pretenders. DeSantis garnered a whopping 21 percent, Haley 19 percent, and Ramaswamy less than eight percent. Christie received 35 votes from the entire state.

Donald Trump has accomplished a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. It’s his now. His rant about building an “iron dome” over America, a reference to genocidal Israel’s US-financed air defense system, was met with a heave of hosannas, many likely imagining some actual dome the way they imagined a 1,954 mile wall along the entirety of the Mexico-US border.

“Giant dome,” was his actual term.

“We do have the technology now,” he riffed, “and we’re going to build a giant dome over our country to protect us from a hostile source. And I think it’s a great thing, and it’s going to all be made in the United States.”

The liberal press, which is overconfidently (again) aiming for a Biden-Trump rematch, played up the dome remarks as a way of sneering at the Orange Grifter. It was also their way—once again—of sneering at the 24 million or so Trump loyalists who will put him back on the ballot for 2024, even as he faces 91 felony charges in four criminal cases. It’s the “deplorables” tack all over again. Haha, aren’t those rubes stupid!

This is theater for Democrats, too, because Trump said much the same thing back in October when he was cheering on Netanyahu’s plan to rid the world of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children. The liberal press then was too busy whipping up its own hatred against Palestinians to contradict the Trump with whom they briefly corresponded.

The greatest vulnerability to hustles is innocence?

Back in January of 1970, I joined the Army. I was an eighteen year old innocent. I’d been motivated to enlist by a John Wayne movie and a teen romance breakup. First, the big city sharpers in the barracks got me. I got wise to them, then the retired sergeants major who were allowed to stalk the barracks as insurance salesmen tried to get me. Then we were allowed out on pass, and we were gotten by street hustlers, bar owners, local merchants, topless dancers, pawn brokers, hookers, and muggers. Eventually we got smarter. The luckiest among us were schooled by the NCOs who gave a shit, those who weren’t themselves on some grift. “Here’s the shit you watch out for.”

Over time, innocence was replaced by experience. We learned who we could trust and who we couldn’t. The point here is that there were some people we could trust. Buddies, good squad leaders, and platoon sergeants (some weren’t so good). A few ethical business establishments.

We weren’t stupid; we were innocents in the sense of having little experience.

Those rubes—the millions who still believe that Biden stole the election, the millions more who say they couldn’t give two shits whether Trump is indicted or not—are in many respects innocents. Calling them stupid for that innocence is not a reliable election strategy. (Ask Hillary Clinton, “Who’s fucking stupid now?”) The problem is that there’s no alternative they can trust. The Democratic Party is every bit as corrupt, every bit as perfidious, every bit as dangerous, and every bit as captive to its own horse shit, as Trump’s Republicans 2.0. Trump didn’t sell them down the river with neoliberal trade deals. Trump didn’t oversee the 2008 financial crisis, gestating since Bill Clinton was diddling barely legal interns with cigars in the Oval Office.

The Wall Street-military-industrial-media complex’s “bipartisan consensus” ever since the Reagan years is the reason people have lost faith in government and its institutions. Is it any wonder—knowing as they do that both parties were incubating cynical liars and ruthless warmongers the way garbage heaps give rise to oily rats—that this new grifter, this lounge lizard real estate cheat, could calve off 61 percent of the Republican Party? Trump’s entire life has been governed by that apocryphal adage, “There's a sucker born every minute.”

Where do they have to turn? Joe fucking Biden?

In 2020, if anyone remembers those ancient days, the Democratic Party establishment was aiming to put Kamala Harris in the White House. When they found out no one liked her, they pivoted to Pete Buttegieg, the incompetent former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The strongest candidate in the expanded field was Bernie Sanders—and many Democratic bosses had determined that before they’d let this critic of Wall Street win, they’d cede the race again to Trump. The Democratic Southern Strategy, along with Covid-19, finally took down Sanders as the party poobahs defaulted to Joe Biden as their last resort.

Biden made his political bones attacking Anita Hill in 1991, when she credibly accused Justice-to-be Clarence Thomas of sexual harrassment. Biden had to perform three mea culpas and ten Hail Marys during the 2020 Primary race to get some of that lingering “attack the black woman” shit residue off of him. His working class shtick was as phony as a street corner Rolex. He’s lied as shamelessly as Trump (though without Trump’s brazen frequency). He’s a corporate sycophant. He’s a creep around women and girls. He was once all on board with cutting Social Security (a move so stupid that even Trump won’t go there). He’s kind of an asshole in general (I know, takes one to know one). And now, as his cognitive capacity fades, he’s playing nuclear chicken in Ukraine, supporting genocide in Palestine, and slow walking us toward World War III.

The Democratic Party’ misleaders are now basically Bush II neoconservatives. They’ve played the two-step bait-and-switch so many times now that no one trusts them, not even their supporters. Campaign lefter in the primaries and righter in the generals, then take office, bail out the financial sector again, and jump off into a fresh war somewhere.

People don’t have that canny old platoon sergeant any more who can tell them, “That lap dancer doesn’t really like you, and don’t leave your watered down drink unattended.” Their platoon sergeant is on his own grift.

With the hegemonic power of the interweb, we’re all subject to it, even a lot of the formerly street-smart cosmos. We’re all the innocent country rubes now, wandering lost and vulnerable in the virtual metropolis. We’ve lost our faith in the institutions of governance, and we’ve lost the Magda-factor.

That’s why an Iowa campaign crowd is whooping like they’re at a tent revival over a carnival barking New York slumlord spinning some Marvel Comix fantasy about “hostile sources” and “great domes.”