War of the Brown Noses: The great Trump world crackup has only just begun

 

   

Donald Trump began this week calling Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor. Standing on the steps of the Capitol, flanked by survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, Greene — someone not so much made by MAGA as made of it — flung the label back at him, unsubtly suggesting the president is captive to foreign interests. 

That same morning, Trump Whisperer and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer issued her own dire warning to the GOP, tweeting, “I’m going to say it, the GOP has a Nazi problem.” She ought to know. The first time most people encountered her, she had her arm around one in a YouTube video, bragging about her “big tits and Ashkenazi IQ” and striking out with him anyway. Some metaphors have a long payoff.  

A war of Nazis vs. Neocons/Globalists might have remained an “ideological” battle behind closed doors, its final word a press release that got repeated until it sounded like conventional wisdom. What Loomer and Greene have done is make that battle active, present and public. They aren’t alone. 

As the Heritage Foundation is pulled in two directions by America First groypers and the significantly Jewish neoconservative foreign policy establishment, Candace “I am also a Black commentator who loves Hitler” Owens and Charlie Kirk’s widow are tearing up the young conservative grifter and YouTube maniac demographics. 

Practically before the body grew cold, Owens began suggesting that Zionist sleepers in the GOP, the Mossad and Kirk’s widow had a hand in his assassination. (Meanwhile, better check to make sure Erika Kirk isn’t secretly transgender.) 

America First is also at war with the tech fascists’ fondness for HB1 visas, just as their supposed populism confronts the reality of what the Trump economy feels like for anyone whose response to a foreclosure crisis won’t be loading up on discount property.

What Loomer and Greene have done is make that battle active, present and public.

Then there is Thomas Massie, the Republican representative from Kentucky’s 4th District, whose commitment to treating the Epstein case as exactly what it looks like has given the House permission to discuss the president as culpable in a massive child-sex-trafficking ring. 

Massie presents the tip of the spear when it comes to dividing a caucus that has been animated by the philosophy that “everyone I don’t like is a pedophile,” while also persistently ducking the “there’s a documentary on Netflix about this” reality that Jim Jordan still serves in the House, and perpetually skates on the fact that not a month and sometimes not even a week goes by without the police introducing new confirmation that “Pedocon Theory is a theory like gravity is a theory.”

Like the cartoon dog in a room filling with flames, Trump and company’s response will probably be, “This is fine.” It’s a meme from the internet, so look for it to appear on the social media timeline of something like the Department of the Interior. It will be childish, stupid and unconvincing, but you can’t fault them, because for 10 years childish, stupid and unconvincing worked. 

Like a golf handicap, Trump could count on a press corps willing to add the numbers needed to cover the gap between what he told us the score was and what he actually shot. The loss of this reflexive support is invariably depicted as his “eroding trust,” but it’s like any other Trump employer-employee relationship: He rewarded the media’s tireless work with nothing, then fired it without a plan for a replacement. 

The story that MAGA tells itself and dares anyone to contradict will find newer and odder bedfellows. If a MAGA incarnate like Greene can claim to patriotically defend it while essentially declaring its creator a traitor, then this is a game that anyone can play. Laura Loomer’s dedication to Trump is so great that she replaced whatever personality she had with his interests and his satisfaction, and she has no trouble imperiling the new base by accurately describing it. 

This is, if not courage, then at least opportunism instantly recognizable to a party full of hyenas. Every new voice creates more permission and support for the next, and every unapologetic counterargument shreds another part of an administration’s messaging almost wholly dependent on having everyone in the party respond to the damning presence of objective reality with, “Nuh-uh.” They may not call this resistance, but it is assuming the form. 

The trouble with pretensions to kingship is that they come with none of the ceremonial aspects of monarchy.

Trump would never use that word either, but he knows it when he sees it. Only five months after a big fan of his started hunting Minnesota Democrats on his kill list, Trump took to social media Thursday morning for another rousing rendition of stochastic terror. 

Democrats who encourage the military to disobey unlawful orders, he wrote, should be hanged. 

But after a decade of the Trump Death Penalty looming over their heads, they need no reminders of their sentence, nor do his followers need more encouragement to exact the punishment. No, this one went out to those in the party whose burden is maintaining whatever polite fictions the Trump administration needs to paper over divisions among the base. 

“Tariffs don’t raise prices, but our removing some just lowered them,” and “Our distinguished colleague from the SS with a doctorate in Great Replacement is very disturbed about campus antisemitism” — whatever fraud gets us over the next 24-hour hump. 

The reward for loyalty is more of the same, and the cost of disloyalty is death. The question now is whose.

The problem with polite fictions is that both parties have to keep being polite, and Trump never upheld his part of the deal, with either the media or his caucus. The latter features many people like Greene who punched their ticket by being as vindictive and self-centered as their leader. At the same time, mainstream journalism has less incentive to pretend along with him that he is intelligent and capable. 

The trouble with pretensions to kingship is that they come with none of the ceremonial aspects of monarchy — the perks and cheats — that indicate an oath binding the participants either to the royal will or the axe. The long dynastic chains bring the polite fictions to you, premade and pre-solemnized, without any of the strain on credulity that comes with inventing them on the fly in less than a calendar year. Even if King Canute’s command couldn’t halt the tide, he still ended the day as king, and he didn’t have to cordon off the shore with courtiers to pretend there never was an ocean in the first place.

 

AS CHAOS UNFOLDS, FIND SOLID GROUND…

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