The I-Told-You-So Variations

In this 2010 photo, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks holds the brain of Donald Trump. The organ was donated by the Trump Organization for tax purposes in fiscal year 1991.

We can thank Donald Trump for one thing. He has finally put to rest the 80-year thought experiment in which Americans have tried to imagine what fascism would look like if and when it triumphed in America. Franklin Roosevelt imagined this country's first fascist president as a folksy populist demagogue in the mold of Huey P. Long (memorably melodramatized by Robert Penn Warren in All The King's Men). John F. Kennedy reportedly believed fascism would come to America wearing stars on its shoulders and fruit salad on its chest. Kennedy's friend Gore Vidal once remarked that if Americans ever elected a dictator they would call him "Coach." We can now sound the game show buzzer on all three prophecies and ask our distinguished dead panel, "Would you like to try again?" For in this seventh month of the Trump administration, we can now definitively state that America's first fascist president is a bloated, cynical, pathologically lying, bottomlessly narcissistic, repeatedly bankrupt self-promotion tycoon, trash TV personality and diploma mill confidence man with the clownishly effeminate physical demeanor of a drag queen who has gone seriously to seed and lost all sense of style. (It is especially telling that Trump's first sally against sexual minorities was directed at trans people. His anti-trans tweets were a classic case of a homophobe lashing out at the sexuality he fears is within him.)

This blog has been silent for the past few months because, in this time so shockingly similar to the decade in which Thomas Mann remarked that "the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms," anything I might have written would have been merely a series of variations on "I told you so." Everything about this Trumped-out half-year has been depressingly, drearily predictable. Every. Single. Thing. From his shambolic incompetence to his nonstop, effortless production of falsehoods; from his bended-knee coddling of the right-Stalinist Putin regime to his outrageous attempt to obstruct justice by firing James Comey; from his bizarre hiring of the Junior Varsity Wall Street clown Anthony Scaramucci to his pathetically weak-willed firings of First Puppies Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer; from his racist, family-destroying immigration crackdown to the recent revelation that the administration's real goal is to melt down the Statue of Liberty and scrap it to China (pronounced like the last two syllables of 'vagina') by placing un-American restrictions upon legal immigration; from his mainstreaming of paranoid internet ravings and fascist talking points to his repeated, petty, childish, cowardly Twitter attacks on anyone whom he even perceives to have slighted him (Our Miss Trump is a real tough guy when s/he hides behind her iPhone and sends out mean girl tweets); from his murderously botched first military operation (that already-forgotten fiasco in Yemen) to his world-destroyingly reckless toying with the prospect of nuclear war over the insane rhetoric of a North Korean regime ruled by a dictator who looks and acts like Trump reflected in a funhouse mirror; from his ridiculously, transparently mendacious campaign promises ("Mexico will pay for it...") to his sub-Dubya oratorical style, best described as a never-ending stump speech; from his demonization of the legitimate media as 'fake news' to his valorization of fascist propaganda as 'real news'; from his beyond-Orwellian degradation of the English language (Trump's 'discourse' is postmodern in the most vulgar sense: he vomits forth strings of signifiers completely divorced from meaning) to the certainty that he will leave the American presidency as indelibly stained as those now-notorious Moscow hotel bedsheets; from his bigoted, moronic, and internationally counterproductive 'Muslim ban' to his forcing of Americans to pay the salary of fascist entrepreneur Steve Bannon; from the bizarre, Stalinist spectacle of that First Full Cabinet Meeting, when his appointees took turns sucking the First Dick in what was surely the first televised blowbang in White House history, to his Latin American strongman-style Executive Order signing ceremonies conducted at a miniature desk that seems chosen to make Trump's hands look larger on TV; from his incessant, obsessive, perhaps delusionally psychotic attempts to rewrite current events by insisting that he won a "great, great victory" in the election he lost by over three million votes to his attempt to turn the Boy Scout Jamboree into a Hitler Youth rally--all of this, all of it, is drearily, depressingly predictable.

And last weekend, predictably, there was blood in the streets. Trump's fascist followers came to Charlottesville to do what fascists do. They marched by torchlight while chanting "Blood and Soil!" and "Jews will not replace us!" (You can bet on that last one: not many Jews will be taking part in Nuremberg nostalgia rallies.) They incited hatred and fear and tried to provoke counter-violence so they could break heads while claiming self-defense. They whiningly assumed a victim role when the violence they wished and worked for finally occurred. They killed and wounded innocent people in an act of terroristic violence. Yes, even the murder of Heather Heyer and the wounding of 19 other anti-fascist protesters was almost as predictable as sunrise and sunset. Emboldened by a triumphalist fascist president, and with fascist fuckfriends like Bannon slithering into high places, it was only a matter of time before a member of the new Trump Generation of American fascists tried his hand at mass murder. Mass murder, after all, is what fascists, historically, have done best.

And the fascist president's numb-brained responses to this act of fascist terrorism were also--predictably--sickeningly predictable. After the Nazi-heartening equivocations of his Saturday statement and the obviously forced, hostage video-like "condemnation" on Monday, the unelected president's unhinged performance amidst the operatic gaudiness of Trump Tower was nothing less than the dropping of the final veil. Like three hundred pounds of beef gone reekingly rancid in summer heat, our aged, flabby Salome now stands naked before us, singing a fascist aria to ex-puppy Reince's head on a gold-painted platter. Yesterday, a president of the United States parroted the party line of American fascism, offered an apologia for its violence, and insinuated that the dead and wounded antifascists got what they deserved. And in the interstices of this verbal shitstorm, he argued that the torch-wielding chanters of Nazi slogans were "good people" peacefully demonstrating to preserve symbols of American history. Reality, of course, tells a different story, but the hate-fueled, violent reality of that evening, recorded in photographs and videos, means less than nothing to the Drumpfenfuhrer. There is but one reality, one fact, that Don the Dipshit Dictator truly respects: If he wants to be re-elected, he must not alienate two groups that enabled his electoral college victory, namely Russian intelligence agencies and American fascists. So no one should be surprised when Trump bends himself backwards like a horseshoe to suck their balls... That's an entirely appropriate image for the American presidency in August 2017, pornographic enough to fit the pussygrabber, ugly enough to work better than Ipecac. This is what American fascism looks like, and no one except David Duke and his anti-American ilk thinks it's a pretty picture. 

My arms are figuratively black and blue from all the times I've been driven to pinch myself over the past half-year, trying to snap my mind out of this fascist nightmare. It's no use. We are trapped inside a bad road company production of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, and this one won't have a happy ending after a few hundred pages. Barring impeachment (highly unlikely as long as the Republicans control Congress) or 25th Amendment removal (highly unlikely, period), we are not even close to the bottom of the Trump years. The next 3 1/2 to 7 !/2 years will likely be even worse than the past seven months. With an institutionally powerless Democratic Party and a Republican Party so thoroughly fascisized that it has no problem selling its country to a Fifth Avenue Hitler in exchange for a tax cut--I picture Paul Ryan avidly fingering his thirty pieces of silver embossed with David Koch's profile--our best hope for at least the next year and a half may lie in Trump's abysmal ignorance and incomparable incompetence. If he continues to flail and fail for the next 18 months--and he probably will, given that he believes himself perfect and omniscient and thus takes no one's advice--his own natural shambolia might mitigate the damage he would otherwise do were he a competent fascist president. And then by 2019 (which seems a century away right now, but it'll arrive sooner than we think), the Democrats might be able to place him in check. Until then, and until this gold-plated fascist ass tumor is excised from our body politic, and until the discredited anti-American Republican Party has been eliminated as an electoral force in American life, the only thing we can do is resist.