The broad trend, perhaps, is the discomfort of tribal human beings living in multicultural liberal democracies.
- How some people (who weren’t paying attention) are shocked that Trump is actually setting out to do what he promised to do;
- How Trump surrounds himself with weak, small men whose sex abuse allegations are a feature, not a bug;
- Perhaps Putin supports Trump because he’s hoping Trump will wreck America;
- It’s not the economy, it’s a worldwide authoritarian revolt against liberal market democracy.
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The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 19 Nov 2024: Washington Is Shocked, subtitled “Just shocked, I tell you.”
More about people who weren’t paying attention. Beginning with an example about reggaeton star Nicky Jam, who supported Trump until a Trump comedian called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had previously gone after Puerto Rico—he punished its leaders for criticizing him after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenland—but even if Nicky Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.
Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election, Trump has moved swiftly to do things he’d said he’d do, and yet many people—especially his own supporters—seem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd. Surprise was perhaps merited in late 2016 and early 2017, when Trump was still an unknown quantity. But after four years as president, culminating in an attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is. Somehow, the delusion of Trump à la carte—take the lib-owning, take the electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuff—persists.
Health-care-industry lobbyists surprised by the pick of RFK Jr.; Senator Susan Collins about Matt Gaetz; Senator Lisa Murkowski about Pete Hegseth. And finally,
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. He’s appointing officials such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning, Trump confirmed on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise.
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Why would these things be true? Because Trump is a sociopath? He appeals to people’s base natures?
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 19 Nov 2024: Sex abuse allegations against Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth only make Trump like them more, subtitled “Republicans complain nominees weren’t ‘properly vetted,’ but don’t get that accusations are a feature, not a bug”
Salon, Lucian K. Truscott IV, 19 Nov 2024: Mr. Me Too: Donald Trump surrounds himself with small, weak men, subtitled “The small, weak men appointed to Cabinet positions by a small, weak man”
Marcotte:
Having endured Donald Trump in their faces for nearly a decade now, one would think more Republicans would understand better the man they’ve kept as their party leader. Instead, they are running to reporters, professing shock and outrage at the cast of dangerous clowns he is tapping to serve in his cabinet. Regarding Pete Hegseth, who Trump nominated to run the Defense Department, an anonymous person linked to Trump’s transition team professed “frustration” to the Washington Post, complaining, “He hadn’t been properly vetted.”
No level of “vetting” can turn a Fox News host into someone capable of running the world’s largest military, …
Reviewing Trump’s own record of sexual assaults, and his support for other men accused of them, she concludes,
Even if the report becomes fully public, though, don’t expect Trump to care. His campaign was constructed on an implicit promise to male voters that Trump was on a mission to restore sexist privileges many men feel have been lost in the #MeToo era. Defending a man’s “right” to have sex with underage girls would be making good on a campaign promise. It’s tempting to hope this will anger the public and result in consequences for Trump, but frankly, that’s unlikely. As noted above, a New York civil jury found Trump to have committed sexual assault against Carroll, but this information did not stop him from winning the 2024 election.
In an understandably angry New York Times editorial on Sunday, Roxane Gay wrote, “Trump is successful because of his faults, not despite them, because we do not live in a just world.” That understanding is what Trump is counting on when he puts forward nominees like Hegseth and Gaetz. He expects his base voters to see these two like they see him, as an aspirational figure. And not because they believe they’re innocent men done wrong, either. The ability to commit crimes — even sex crimes — and get away with it is part of the allure of Trumpism.
Truscott:
Do you know what I noticed about the flood of stories about Trump’s Cabinet picks in my inbox? How none of them talked about what kind of small, weak man it takes to sexually assault a woman or pay for sex with an underage girl. Let’s step back for a moment and get into what we are talking about here. We just went through a presidential election in which the winning candidate, Donald Trump, is a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by no fewer than 25 women. That man received the votes of some 76 million of his fellow Americans. He took a few days off to celebrate – numerous photos of a big post-election party at Mar-a-Lago hit the internet during the past week or so – and then he got down to business appointing candidates for 12 Cabinet positions in 12 days. Two of those appointments went to men who face the same kind of charges of sexual crimes that Donald Trump has been accused of.
…
These stories shouldn’t be about these small, weak men. They should be about the women they traumatized. The #MeToo movement shouldn’t be over because Donald Trump was elected president. It should be just getting started.
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Why does Putin root for Trump? Perhaps to see Trump wreck America.
NY Times, Mikhail Zygar, 19 Nov 2024: Putin Sees America Hurtling to Disaster, With Trump at the Wheel
The American election results were received with enthusiasm in Moscow. President Vladimir Putin, offering his congratulations, seemed genuinely pleased. But it’s not because Donald Trump is seen as a pro-Russian politician or even one of their own — those illusions faded long ago. Nor is it the prospect of an advantageous peace deal in Ukraine, ruthlessly brokered by Mr. Trump. The first reported call between the two leaders, which the Kremlin denies took place, suggests that the incoming administration will be no pushover.
Instead, the excitement comes from something else. It’s that to many in the Kremlin, a Trump presidency might bring about the collapse of the American state.
After all, the Soviet Union fell apart, why shouldn’t the United States? Russian officials apparently really liked the American film “Civil War” (from last April) which in Russian they titled “The Fall of the Empire.” They see, the article says, liberal ideology as like communist ideology in the Soviet Union, stumbling toward a fall. Russia has been fighting what they see as “woke” because…
Russia has been trying to help. As part of a broad assault on so-called woke culture and its supposed threat to traditional family and religious values — which at home has seen the banning of gender transition, the labeling of L.G.B.T.Q. groups as extremist organizations and the restricting of books that mention same-sex love — an army of Russian bots and propagandists promote conspiracy theories, vaccine skepticism, anti-feminism, anti-L.G.B.T. sentiment and anti-immigrant rhetoric on social media. The aim is to deepen the polarization of American society and, eventually, break it apart.
That is, on social media in the US.
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As widely noted, there’s an anti-incumbent, and authoritarian, trend around the world. But why?
Washington Post, Eduardo Porter, 19 Nov 2024: Opinion | There’s something scarier than rising costs behind Trump’s victory, subtitled “A broader dissatisfaction with liberal market democracy is churning up authoritarianism around the world.”
Blaming Harris’s loss on the economy misses the forest for the trees, the writer says.
Twice already, more or less half of American voters have elected a guy who promises to overthrow the liberal world order — to do away with democratic institutions, values, and norms, trample on human rights, blow up the economy — and to bend the nation, and the world, to his will.
While voters might be forgiven for 2016 on the grounds that they hadn’t fully understood what Trump was talking about, this year they knew well what they were doing.
The economic interpretation of voters’ embrace of Trump is suspect not just because it is so narrow. For all the polls demonstrating Americans’ grim assessment of the economy, consumers have kept up spending as if they have few worries in the world. For all the gripes about the cost of living, real wages for typical American workers have been rising faster than inflation.
It’s more about change — and, in my terminology, the difficulty escaping the tribal mindset.
While identifying strands of voters’ discontent can be useful, the analysis must not miss sight of what Nov. 5 revealed about their broad-based disgust. To steer voters away from Trump’s “blow it all up” approach will require figuring out how to invite them into a country that feels alien to so many — a society that is continually changing to embrace new peoples, cultures and technologies, products, environmental constraints, languages, religions, forms of expression, gender identities, sexual affinities, and so on. Voters’ disgust might appear as though it is aimed at venal leaders out of touch with the salt of the earth. But it amounts to a rejection of what America is becoming.
With details about the unease with all this change. And finally this:
The idea that American voters expressed their economic malaise at the polls comes attached to a bolder claim: that Harris’s loss was merely part of a worldwide anti-incumbent fever caused by post-pandemic inflation. Voters everywhere, this story goes, revolted at the rising cost of living. But the relevant parallel with other countries is not merely about prices. It has to do with the broader dissatisfaction with liberal market democracy that is churning up authoritarianism around the world.
The challenge for the standard-bearers of capitalist liberal democracy is not to offer a better strategy against the vagaries of the economic cycle. It is to bring aboard the many citizens who reject where liberal market democracy has brought them. The challenge is urgent, because the other side is offering to end liberal democracy altogether.
So then does this trend expose the limitations of humanity’s ability to live in a multicultural world? It will only get more difficult, as the population keeps expanding. It was a nice experiment.
