City on a Shill

The Internal Consumption Engine of the American Reich

The grift has almost run its course. Even the combined forces of the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Gannett papers group, The Atlantic, CNN, NBC, 538, the nation's pollsters, the Substack intelligensia and all the rest can no longer Weekend at Bernies the legitimacy of Donald Trump's third and final campaign for office.

In the final days he is showing up on TV like a Batman villain, threatening the public with economic doom from beneath a hat brim that drapes his eyes in shadow and before a dozen American flags pressed close together to hide that he's probably recording from a broom closet at some overpriced steakhouse his dumb kids overinvested in.

His supporters rage about an influencer's pet squirrel killed by animal control as evidence of a deep state liberal conspiracy; his most powerful surrogates in governors mansions and supreme courts indicate willingness to join the coup but a distinct lack of interest in leading it; RFK goes on TV to promise that if Trump is elected he will make Doritos, Coca-Cola and Pop Tarts illegal; Melania in a lounge chair somewhere stops eye fucking the pool boy long enough to read through the notarized, signed, and initialed divorce papers for the thousandth time, making herself giddy by pushing up the potential filing date: January 21st seems so far away, she deserves an early christmas present, or, better still– she shudders with excitement--November 6th.

Meanwhile the fuhrer takes the stage to gag on invisible cocks, brag about refusing to pay his employees, and demand the followers at his rallies take pot shots at the news crews that film him. "There goes Ole Donnie again" they say, cheering and laughing, but none of them even really considering getting their gun, instead leaving the rally before he's halfway finished: they still support him, of course, but they're trying to beat the traffic, plus they got a big dinner to make tonight and no sense paying the babysitter more than they need to.

The various conmen operating in his shadow have similarly begun to disperse. A few, the World's Most-Divorced Man Elon Musk key among them, are in too deep to pivot and are gonna see this thing through to the end. Others, having lost the Infowars, are too busy with their own personal legal battles and collapses to fully put their hearts into it. Still others see the Bobby coming down the block, truncheon merrilly spinning in hand, and are quietly folding up their card tables and walking away, whistling. The most deranged and desparate among them, like America's Mayor Rudy Giuliani are already on to the next scam. Griftopia, it seems, has fallen.

One thing that I think distinguishes the American fascist movement in its MAGA hat from otherwise politically aligned groups is its deep roots in an anti-government libertarian conservatism. Fascists often oppose themselves to the regime, but they see the state as an invaluable tool not just for violent repression but for revenue generation.

Small petit-bourgeois men with chips the size of Europe on their shoulder like Adolf and Benito were more than happy to expropriate the wealth of their enemies and their colonized subjects. But MAGA is a movement lead by actual billionaires, Trump, Koch, Bezos, Musk, etc, and these men have been trained to genuinely hate any and all forms of state revenue generation. Instead they want to rob the already amassed coffers and bankrupt the whole damn thing.

So even in their four years in power they were more focused on grafting for their friends and grifting from their followers, whether through Covid small business loans or goofy new federal departments like the space force, while sabotaging the bureaucratic mechanisms of state instead of using the kind of punitive and violent fundraising at which that bureaucracy excels. Project 2025 arrived much too late to correct the error.

The result is a movement with extremely high turnover. Other than the most ideologically committed die hards, MAGA activists and content creators can either grab the bag and vamoose, or compete viciously to establish their own long con in a podcast or supplement or newsletter or merchandising sub-empire. But these businesses are precarious, driven as they are by movement excitement and enthusiasm, and feeding off of a large but ultimately limited pool of easily duped customers. We saw the precarity of this dynamic in microcosm when dozens of Trump retail entrepreneurs were stuck with inventories full of worthless Lets Go Brandon merch after Kamala took the candidacy. And the Trump family isnt about to bail any of them out.

After a decade of these dynamics the movement is made up almost entirely of the gullible and/or those trapped by sunk-cost. The most prevalent of these is probably Elon. The worlds richest man is also one of its most obvious marks. He spends all his time posting online with brutal humiliating emotional transparency to prove he's actually the con man not the conned, thank you very much. Just because he sank billions into buying a social media website to stop people being mean about him on it and promptly drove it into the ground while dramatically increasing the volume of jokes at his expense is not pertinent evidence.

If Elon was only playing himself he might still be part of a stronger movement, but he also wouldn't be nearly such a prominent part. But much like other campaign super genius Robert F Kennedy Jr, Elon is a perfect patsy for the Trump Organization. Musk's incompetent handling of the GOP GOTV through America PAC and his blatantly criminal electoral lottery scheme drew significant attention away from the in-plain-sight embezzlement of campaign funds by Trump, and are the perfect excuse on which to blame a loss if thats the path the team needs to pursue.

While Trump's lawyers have been busy gold plating their own toilets from the profits of funneling his amassed campaign cash into overseas accounts, Musk and RFK provide incredible distraction and cover, just the latest in a long line of obvious and pathetic fall guys. As much a Communist Party under the Leninist purge model as anything from the brown shirt lineage (although until know they have tended to just rob, violate and humiliate, rather than the expediency of the firing squad or the long knives) the MAGA movement is a leopard running out of faces to eat.

Maybe if dear leader had been made of sterner stuff, or if the GOP had a few better minds or a few actual backbones, or if the revolutionary movement in the US hadn't been so ideologically compelling and active (if not politically victorious), or if the economy really had tanked, maybe then America might have been great again.

No matter how melancholic their reflection, no matter how deep their sighs or how sincere seeming their retractions, they must not be allowed to go gentle into that good night. There is going to be a lot of mopping up to do, and the faster and uglier we make it for those at the top, the less we'll have to worry about the millions of acolytes below.