Trump Keeps Shooting at an Empty Net

and scoring about half the goals

First, and most important, I apologize for using a soccer metaphor.

Now: Do you remember TACO Trump?

Trump always chickens out, TACO. This discussion suddenly appeared out of nowhere, instantly becoming ubiquitous, then quickly lost steam and died off:

It’s all the same. This is at least the last ten years in American politics: Some consultant comes up with a too-clever idea, everybody chants the slogan for a while, the slogan fails, they give up, the slogan sinks away, eternally meaningless. There’s no core. There’s no foundational set of ideas, somewhere down at the bottom, that people in politics and media are trying to find a way to express, other than the “more free shit” imperative to transfer money to clients. The thing that wishes to depict itself as the American political mainstream is a series of symbol-maneuvers, a horse pulling a slogan in a wagon. Occasionally the slogan falls out and gets replaced, but horses just pull. To participate in this, to post your hourly TRUMP IS A FASCIST DICTATOR slogan on social media, is to stop being a person.

Orange Man Bad Orange Man Bad Orange Man Bad

So my response to Tulsi Gabbard’s release of a long set of damning documents on the idiotic Russian collusion nonsense is that TACO Trump: Of course they made it up, of course it was just an attempt to find a slogan that would stick, of course it was unsustainable, of course it was a dumb, sloppy, lazy, useless lie. Only idiots have ever believed any of it. Since more or less the first moment I heard that Russia installed Trump, this has been the go-to joke in my circle of friends: Ohhhh, did VLADIMIR PUTIN tell you what kind of beer to buy!?!?!?!? The devil Putin tricked American minds into accidentally voting for Donald Trump. The quality of American political argument, captured in one sentence. Worthless, meaningless gibbering.

The respectable people, the good people, the people who are very pleased with themselves for not being low-status MAGA trash, have been mindlessly pulling that cart full of rotating slogans for quite a while, now, and the automaticity of the performance is remarkably clear. The new outrage-of-the-day video from Chris Murphy or Elizabeth Warren or whatever is, above all, stale on arrival. This is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage, this is an outrage!

So the, so the, so the….Sorry, just dozed off there for a moment.

We’ve been flooded with talentless, offputting, noisemaking human-shaped things, empty souls making repellent sounds that other empty souls try to market as responsible mainstream views.

Consistently, the things performed as high-status and respectable symbols are astonishingly repulsive.

So this is what Trump is up against: literally nothing. There’s nothing over there. No form of American future includes any degree of meaningful contribution from Sheldon Whitehouse and Margaret Brennan, or any of the other interchangeable human-shaped things you could swap in behind those two names. The prevailing feature of the American “mainstream” is emptiness. Boring emptiness, sometimes peaking to a grating emptiness.

We’ve been handed the perfect symbol of the contemporary American governing class, the mainstream technocratic managerial symbol-performers, because California is suing the Trump administration this month for de-funding the state’s high-speed rail project. The bullet train, approved in 2008, was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020, for about $30 billion. Actual construction started ten years ago. Five years after the anticipated completion date, no track has been laid — zero track. The new cost estimate published by the California High-Speed Rail Authority is “a cost range of $89 billion to $128 billion.” And the revised goal was to connect Bakersfield and Merced with high-speed rail by 2030.

They can’t build anything, they can’t make anything, they can’t do anything. They perform symbols:

Oh, SNAP, Orange Man loves CHINA! They can’t build the thing or make it work, but they can manufacture an endless stream of TikTok-worthy bitchy slogans about it. “Newsom 2028,” ladies and gentlemen.

Against that endless and bottomless emptiness, the Trump administration is doing…okay. After four years of destructive chaos, a troubled border is genuinely closed to illegal traffic. The rescissions bill passed, the underexamined and not-insignificant BBB passed, USAID is dead, PBS and NPR and Planned Parenthood have been pried off the Treasury, MAHA is maybe making some modest progress with the food and insurance industries, and the release of the Russian collusion hoax documents represents the degree to which the cultural tide is going out and showing us who’s been swimming naked.

There are disappointments. We’re still, bizarrely, sending weapons to a war in Ukraine that has no point or obvious ending, a war that the belligerents appear to be fighting because it’s what they woke up to this morning. The mRNA injections haven’t been pulled off the market. Deficit spending continues.

But for six months, we seem to have a respectable start on an agenda to reverse a considerable degree of decline and insanity. We’ll see. I’m repeating this last part, but I just don’t see an alternative. The Trump administration is succeeding in places, flawed in significant ways, and basically alone on the field. I don’t see that reality changing at all in the foreseeable future.