Sunday, December 29, 2024

Doom Report (Week -4: Goodbye, 2024)


The rapidity with which Musk and Trump are falling out is highly amusing to me.  I mean, they are two malignant narcissists: they were never going to be able to work together for long.  But I did think it would happen after he actually took office.  The fact that they just can’t wait to start sniping at each other is quite delightful to me.  Is this schadenfreude on my part?  Oh, certainly.  Does it make me a bad person?  Shit, I dunno; maybe.  Do I care?  Fuck no.

I should clarify: Trump and Musk have not quite started going directly at each other.  Mostly what’s been happening over the holidays is that Musk (in typical Musk fashion) could not wait to start putting his agenda out there, and part of his agenda is to ramp up H-1B visas: people on such visas don’t typically ask for raises, and they certainly can’t unionize, so they’re sort of the perfect workforce for someone like Musk.  But, see, the crazy MAGA-heads don’t want more immigrants: they’re busy trying to get rid of all the ones we already have.  And they (in typical crazy MAGA fashion) don’t much care who’s footing the bill—they’ll spew all over whoever gets in their way.  So it’s less Trump going after Musk and more Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz and ever-reliable looney Laura Loomer doing so.  If you want a breakdown of the ongoing saga, which I would title “Vicious Tweets,” you could watch a recent BTC video, but, trust me: you don’t actually want that.  It has all the high intellectualism of a middle school mean girls drama (the high school equivalent would have much more depth, believe it or not) and even lacks the draw of making you want to root for one side or the other, because in this case both sides are equally execrable.  Just take my word for it that it’s all unraveling before it’s even gotten started.

Now, Trump has been conspiciously missing from these articulate “you’re a poopyhead!” “nuh-unh! you are!” exchanges, because he actually does know (and, apparently, care) where the money’s coming from.  Remember, people like Bannon and kids-in-cages architect Stephen Miller appear to be true White Nationalist believers, but Trump is strictly in it for the money.  He’s not Christian, but he’ll take money from the Christians (see also: $60 Bible).  He’s not a neo-Nazi, but he’ll take money from the neo-Nazis (stand by, Proud Boys!).  For Trump, being President is the ultimate grift: he overcharges the Secret Service for staying in his hotels, secured billions from the Saudis by going through Jared Kushner, and conned ABC into donating $15 million not by having a great case (the case was almost certainly unwinnable), but because parent company Disney didn’t really want to be on the wrong side of the incoming administration.  At this point, he’s basically selling cabinet positions and ambassadorships: we will soon have a cabinet with a net worth of over $10 billion dollars, and that’s not even considering Musk, whose “department” is not even a real department, so he won’t be part of the cabinet.  So Trump knows where his bread is buttered, and he’s not quite willing to join in with the MAGA nutjobs.

BUT.  At the same time, Trump hates it when people other than him get attention.  And the Democrats know this, and so they started the whole “President Musk” meme.  Just as they knew that talking about his dwindling crowd sizes would get under his skin, they’re transparently playing him, trying to drive a wedge between him and Musk.  And the great thing about playing this game with Trump is that it always works, no matter how obviously you do it.  So where I see the true friction—the real breakdown of the bromance—is in this fantastic clip where he goes back and forth, nearly Gollum-like, between praising Musk and snidely pointing out that he can’t be president, because he wasn’t born here.  You really have to listen to that part of the clip: the fake, Nelson Muntz-like laugh at Musk’s foreign-born status, followed by a whiplash-inducing “nah, he’s a great guy” is so revealing.  If the Dems can keep the whole “President Musk” thing in the news for a bit longer, that’ll solve the problem right there.

But the pitched battle over immigration—“absolutely no one” on the one side vs “only the ‘good’ ones” on the other—is also pretty entertaining to watch, though I’m not sure it will lead to the dissolution as fast as the President Musk bit.  At the end of the day, Trump likes people like Bannon and Loomer because they worship him.  But he doesn’t need them.  If they become inconvenient, he’ll ditch them in a heartbeat, as he has so many others.  Loyalty is never rewarded in Trump-world; Trump lives by the credo of the old Janet Jackson song: what have you done for me lately?  So, from his perspective, he’s happy to sit back and watch them fight it out—he probably thinks of himself as a Roman emperor, facilitating gladiatorial “survival of the fittest” fantasies—but I think that if he has to pick, he’ll go with the checkbook.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the show in the meantime.

Because we must take our joys where we can find them.  Though that clip doesn’t show it, the speech Trump is giving there is the same one where he said this:

On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign a historic slate of executive orders to close our border to illegal aliens and stop the invasion of our country.  And on that same day, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D Eisenhower.

Of course, the deportation is a grift as well: the value of the private prison industry is soaring right now, and which company gets to lock up all those prospective deportees will no doubt go to whichever company manages to line the pockets of the Trump family most effectively.  But that doesn’t ameliorate the wave of human misery that is about to be unleashed.  I’ve heard many commentators point out that this will be radically unpopular and may be the very thing that costs the Repubs control of the government ... but there’s a real cost to real people in the meantime.  Will some of those rounded up end up being Americans who actually voted for Trump, possibly screaming “wait, wait: I didn’t think you meant me!” the whole time?  Maybe.  But not that many of them.  So, even if we’re cruel enough to revel in the classic joke of “I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, it still wouldn’t be worth the cost to all those who never even got the chance to vote, because ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS DON’T VOTE ILLEGALLY.  Man, I thought the con man who convinced people to pay for bottles of something that comes out of the tap for free was a genius, but the hustler who managed to convince half the country that people terrified of being deported would risk their freedom to do something nearly half of Americans can’t be bothered to do ... man, that guy was really slick.  So the horrors, they are a-comin’, and thus we takes our small joys where we can find them, even when they’re a bit cruel.

And, by the way, if you find yourself a bit overwhelmed by the thought of all that human misery and unsure what to do about it, I’ll pass on a message from Jesse Thorn, founder of Maximum Fun and co-host of Judge John Hodgman, who’s worked with his wife Theresa for a couple of different immigrant advocacy organizations.  Jesse advises us to donate to Al Otro Lado (that’s “to the other side,” for those whose Spanish is a bit rusty).  While they’ve already nearly doubled their goal as I write this—blowing away the amount that Jesse and Theresa pledged to mach dollar for dollar—I’ve no doubt they’d still be happy to receive more financial help.  These are folks who provide free legal help to immigrants (remember: unlike most people who are arrested in our country, immigrants don’t have access to a free attorney), and, as Jesse said in a recent episode of JJH:

One of the pieces of good news that I can offer is, as cruel and unjust as our immigration system is for migrants, migrants who have legal representation and have legal assistance actually have a pretty good shot.  The reason is that our government is so incompetent that they always mess up a thousand things.

And that’s, once again, a bit of a sad place to find comfort, but, as I said: wherever we can find it.

Finally, I thought I’d address the “Trump can’t take the oath” thing that seems to be going around.  Remember how, in 2020, the MAGA crowd kept saying that Trump would just refuse to leave the White House, and that way he’d stay president?  Remember how we all laughed at them and shook our heads sadly at how deluded they were?  Well, liberals have their sad little delusions too, and this is one of them.  Let’s break it down.

Remember how Trump incited an insurrection?  And remember how the 14th Amendment says that people who do that can’t hold office?  Okay, now remember how several states sued to keep Trump off the ballot on the grounds that, you know, the 14th Amendment said he couldn’t be President?  And then remember how the Supreme Court said, fuck the Constitution! we work for Trump, and he can do whatever he wants!  Remember all that?  Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

See, the Supreme Court didn’t actually say that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply to Trump.  And they didn’t say that Trump wasn’t an insurrectionist ... because they couldn’t.  Although the Supreme Court has gotten very good lately at doing things they’re not supposed to be able to do, they weren’t actually willing to go as far as that.  See, one of the rules of an appeal to the Supreme Court is that they’re not there to overturn what’s called “findings of fact.” And the Colorado courts (and a couple of others as well) had adjudicated Trump as an insurrectionist as a finding of fact.  So the Supreme Court couldn’t (theoretically) even look at that aspect.  They just had to decide whether that fact meant that he could be kept off the ballot.  And what they decided, in the end, was that the 14th Amendment never says an insurrectionist can’t run for President ... only that they can’t take the oath of office.  So taking someone off the ballot isn’t an option.

But now (so the liberal delusion goes) it’s actually time for that oath of office, and so now the 14th Amendment will kick in and Trump can’t become President.  See?  Where this fantasy falls apart is, of course, that the person administering the oath of office is ... the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.  And remember how the Supreme Court works for Trump?  Well, it might be more fair to say that the 6 conservatives on the Court work for Trump.  And, actually, it might be even more fair to say that Alito and Thomas work for Trump—and even more fair to point out that Thomas just works for whoever pays him the most—while Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh work for the Conservative legal movement (and Barrett sort of does too, though I suspect that one day she’ll be more of a moderate than most people think at the moment).  But I think that’s a distinction without a difference in this case: Roberts has absolutely no problem with ignoring the whole inconvenience of the 14th Amendment and giving Trump the Oath, which he will do, and there we’ll have it.  It’s a really pretty fantasy, guys, but it’s just that.

So that’s where we are, here at the end of another fairly awful year.  Do I wish I were talking more about, say, the fact that a favorite hobby of mine has returned after nearly 15 years being out of print?  Sure.  Or that I were talking about how my middle child (typically referred to in these posts as “the Smaller Animal,” despite the fact that they’re now the tallest of my children, and nearly a foot taller than myself) became an adult this year, getting to vote in their first Presidential election?  Definitely.  But we are where we are, and there’s no use crying over spilled water under the bridge or what-have-you.  The year has held a few bright spots, but mostly it’s been a great steaming pile of shit, and I don’t think I’ll be too sad to see the back of it.  Next year?  I mean, honestly I don’t hold out a lot of hope.  So I’ll take my amusements—like watching idiots such as Loomer and Musk go at each other like the Real Housewives of MAGAwhile I can still get ’em.  Wherever we can find it.









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