Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else
The agita over whether it’s accurate or impolite to call Bloomberg “racist” or to suggest that he “hates” poor people is irrelevant. It matters not one whit what’s inside Mike’s heart, or if he even has one, since his actions have always already been right in front of our faces. The “context” for the Stop and Frisk and redlining clips is the fact that Mike Bloomberg spent over a decade presiding over a gargantuan machine for oppressing people of color, the poor, and poor people of color most of all—a total, merciless system for violating their bodies, controlling their lives, and driving them from their homes and communities.
At the center of this universe sits Trump, like the Blind Idiot God Azathoth in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. If the self-serving narratives of personal accomplishment Woodward’s principals relate are dubious, their descriptions of Trump are not. He is impetuous and erratic, vulgar and incurious. A font of abuse, he showers invective on those around him.
The President is presented as someone who constantly watches TV—three in bed at once, we’re told—and whose antipathy for the written word is so intense his staff has concluded he is “semiliterate” or even “dyslexic.” Fundamentally incurious and easily bored, Trump time and again reveals neither knowledge of or the barest interest in any of his supposedly most cherished policy issues, from the budget to Obamacare.
What have we learned about “gun violence,” as a phenomenon and as a political cause, over the last five years?
The entrenched white supremacy that enabled George Zimmerman to kill Martin with impunity was likewise at play in the genesis of Sandy Hook. There were abundant red flags in the Adam Lanza case—from repeated hospitalizations, to warnings by mental health professionals, to troubling behavior in school, to an explicit tip given to police in 2008 by one of Nancy Lanza’s friends, who reported that Adam had access to an assault rifle and planned to “kill his mother and shoot children at Sandy Hook.”
Mass shootings reveal to Americans otherwise insulated from quotidian gun murder that they are not immune, that brutal death or grievous injury can, in principle, come to them no matter who they are or where they might be. Compounding this sense of terrifying vulnerability is the recognition of a properly existential futility: an understanding that, no matter your station or your status, if this is how death comes to you, then, in any substantive sense, your death will not matter.
The deaths of other people may truly be a matter of utter indifference to Donald Trump. But how does he think of his own death, if he does at all? Certainly his body will fail him, eventually, as it must. And, contra the protestations of his muppet of a doctor, Trump must already feel its growing limits, the indignities of age. But I am hard pressed to think of an occasion where he has spoken of what he hopes his posthumous legacy will be, of how he hopes to be remembered.
No amount of coverage seems to be enough, and what coverage there is always falls short.
Compared to every other human on earth, Trump may occupy a singular position in the circuit of television production and consumption—at once its object, referent, and subject—but this doesn’t liberate him from being dominated by the merciless regime of the image; in fact, it binds him to it all the more.
War has become a given in American political life. In the process it has become depoliticized.
It might seem ludicrous that only hours after many of us called Trump a Russian spy, a new Hitler, a feckless idiot, a psychopath, a sun-downing, pill-popping monster, we fell in line and rallied behind him and our troops because, after all, he is our President and Presidents lead and the troops must be supported.
Donald Trump’s disdain for heroism has been replaced by a passionate commitment to its exact opposite.
Trump’s florid hero worship represents a new liturgical moment in the political theology of American power—and a major shift in Trump’s rhetorical posture, which has previously made very little room for accomplishments other than his own. Yet it is far from unfamiliar in the world history of demagoguery.
To focus on fact-checking alone is to miss the point: what is at stake here is not truth, but power.
This list is an absurdity and an obscenity. It is absurd because it bears all the hallmarks of a social studies paper hastily compiled by some desperate, clueless high school freshman. It is obscene for nearly too many reasons to count.
