"The inauguration of US?"

Anand Giridharadus nails it.

   

…Is this vulgar peddler of coins and sneakers and steaks and educations and Bibles so, yes, outrageous to us that we cannot see that this, too, is us — a country of get-rich-quick schemes and big-smiling salesmen, of trusted media voices who sell gold and supplements on the side, a country where now you must have a personal brand to be a painter, a writer, even a professor or a schoolteacher crowdfunding for pencils, where religious leaders are multimillionaires, where former presidents build corporate empires, where you cannot get news of public affairs without being sold to?

Is Trump’s famously short attention span all that alien to our scrolling, swiping ones?

Is his success as a self-styled billionaire savior, uniquely capable of fixing it, because he milked the system he now heads, because he broke the rules he now proposes to reform — is this profoundly American figure not an emanation of our own strange relationship with the rich superhero? A relationship you don’t find in many other places. A tendency to put these people on magazine covers, to treat them as social visionaries, to take their money for good causes and sell them reputational detergent, to think that they are in possession of special brains that know how to run society?

Is this man who has been so deeply moulded by the activity of Not Reading all that alien from a country that reads less and less?

Is the allure of the 24/7 show this once-banished, now-returned, riveting felon puts on so inexplicable in a country whose preferred forms of entertainment are conflict-saturated fictions called “reality TV” and crime procedurals and superhero reboots?

Is Trump’s stoking of tribalism unconnected to the filter bubbles and civic fatalism and contempt we let creep into our hearts?

Is his insecure masculinity not the insecure masculinity that has been allowed to fester in millions of Americans? Left to fester in part because of a belief that to help those who once enjoyed certain privileges is to compound the old oppressions.

Is Trump’s certitude not the certitude we have let attack our own curiosity? Is his knowing before thinking not familiar? Is his being a person only of answers, never of questions — do you not recognize this at all?

Is his consequentialist view of truth — that the only truths worth hearing are those that benefit him — not also ours? Whether about an aging president or a war in Gaza, how interested, how open, are we to truths unhelpful to our causes and our teams?

I would never in a million years argue that today, at high noon, we are getting what we deserve. No one deserves all that may be coming. But America is getting a playback of what we have allowed ourselves to become…

… Today, after all, is both Donald Trump’s re-inauguration day and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday. We are both.

We are the country of book bans, and we are the country that has published many of the books that have driven much of the world’s conversation for many decades.

We are a country in the grips of a backlash, and we are a country that has in recent decades changed more in the status of millions of people who once lived on the margins of society than our forebears in many previous centuries combined.

So, yes, today, painfully, we are witnessing the inauguration of us. It is not the triumph of some Americans over other Americans so much as the triumph of the small-hearted tendency in American life over the generous one, the cruel impulse over the humane one, the vengeful drive over the magnanimous one, the safety of the smaller “we” over the dream of the bigger one.

And, again and again in history, the generous tendency, the humane impulse, the magnanimous drive, the bigger “we” has ailed and then returned stronger than ever.

Will it again? I trust in my bones it will. But its revival will not be a function of the clock. Time may heal wounds, but it doesn’t on its own resolve the battle for your soul.

What begins today isn’t who we are, and it is. What should give us some hope is that who we are is still a matter of our choosing.

From his Substack yesterday.

I've reviewed some of his books in prior posts.

 

Quite the writer and thinker.

ALSO, KLAAS IS BACK IN SESSION

He’s back. How should we deal with it? And how can we respond to the return of Donald Trump with more personal resilience and smarter political resistance?

The Banality of Corruption

Exactly eight years ago, in January 2017, my life developed a strange rhythm: Trump tweeted—and a few minutes later, my phone started buzzing. With every bizarre half-baked post, whether it was about “General E. Watch,” the infamous middle-of-the-night “covfefe,” or his various threats against the press and his political opponents, his fingers furiously raced across his iPhone and moments later, the BBC or other news outlets would ask me for a rapid response interview as part of its breaking news coverage.

This caught me off guard; I had unintentionally developed a depressingly relevant area of expertise for the rise of Trumpism. On the one hand, I had worked in US campaign politics—I helped manage a winning campaign for governor of Minnesota—so I understood some of the complex contours of American politics.

On the other hand, I had just completed a PhD studying authoritarian regimes and the breakdown of democracy across the globe, a visceral firsthand experience of understanding how autocratic populist demagogues can devastate a country, forever changing its political dynamics in the most toxic ways imaginable. The surge in Trumpian politics was sadly merging my professional life, past and present.

Over time, the tweets numbed us, the exhausting normalization of the routine abnormal. As the Trump years ground on, my phone buzzed less for the bizarre and more for the scandalous; exposés, tax frauds, impeachments, blatant racism, incitements to violence, revelations of grotesque corruption, underhanded payoffs, the hidden machinations of a narcissistic strongman.

We steadily succumbed to what I call “the banality of crazy,” in which the routine bombardment of unacceptable, disgusting, and frankly unhinged behavior simply became an accepted feature of the political landscape. By the end, the tweets were barely covered, the lunatic speeches ignored…

From his Substack.

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"I don’t think there’s any way to read yesterday except as President Trump deciding that with the Republican party fully subservient to him, he can subjugate the other remaining power centers in American life.

He can finally be a wartime president. It’s just that he’s going to war against America."
  

     —Jonathan V. Last

RICK WILSON

We're In Our Oligarch Era
And other observations from Day 1 of Trump's Second Reign of Misrule

A Day at the Circus. It was one for the books, folks. 

Peer behind the bright lights and limp ceremony—both manipulated to accommodate Chicken Donny’s pathological fear of a winter breeze—and you get a sneak preview of this unholy presidential term: peril, drama, calamity, chaos, plague, and maybe the entire Book of Revelation tossed in for fun.

If the day was any indication, we might want to buckle up for the Return of the Seven Plagues and watch the sky for raining frogs while we're at it.

Three Speeches, One National Nightmare

First, trifurcate the three speeches. Ah, trifurcate—God, I love that word. The day sliced itself into three big moments, each more unhinged than the last.

First up: the official swearing-in, a visual carnival that also served as a grad-level seminar in modern Kremlinology. 

In the Rotunda, America’s titans of tech occupied front-row seats like they were on the deck of the latest superyacht.

Zuck, his perm aglow, was ogling the spectacular store-boughts and Agent Provocateur lingerie peeking from Jeff Bezos’s newly acquired paramour’s decollatage. 

Elon looked like the Ketamine was reaching its peak. Tim Cook looked like he’d do anything to be teleported to a supply closet, and Sundar Pichai of Google had the fixed smile of a a man thinking only of his 10Q.

Meanwhile, the newly minted Cabinet picks hovered behind them like a second-string JV squad. The message was unsubtle: the real power is with those who can help Donny and his nearest and dearest. 

They get the joke now: corruption is a business model, and they’re going all-in. Hell, if they play their cards right, some might hit the big T—a trilly—by the end of the term. 

Welcome to our oligarch era. No one else matters, least of all Trump’s base.

As for the Cabinet? Errand boys sent by grocery clerks. Congress? A rubber stamp. And have you accepted Our Donald as your personal savior? If not, repent now.

Somewhere between the forced smiles of George W. Bush and Barack Obama—who both looked like they were trying not to snort-laugh—and the U.S. Senators glancing around to see who stopped clapping first, we witnessed the reading of a speech the new POTUS can never quite make look genuine. 

His teleprompter game is shockingly weak for a reality TV dude; his words fall flat when some geek writes for history and posterity. Let’s face it: Donald only comes alive when he’s bragging about himself or whining about some imagined harm…

More shortly...

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