He Eats the Souls of Human Babies

about that epistemic crisis

There is no world outside their heads. They’ve descended into self-hypnosis and ritual psychosis. They don’t see. And it’s really interesting, because the precise way they don’t see is harming them, but they can’t make a course correction. They don’t even see that they’ve wandered off the map.

The way the American political class speaks about Donald Trump is a warning, and it tells us that the next moment after Trump’s eventual departure from the stage won’t be any healthier. Hillary Clinton, a few days ago: "Trump is like gaga over Putin because Putin does what he would like to do: Kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists and others into exile, rule without any check or balance.”

They’ve been doing this for a long time.

I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016, I’m sorry to say, then voted for Trump in 2020. But even in 2016, I saw the moment as something interesting and important, and I drove to Las Vegas to watch election returns at Trump Hotel — amazing hotel, the very best, believe me, everybody says so — on the theory that it would be full of people who wanted to share the moment. It was, and the bar was so full that the cocktail waitress gave up and hid in the back.

Driving home, I got a phone call from a person who knew where I’d gone, and the conversation was about the fact that I was celebrating the election of a person who was about to put my own friends and family into concentration camps. “He’s gonna put us in the camps, Chris, he’s gonna put us in the fucking camps, and you’re okay with that!” You think I’m kidding, but remember what Rachel Maddow said when she was invited to share what she would ask Trump if she could land an interview.

Now, at the risk of revealing personal information, President Donald Trump actually didn’t put any of my friends or family members into concentration camps. We really dodged a bullet there, I know.

But now they’re right back here again, saying that Trump — who has been the President of the United States — yearns to kill and imprison his political opponents, and will try to do so if he ever becomes the president. The president who didn’t start any new wars and respected even the most ludicrous national policy injunctions from lone district court judges is very very very dangerous. It doesn’t make the slightest sense, and it lands on live nerves that a prominent Democrat shouldn’t be poking at, like the one about trying to put his opponents in prison. But they just can’t help themselves.

Here’s the really bizarre thing, though: It’s not that hard to criticize Trump in ways that comport with earthly reality. Like any political figure in a free country, he’s criticizable. If you’re an opponent of the man, you can land some honest punches. Here, watch:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a clean hit. All you have to do to land those is see.

Donald Trump isn’t a highly nuanced public figure. His announcement to the world about who he is and what he’s up to, The Art of the Deal, features a discussion of his effort in 1971 to join an exclusive private club with the asinine name Le Club, back when he was a young man and fresh out of college — living in a “dark, dingy apartment” in Manhattan. Why did he want to join Le Club? Because it was full of his two kinds of favorite people, rich men and hot women.

Three blondes from Sweden, baby, my kinda place.

And then on the next page he says that the president of the club agreed to let him in, but expressed concern about it, because Trump was so devastatingly handsome that he worried the new kid would steal all the rich old men’s shockingly beautiful young wives. And then on the page after that Trump says that it was really worth joining Le Club, because it’s the place he first met Roy Cohn, who gave him a lot of great advice.

If you’re a political opponent of Donald Trump and you feel like you have to make up a bunch of wild-eyed bullshit about the ways he’s just like Putin and wants to murder everybody so you have something to use against him, you’re maybe…not that smart? Not paying attention, really? Not at all good at anything you’ve spent your adult life doing, Hillary Clinton, but you’re married to someone who’s good at it so you get a free trip to third base? I KNOW HOW WE CAN BEAT HIM LET’S SAY THAT HE WENT TO MOSCOW AND PAID FOR A GOLDEN SHOWERS PARTY IN BARACK OBAMA’S HOTEL BED. Has anyone ever been dumber?

It’s like the man is covered with levers you can pull to harm him, but he’s opposed only by people who somehow can’t ever see any of the levers, so they frantically try to construct new levers instead of using the levers that are already plainly in evidence. The people who are doing this PUTIN PUTIN PUTIN shit are telling you that they don’t see the world. They’re announcing their moral and intellectual blindness.

Trump holds rallies that are attended by thousands of genuinely adoring fans, and these crowds of people who love the man boo him when he brags about his amazing Covid-19 vaccines, which are absolutely brilliant and amazing. That’s an opening to an effective political attack, but you have to live in reality to notice it.

And so the brutally stupid architect of the appalling regime change in Libya, an undeclared war waged without congressional approval for poorly defined ends and with the result of producing a failed state, warns that Donald Trump wants to “rule without any check or balance.” It’s a performance of such sociopathic obtuseness and repellent falsehood that only a few political figures could ever even hope to attempt it. But the extreme is now the regular, and we’re somehow headed toward the normalization of this kind of bizarre non-attack attack, a politics in which opposition research is conducted in the presence of a hookah-smoking caterpillar. Reminder: this is their response to all rising opposition figures, not simply their response to Trump. It’s their only remaining vocabulary. No end is in sight.

They would use this precise language if Barney the dinosaur became the Republican frontrunner, or a newborn kitten. It’s the only language they know how to use. All opposition is the most terrifyingly dangerous existential threat in the history of the world. Here’s a preview of the next twenty years of mainstream American politics:

HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN.

They’re descending into the chaos of war everywhere and the serious threat of declining American military and economic power while warning that Donald Trump threatens us with destabilization.

Anyway, enjoy!

Watching Democrats wave Ukrainian flags on the floor of the House of Representatives this week, with their hapless non-opposition mostly looking on in helpless and complicit silence, I share this conclusion:

There’s…just…blindness. Just blindness and emptiness.