"Like a 12-year-old, he bullies everyone and kicks every can down the road"

 

Presidencies birth their own rhetorical shorthand. Bill Clinton is remembered for the definition of “is.” TV pitchman Donald Trump has given us numerous options, including the current front-runner, “The cruelty is the point.” Years from now, though, I suspect this administration’s lasting phrasal monument will be, “Everyone is 12 now.”

The creator of the “Everyone is 12” theory of Trumpism is the lawyer-musician-podcaster Patrick Cosmos, who described it as an attempt to draw “a unified theory of American reality.” The idea that Donald Trump never mentally developed past age 12 once seemed relatively benign, because childishly rejecting niceties can sound like truth-telling when your opponents are choking in dishonest message-tested cant. But the benign reading is no longer possible.

The idea now works because, like a 12-year-old, he bullies everyone and kicks every can down the road. The easiest way to fix problems you don’t want to fix is just to say that they’re fixed, blame those who notice they’re not and propose an alternative that seems snotty or funny but is also the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard of. Then threaten critics with jail.

This, then, is how you get to hitting Iran with a decapitation strike and hoping that everyone’s so scared of you that they do what you say. Or why it sounds like a good idea to threaten genocide, forget about it, make another threat, forget about it, then make another. We’re going to win the war anyway, because we’re special; we know karate, and our dad works for NASA.

We don’t need our friends, because they’re stupid and losers, but if we lose, it’s because they’re fake friends and didn’t show up. We’re going to make a free-trade club, and they can’t join. “Oh, you’re gonna close the Strait of Hormuz??? Well, I’m also going to close the Strait of Hormuz.”

Like a 12-year-old, he bullies everyone and kicks every can down the road.

The preteen mentality is the one that sees someone who’s been a Catholic for the length of a spa weekend challenge the pope to exegetical combat, then not actually quote anything. It is 100% also how the speaker of the House and VP dismiss the Pope Leo’s criticism of the war in Iran by citing the Catholic “just war theory” without Googling it and noticing that the text indicts them both. 

But 12-year-olds don’t look things up. What they do is be a member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, go to quote a homicidal part of the Bible, whiff and quote “Pulp Fiction.”

The Department of Government Efficiency was a deeply 12-years-old concept. It had to be, as it relied on a chain of assumptions that could only be connected in a preadolescent mind palace. There were trillions lurking in the government that no one noticed, and functions could be cut even when statutorily forbidden. They didn’t give the slightest concern to effects on the economy and state capacity, because children don’t care about that, and someone else gives them shelter.

They never asked if America would save more than it would eventually give up by losing lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. Most importantly, the only people who could see the secret map to ”National Treasure 3: The Deep-State Vault” were guys with names like “Big Balls” and the designer of the Cybertruck — arguably the most 12-year-old vehicle in automotive history — who thinks the coolest letter in the alphabet is X, who has been pissing his pants on the internet for six years because people stopped complimenting him, and who eventually had to buy a part of it and algorithmically adjust it to make him seem cool.

Even in a functional system, a person who refuses to stop being entitled and intolerable can get away with a lot. Others just assume they’re someone else’s problem; and those other people often just want to give the shrieking brat whatever it wants to go away. It got Trump to the Oval. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, it also got an administration and political party whose operating theory is, “What if we made the entire store out of its worst customer?”

It turns out nothing works because everybody’s a jackass with no impulse control. The executive is stuffed with Chan dweebs who daily say something so racist that Trent Lott would have to resign from the Senate 11 more times to proportionally atone for them if he’d said any of them in 2007. The secretary of the Treasury can dismiss rising seas from anthropogenic climate change with, “As we all know, the natural habitat for the Earth is actually water,” because 12-year-olds think other people’s mass deaths or immiseration are stupid and kind of funny, because they have children’s brains. 

A person who refuses to stop being entitled and intolerable can get away with a lot.

Answering grownups’ dumb questions by pretending to be a colossal dunce is funny just as a practice. See also: Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett saying, “Imagine if oil prices start going back down because the [Strait of Hormuz] situation resolves itself somehow, you could be looking at an inflation close to zero. That’s something the Fed needs to pay attention to.” Sure thing, Kev. While we’re at it, we can re-task the Hubble to look for Luke Skywalker’s ship when he comes to Earth to tell you that you’re his hero. Go home and sleep in your race car.

This perpetually preadolescent mentality keeps rolling downhill to the dittoheads, and it’s a killing joke that stands to run for a generation. Cheap gags roll around in the background of everyday and end up at what might as well be murder. 

Somewhere, one of the poorest people you could ever meet in your life is being deported to a country they’ve never been to, because that’s funny if you’re 12. Somewhere, someone in a boat is exploding, because only the president was genius enough to realize that the solution to drug trafficking is bombing it away via a globe-spanning murder spree, because — you guessed it — he’s a fucking child.

The child shall lead them. The Republican Party will be stuck with this mentality for a very long time, and the rest of us may be too. Trump’s term is supposed to end in January 2029, but the Supreme Court has already found that everything the conservative majority wants is legal, and everything their opponents try to do is a crime. You can probably guess what kind of thinking went into that.

-Jeb Lund, Truthdig