Donald Trump: A Post-Mortem

I believe when they found the body of General George A. Custer
Quilled like a porcupine with Indian arrows
He didn't die with any honor, any dignity, nor any valor

I wouldn't doubt when they found George A. Custer
An American General, Patriot Indian fighter
He died with shit in his pants

-Minutemen, "The Punch Line"

My household watched the debate last night. My partner, Sophie, who lives a life much less cursed by poster's madness, has avoided all but the biggest election headlines, and so for them the debate is an appropriately-bounded dystopian spectacle that updates her on the state of the country, a car crash to rubberneck for as long as she can stand it. Sophie summed up the actual political content of the evening quite well, I think, with the following:

This was Sophie's first sustained engagement with the campaign for weeks. I enjoy no such blissful ignorances. No, stuck at a laptop screen 40 hours a week with nothing to do but check news and socials or continue entering data into a database (or, occasionally, a spreadsheet), I am all too aware of the goings-on of this campaign. I imagine many of you sickos are too. And for the first time in a long time, maybe since I was a teenager in 2004? I find myself giving the ins and outs an attentiveness and curiosity that, in my more reflective moments, depresses and disgusts me.

As a result, I found the rambling incoherent fury of Donald "Abe Simpson" Trump at the debate deeply familiar: it's just his stump speech, broken up into slightly smaller chunks by Kamala getting to speak and moderators framing questions. I knew, humiliatingly, what events he was referring to through his gish gallop of proper nouns and what weird fantasies were struggling three-stooges like to emerge from his frontal cortex and spill violently all over the nation. (If only for three measly inches, they might have done so much more literally, alas alas).

I imagine the election is serving me the way it's serving a lot of people in this moment: a way to think about something other than the ongoing settler-colonial genocide, pandemic and cascading climate disaster. In other words, it's a distraction. It's always-on entertainment, but it's boring entertainment that makes you incredibly frustrated, that refracts and specifies and dissects just how absolutely fucking doomed we are, though occasionally you get a good joke. This has been the affect of attention economies, social media communications and platform capitalism for over a decade now. Boredom for everyone, for free, contribute well enough to the collective boredom and get a nice serotonin boost. Get angry, get sad, get horny, start again.

But the thing that was on display to everyone last night who isn't paid to be obtuse, the thing that those of us poisoned by the internet already knew, is that the Trump show isn't even a distraction any more. Sophie and I were both barely paying attention by about the twenty-minute mark, trying and mostly failing to even find funny posts on our phones for one another, and at some point we just turned it off with a shrug. It's like boring-boring.

Trump has grown more and more incoherent as the years, losses, legal troubles and increasingly fanatical echo chamber have taken their toll. As many of us have been arguing for some time now, MAGA, which by rights should be invigorated by a national campaign, is instead the weakest it's ever been. COVID-denying genocide Joe Biden was maybe the only sonuvabitch left without the political lung-power to blow this paper tiger over.

Ever since Tim Walz called them weird and stumbled over the fact that you just have to point out the emperor has no clothes, anti-fascists have been rightly calling attention to how simple it was for the Harris campaign to take him apart: this could've happened in 2015, and spared us so much suffering, spared the globe so much destruction!

Kamala Harris is not some once-in-a-century talent. She's not a particularly charismatic speaker, (although her practice on the intimate stage of the courtroom means she was made for the split-screen debate reaction shot, for the always-on argumentation displayed in body language and facial expression) nor is she offering a particularly robust or compelling image. Last night it didn't matter. She understood the assignment: she just needled Trump with all his worst insecurities (crowd size, former colleagues hating him, etc) and let him unspool into incoherent blathering rage. The most entertaining possibility was that he might stroke out right there on the ABC carpet: I think we got close.

And it is true that this could have been done years earlier, were it not for Trump taking advantage of the strait-jacket of respectability, politesse and faux-objectivity that so restricts the boomer political imagination. Hillary and Biden both, alongside Trump's rivals in the 2015 Republican primary, were helpless before the gleeful nihilism of a true poster. They had no idea how to deal with the troll who argues and performs not for the newspaper reporters or the history books or the TV cameras but for the audience streaming live, for the giddy crowd filling up the peanut gallery.

A poster in a boomer's body, Trump's winking, ironical attitude had a real frisson of subversion that thrilled the racist petite bourgeoisie, themselves overwhelmingly older, who were tired of pretending to give a shit about their communities, their employees, their wives, children or the planet, about anything other than their own sense of threat and fear, about their own suddenly flashing mortality and a future without their patriarchal control and power. They wanted to return to their youths, when men were men, black people couldn't vote and faggots were beaten in the streets.

So yes, his whole shtick was perfectly attuned to jam up liberals and capture boomers, but in 2015 it was also designed to be an antidote to the hopey-changey empty rhetoric of Obama, which were themselves something of a rework of Reagan's 1980 campaign (and which Harris-Walz updates with some girlboss top-cop toughness and downhome common sense.)

Even with that highly refined package of resentments and contrarian impulses, and among the most conservative half of the American population (the electorate), he still lost the vote to one of America's least charismatic celebrities, Hillary Clinton. He has never won over the majority of even this minority of American hearts and minds. His is a fundamentally unappealing and unpleasant promise that appeals to a bloated and powerful sector of American society, but the media and the democrats have spent a decade pretending his "populism" reflects some secret hidden truth at the heart of "real America".

In hindsight I think it's clear that the thing that got Trump close enough to be awarded the election by the oligarchic slave-republic's Electoral College, the crucial ingredient in Trump's recipe, as in any true poster's repertoire, was the jokes. What made the meme magic work was that it made the 4chan fash actually laugh, the shock tactics actually shocked. His insults were sharp and catchy, his turns of phrase absurdist and comic as often as they were simply nonsensical. By responding to his outrageous lies as though they were good faith arguments, his interlocuters couldn't help but appear lessened, while he shrugged and smiled, a shameless lil' scamp.

People have compared him to an insult comedian or a radio shock jock, but I think the closest archetype was the foul-mouthed clown. A lot of Trump's power, like any successful authoritarian, resided in his body. Trump had a knack for slapstick self-abjection and ironical gesture, he could pull a good face and had a small retinue of servile caricatures he could embody and deploy (whoever they were they inevitably referred to him as "sir"; all harlequins in his retinue). His oversized suits and mall-kiosk hat were a costume of indignity that revealed the equal absurdity of the ringmaster's tuxedo'ed gravitas. In this way, Trump has always resembled Mussolini, the great buffoon of the 20th century, more than any other fascist. (And the USA's anti-historical reduction of all of fascism to the goose-stepping leather-clad nazi screaming with intensity means most were unable to identify the deeply authoritarian nature of such performance).

Behind that clownish facade was always the apocalyptic vision of "American carnage". It is the viewpoint of the angry little man, humiliated and aggrieved, who, despite his material power, despite owning a succesful franchised business, beating out the competition, starting a family, a huge house with a four car garage, despite winning at the game of life, when he looks up he still sees a yawning gap between him and the movie-star, the mogul, the senator; he looks down and his nervous mind can chart a quick slide into precarity and poverty with only a few missteps.

And what about his ungrateful and shitty kids, his demanding employees and his cheapskate clients, despite everything he's given them, a job, a roof over their head, a good deal on a used Ford, they don't do what he tells him. They don't respect him. How dare they? Don't they know a father and a boss is owed respect, fealty, obedience? It is the politics of the divorced millionaire arguing against paying alimony in court, of the rapist's crocodile tears when confronted with his crimes.

Trump could put this over with enough people who would otherwise find such resentment repellant by winking at the camera and saying "ain't I a stinker?" "We have a good time, don't we folks." Sure, he's saying ugly things, but it's a bit, he's just playing a character, he's not serious. He's just a clown! But in the interim Vance and DeSantis have demonstrated what these little-man politics look like without the jokes or the charisma: absolute electoral poison and complete anathema to almost everyone who encounters it.

This crucial piece of the performance is long gone for Trump, too. Trump has none of the patience, organizational capacity or extensive experience that marks other successful fascists, like his favorite buds Orban or Putin, like Modi or Meloni or Marine Le Pen, he has not been sharpened by decades of struggle, but instead dulled by a decade of easily pushing over weak-willed and worthless opponents. He is a silver-spooned manbaby used to getting his way, who has never faced consequences he couldn't simply bluster his way out of, and despite ten years in politics, never had to contend with real political barriers.

He took over a GOP so moribund and unpopular that within four years they voluntarily created a protective cocoon of election-fraud myth and chosen-by-Jesus bombast to soothe his bottomless narcissistic crisis. People he literally tried to kill with a violent mob of conspiracy theorists bent the knee and kissed the ring. They all gambled that their personal humiliation, the billions of dollars and millions of hours spent on the ego of this pathetic failure of a person were what it took to get the truly motivated fascists into power.

But the game means they move at the speed of Trump, and Trump, demanding his throne NOW, went mask-off way way too early. He was tired of having to pretend, of playing make-believe with the electorate and the party. He had already won, hadn't he? Wasn't the presidency already his by rights? Why should he have to keep performing, wouldn't the people applaud for him just as he was? He stopped wearing his clown nose, put away the size 28 shoes and the daisy-lapel water pistol. Just like a clown's slapstick antics are just physical assault outside the context of a circus, Trump without the jokes is a bottomless well of self-aggrandizement and grievance, of pure spite and petty fury, emotional stultification five decades past the point of being reachable by therapy.

This beta-male rapist failed up as far as it is possible to go, and still he is a miserable piece of shit, an unhappy ungrateful goblin of a man with nothing but disdain for everyone around him. He used to bring a resentful, violent glee to his fans, but now can only remind them of the good old days of 2015, when he reminded them of the good old days of 1955 by owning the libs and grabbing em by the pussy. "Make MAGA Great Again" is actually the tenor of the campaign, it's revealed at every rally, where he takes ten minutes naming and pointing out everyone in the crowd who participated in his administration or campaign, reminiscing about how great it was when they won that senate primary because of his endorsement, how no one had ever seen a more effective transportation secretary. Sure, now they're all greatly reduced in status and power. They've lost jobs, been banished from everything except the various grift-economies of MAGA world. But don't worry, they'll get the respect they deserve when he's back on top. He'll see to it.

He's been reduced to the commentary track on a DVD retrospective.

Which brings us back to the campaign. Because the thing that is, ultimately, so infuriating about the endless coverage, about the polling and handwringing over "undecided" voters, about the years-long spectacle that is American presidential electioneering, is that literally none of it matters.

The percentage of the electorate that goes, respectively, for the Republicans and the Democrats is remarkably static. It has been static since Reagan. The only question is how good they are at turnout, and since the Republicans have by and large been more unified and organized via the expediencies of the evangelical church, combined with the fact that they skew older and wealthier, the only real question has been Democratic turnout.

That's why W had to steal the election, why the Republicans have focused the great majority of their energy on gerrymandering, voter ID laws and disenfranchisement, on cutting funding to polling places and spreading election misinformation. It's also why they developed a strategy of obsessively campaigning for down-ballot races, building local GOTV apparatuses, and constructing the right-wing info-sphere that spun so easily into out and out fascist paranoia.

"But but Trump was a huge change" I can hear the pundits blustering. He wasn't. He increased Republican turnout, while Hillary's terrible campaign, with an infamously poor ground game and GOTV effort, combined with her unpopularity, depressed Dem turnout. Even still she won by 3 million votes.

2020, meanwhile, saw record turnout for both parties. But 2020 was a year of crisis, near-revolution, and almost total collapse. It was a year of actual politics. Trump had both the Q Anon movement (made up overwhelmingly of non- or infrequent-voters) and all the white folks otherwise whipped up into a lather by the uprisings and the pandemic. But even more people hated Trump, even more people had been called into action by the uprising, and despite the demoralizing and demotivating effects of Biden's dogshit campaign, they still outnumbered the best shot Republicans had by almost 10 million voters.

2024 is a very different story. He may have locked up the Republican primary with remarkable ease, but Haley continued getting double digit percentages of primary votes long after she had withdrawn from the race and endorsed agent orange. MAGA may have overtaken the Republican party apparatus entirely, but the MAGA faithful and the Republican electorate are hardly the self-same unified body they were in 2020. A lot of Republicans are just as tired of the joke.

And even still the Dems came awfully close to giving it back to him. But the campaign was basically over the second Democrats and liberals demonstrated how absolutely unified and excited they were by Biden 2: Girlboss Time. The progressives found in Walz reason enough to mostly hold their tongues. Meanwhile the Palestine liberation movement, the movement that I believe was the necessary factor that made it impossible for Biden to weather the storm of his disastrous debate performance and forced him to step down, has once again been told to shut the fuck up, because the adults are speaking.

There is a piece of common activist wisdom that I've been seeing go around, which is "vote for the candidate it will be easier for us to fight." I've heard this logic used to argue that a Harris administration, as a result of being much more effective at governing, will be much worse for resistance movements. And if we think purely in terms of activists vs. the state, this argument has merit: with Trump in power, the numbers at demos, the level of ambient anger and preparation for fighting was higher, and that would likely happen again. Harris will see many many people go back to brunch, and she will not only recuperate movement energy but no doubt be better at managing and deploying the repressive apparatus.

But this forgets what that energy actually looked like, that the constant rage was coupled with near-constant fight or flight. The huge infusion of liberals built a massive right flank in our movements, and the victory of MAGA fascism lead to a reflexive authoritarian turn among much of the radical left, particularly its terminally online contingents. Long-moribund party-cults were suddenly reinvigorated, as people despairing at the rise of the far right reached for anything that looked like real power, which is always the appeal of discipline, of the simple solution that you just need to "join the Party".

Far too many found this in ostentatious displays of the hammer and sickle, in scale models of the guillotine and made-in-Vietnam porcelain busts of Lenin. (I sported a pair of guillotine earrings myself for a little while. No one is immune to propaganda.) If the fascists were gonna be edgy, the left was gonna be edgy right back! And what was more edgy than the USSR?

When the rubber actually hit the road, in summer of 2020, most of the soc-dems, nursing wounds from Bernie's ratfucking, were nowhere to be seen. The most committed of the alphabet soup cultlets, meanwhile, actively diminished revolutionary possibilities, wet-blanketing, peace policing and otherwise leading crowds of riotous youth in pointless circles until they all went home. I don't think it was even particularly good for their recruitment numbers.

In 2024, a huge number of those people, from the dirtbag podcasters to the neo-gonzo journalists to the Stalin revivalists, have revealed the deep brown streak in their "red" politics. Always living strategically in the past, they are going full fash at exactly the moment the they have the least to win from the move. Many of them built careers calling out the hypocrisy of the #resistance, but that's the thing: if you loathe liberals more than you crave liberation, the arc of your politics will always bend towards Strasserism.

So much for the tolerant left! As for Trump and MAGA, they have been the organizational, financial and spiritual backbone of the fascist upsurge across the globe for almost a decade now. They have also been in something of a freefall, as an erratic narcissistic landlord sitting atop a mountain of grifters is hardly the basis for a sustainable social movement. The US far right that has been slowly but surely disintegrating since January 7, 2021 would stitch itself back together with a quickness if Trump took office.

Even if he weren't able to accomplish his most cherished goals of building concentration camps for "15 million migrants" or jailing liberals, democrats, reporters and various other enemies named and unnamed, even if he failed to get the machine of total fascism going here, he would let all the J6 nazis out of jail and likely give them a job and a gun, encourage a rash of school shooters and pogroms, rip up what pathetic ecological regulations remain in place, enforce comstock as a nationwide abortion and HRT ban, but, most importantly, he would reinvigorate a global far right that is faltering everywhere (except Europe, which is as ever living half-a-decade behind the times.)

Kamala Harris is an unbelievably objectionable politician. She supports Israel whole heartedly, she loves Dick Cheney and Genocide Joe and is tacking to the right consistently, even though she really doesn't have to. Just like Biden, she does it because it's what she likes: She's telling you who she is. She may actually be a little left of center on reproductive rights and LGBT issues, as long as you're not a drug user or a sex worker, of course, but the center on those issues in DC at this point is basically "friendly youth-pastor at the mega church who isn't super comfortable with everything the other pastors say but wants to work from the inside" so it's a pretty low bar.

It also doesn't matter. The point is not to find a candidate who you like. If you find yourself supporting any viable candidate for American president politically, you are already pretty lost in the woods. Don't let the years of rising fascism and desperation obscure the fundamental truth: We must abolish the police, prisons, slums, nursing homes, psychiatric jails and for-profit housing systems that mean so many of our siblings already live and have always lived under fascism. No president will end the ecocidal capitalist world system that America currently steers, in fact the US has become the world's leading producer of fossil fuels under Biden and Harris. The only way out of this mess is the abolition of the so-called United States, that settler colonial imposition upon this continent, that abomination built upon slavery and genocide that dares call itself "freedom".

My belief is that Trump's loss here will be devastating to the global right for a generation, and that that is more valuable than the burst of energy from opposition to a Trump dictatorship, but maybe I'm wrong, maybe my comrades are right that his victory would tee up a revolutionary moment that Harris instead recuperates and successfully puts off. We can't know the future or the potential pasts we missed out on. But we also have no effect on presidential elections. It is the place where our efforts are weakest, smallest, least meaningful, it is the terrain on which state and capitalist power flows most freely, and I yearn to once again not give a shit about them.

I think Donald Trump is finished as a political proposition. (I also still think he's gonna flee the country, and has been siphoning huge amounts of campaign funds offshore). I believe MAGA is eminently beatable right now, and that if anti-fascists continue to push and fight a little longer, we will dismantle it.

I might be wrong. Maybe he can pull of the coup. I mean, anything could happen, I'm not a soothsayer. But even trying to think about it feels like an exhausting waste of time. If things change, they'll change, and I'll deal with it accordingly.

I no longer want to think about him, or write about him, or treat him as anything other than a fading and pathetic joke. I will gladly chortle in schadenfreude, I will dance on his grave, and I will do everything in my power to defend myself and my community when his nazi fanboys lash out in violent terror. But I hope that this is the last time I feel any pull to analyze the Trump phenomenon. I am tired, and so are these arguments, and so is his shtick.

The clown stands shivering and downcast, his face bare of make up, alone in the spot light at the center of the ring. He holds his arms out to you in supplication, begging for one more chance. Do not let the pathos of this moment fool you: his hand still conceals a buzzer, his oversized pants are still full of pop-out snakes. Pelt him in rotten fruit and banana cream pies until the spotlight cuts out, then get up, and walk out of the tent. There's much to do, and a better world is waiting for us.