Roaming Charges: The Anal Stage of US Politic

 

Few men had been as cavalier and as debauched as the Président, but completely jaded, utterly torpid, all he was left with now was the depravity and turpitude of libertinage.

–Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom

Donald Trump seems to have reached that transcendent state of personal satori, where he is liberated from all inhibitions, political and psychological. His true persona has been unleashed out on the road, at one pit-stop rally after another.

Trump seems not to care–perhaps he doesn’t even notice–that the once-packed auditoriums have dwindled to the point where giant curtains don’t cover the sections of empty seats. 

The rousing receptions have been groans and baffled silences, as he rambles on and on about his own peculiar obsessions. He riffs on Nicki Minaj’s ass and Arnold Palmer’s penis. He brags over and over again about being the only president to have taken and passed (without missing a question) “a very difficult” cognitive test, three times! Even though his recent performances would suggest otherwise.

He drops strange hints about his declining health. He showed up to one rally with a bruise on his left eye, leaving some to wonder whether Meiania belted him or Natalie smacked him with her portable printer.

He indulges in his lusty fantasies on the musculature of the male anatomy, using a sitting US senator as a case study. He spins sadistic stories of violence, murder and torture. He enjoys the theater of cruelty, though not Artuad’s kind. He often sounds like he’s narrating a slasher film. Here is Trump entertaining his followers with a debased description of the murder of Iryna Zarutska for no discernible reason other than his own titillation:  He was a big, strong guy and he stood up and violently slashed her neck. Almost cut her head right off. Slashed it violently and viciously. For those people who are able to handle that kind of stuff, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Very rarely do you see it run beyond the actual, almost-hit. If you did, you wouldn’t see anything like it, probably. 

In many cases, you wouldn’t be the same. Her head was barely attached. And she looked up in that final second of her life, and she said, to herself, ‘Oh god. What happened to me, oh God.’ And she knew she was dead. She knew it. She literally probably lived seconds. Or just a second. She knew what happened. The slash was inches deep. She knew she was in trouble. She walked onto the train because she didn’t wanna…I don’t know what. You could see how scared she was.

Trump boasts endlessly about his own wealth and openly expresses his envy of those wealthier than he is and his disdain for the poor. 

He ridicules his own supporters and thinks he can get away with it. He tells them their own financial problems are delusions. At one stop, Trump invited his MAGA followers to Mar-a-Lago, with this stipulation: “You could even come to Mar-a-Lago. You’ll be my guest. The problem is that for $5,000, the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. I’m not even sure you could buy that! No, don’t go there. It’s not a good place if you’re price conscious.”

At another stop, he doubled down on his statement that he couldn’t care less about higher gas prices, saying: “I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump.’ That’ll be the headline. I said I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna say it: We’re making a freaking fortune.’”

America’s truckers, who once convoyed for Trump, aren’t making a fortune. In fact, they’ve been smacked hard by his tariffs and the spike in diesel prices from his imbecilic decision to go to war with Iran. At least 221 trucking companies have filed for bankruptcy this year alone, the most in decades. Smaller companies are, of course, the most vulnerable to financial ruin and are being gobbled up by big conglomerates like JB Hunt.

Trump’s speeches–rants, really–have become more and more profane. 

It’s like listening to less f-word-fueled private recordings of LBJ or Nixon, except delivered in public before audiences of evangelicals and Christian Nationalists. This is Trump unbound, unconstrained by the grammatical demands of paragraphs or even sentences. Free association is now the name of his rhetorical game and the thoughts and anecdotes unroll in no particular order, skipping from one not necessarily parallel universe to another.

More and more of Trump’s speeches have devolved into mere glossolalia (aka, grunts, groans, belches, wheezes and episodes of gurgling aphasia), which will be interpreted by the most devoted members of his cult as him speaking in the Divine Tongue. But most, I suspect, will see it as evidence of a mind unraveling in real time.

Trump seems to have embraced his own weirdness, a weirdness that has gone pathological. He is the Buffoon-in-Chief, and his presidency is our national opéra bouffe with a soundtrack by Lee Greenwood and the Village People. What is the point of his ravings? Often there is none, except his own gratification. 

His jokes have no punchlines. His stories fade off without endings. His anecdotes have no discernible political messages. He seems bored. Bored by the road. Bored by his crowds. Bored by his job. Several times he’s told his sparser and sparser audiences he doesn’t want to be there talking to them. They’re not really his kind of people. The kind of people that like ballrooms and are members of golf clubs. He repeatedly interrupts his rants to complain, “Why am I here? I don’t need this.” But of course, he needs this. Blind adulation is what he drinks instead of blood.

After all, this losing campaign isn’t really about him, even though it really is all about him. Sure, he’ll seize credit for any unlikely victories. But he won’t take any blame for the losses that seem sure to come.

Everything has gone to hell, and he seems to know it, despite Natalie only feeding him (highly edited) good news. 

His tariffs have backfired economically. His war on Iran is a debacle. He can’t stop the Ukraine war despite his vow to end it on day one. He has been diplomatically outplayed by Xi, Putin, Zelensky and the Prime Minister of Canada. Netanyahu calls and Trump comes and sits. His military has taken it on the chin from Iran and, embarrassingly, the Houthis. Internationally, few fear him anymore, and none respect him. He has alienated his base. His flacks in the White House are scheming behind his back. Women reporters just shrug off his verbal assaults and attempt to humiliate them. Much of the American public now views him not just with disdain but with disgust.

In the end, Trump replaced neoliberalism with neo-narcissism. 

His economic strategy is unabashed self-enrichment for him and his cronies. Though look out if you were a crony who made out better than he did. Trump has no friends, only collaborators and co-conspirators. He’s never really trusted anyone, not even his sons and accountants. He trusts NDAs, not the people whom he forces to sign them.

So, he celebrates his own malfeasance. Trump wallows in the aroma of his own mess. In the Anal Stage of US politics, it’s a thin line between self-love and self-loathing. 

One oozes seamlessly into the other. Trump’s personal wealth has swelled by $3.3 billion since retaking office. He may be America’s first self-dealing president. He’s turned the White House into his own gift shop. Contra Obama, it looks less like a Cheesecake Factory than Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Interior design as an infantilism.

He’s suggested he will issue sweeping pardons (thank Biden for the precedent) for even the lowest-ranking members of his staff, effectively indemnifying them from prosecution for any crimes or trampling of the Constitution he tells them to commit. And then he will, of course, force them to sign NDAs to prevent them from ever disclosing what crimes and who ordered them.

Trump doesn’t think he’ll need to pardon himself, though he may do so anyway, just because no one else has had the nerve to, not even Nixon, who was trained by Roy Cohn. It would be another first. And Trump likes firsts, the more unscrupulous, the better.

Trump believes the Supreme Court has given him the green light to do whatever he wants without legal consequences. 

And he may be right. He can trade on inside information. He can manipulate the markets to his advantage. He can cheat on his taxes. He can shake down white-collar criminals for pardons.  He can accept jumbo jetliners from a foreign government with ties to terrorists. He can reward purchasers of his meme coins with private meetings, even foreign nationals with dealings before the federal government. He can build monuments to himself and deface those of his predecessors. He can target his enemies with revenge prosecutions. All without, he believes, legal consequences. The disruptor agenda of 2015 has shriveled away. All that’s left is the cashing in.

The last vestige of populism that Trump exudes–and he more than exudes it–is his free-wheeling bigotry and the license he gives his followers to hate the same people he does.  As Tolstoy said of Napoleon after his Russian debacle, “He lost the power to think a decent thought.” […].

-Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch