Inside Trump’s Freak Show
The collection of people Donald Trump has been appointing to his new administration is extraordinary. It’s worth resisting their normalisation and sanewashing and let them go by without comment. To the surprise of nobody they are a toxic mix of white supremacists, evangelists, Islamophobes, tv hosts, Zionists, foreign assets, Christian Nationalists, homophobes, sociopaths and deranged conspiracists. Some of these posts need to be confirmed by the Senate, some do not. Among them are:
Stephen Miller – Deputy Chief of Staff
Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy – DOGE “Department of Government Efficiency”
Pete Hegseth – Secretary of Defence
Mike Huckabee – Ambassador to Israel
Tom Homan – Border Czar
Tulsi Gabbard – Director of National Intelligence
Matt Gaetz – Attorney General
RFK Jnr, – Department of Health
Kristi Noem – Secretary of Homeland Security
Here’s Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth is a Fox News host and former Guantanamo Bay prison guard. He’s a former Bear Stearns banker and head of the Republican-friendly political action committee Vets for Freedom.
He’s just published a book where he seems to be calling for civil war.
Hegseth was one of a number of National Guard members ordered to stand down from Joe Biden‘s inauguration, according to CBS News reporter Jim LaPorta. In January 2021 the Associated Press reported 12 National Guard members had been removed from guarding Biden’s inauguration after they were linked to “right-wing militia groups,” or found to have “posted extremist views online.” In a post on Twitter, CBS News reporter Jim LaPorta said one of these 12 National Guard members was Pete Hegseth. His tattoo is a “Deus Vult” (God wills it), which was the symbol of the First Crusade. In recent years it’s been adopted by far-right extremists, and was widely displayed by many insurrectionists at Jan 6. That specific cross is associated with neo nazis & Christian/White Nationalists.
The responses to his nomination have been uniform. Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq War veteran and founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Association, commented: “He is a highly effective and ferocious media, culture and political warrior for MAGA. And beyond loyal to and trusted by Trump. Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for Secretary of Defense in American history. And the most overtly political.”
Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, an outspoken Trump critic who was a former lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, said in response to the news on X, “Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing.”
One commentator posted: “This is beyond stupid. But honestly I can’t stop laughing. Like if this was a TV show, people would say f*** this is too made up. The greatest military machine in the history of mankind to be under the thumb of a TV show host…”
Jeff Sharlet, author of Undertow, Scenes from Slow Civil War, has written: “Pete Hegseth, soon to be the second only to Trump in command of the most powerful military in U.S., declares liberals, leftists, Democrats, even Presidents of the U.S. “domestic enemies.” He doesn’t mean it as a figure of speech.”
If anyone would be the one to enact sending the military against US citizens, as Trump threatened, it would be Hegseth. Hegseth served as a National Guard officer, but he has no experience in government leadership that could inform the management of the federal government’s largest agency. His complete unsuitability – and lack of any experience for the post – is over-ridden by his ideological fervour and maniacal loyalty to Trump.
Kiera Butler has written for Mother Jones (‘Trump’s Defense Secretary Pick Hopes for a Christian Crusade’): “Hegseth has connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to Biblical law.
Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote.”
Next up, Mike Huckabee. Huckabee is a a former governor of Arkansas and a devout evangelical Christian. He has been appointed the US ambassador to Israel.
Huckabee has visited Israel more than 100 times, leading evangelical tours there since 1981. During his own run for the presidency he was quoted as saying “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian”.
Huckabee has himself considered buying a house in an Israeli settlement and typically refers to the West Bank by the Hebrew biblical name Judea and Samaria. His appointment is widely considered to be the green light for the next stage in the next stage of the complete obliteration of Palestine and the seizure of the West Bank. Alongside Huckabee Trump has appointed Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor as ‘Middle East envoy’. Witkoff raised huge amounts of money from Jewish donors who were persuaded to back Trump after Biden paused shipments of certain weapons to Israel following its invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza.
Next up, RFK Jnr.
Having dropped out of the race due to the Bear story breaking, RFK Jnr then threw his lot in with Trump, bringing with him the votes of a mixture of QAnon cultists, Kennedy-enthusiasts and the anti-vaxx brigade to the party. Kennedy’s appointment as the US secretary of health and human services (HHS) will have to be approved by the Senate. But the Senate (and the House of Representatives) has been won by the Republicans, and the idea that there are somehow constitutional ‘guardrails’ on Trump is fanciful.
In his victory speech Trump declared: “He’s going to help make America healthy again. … He wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him get to it … Go have a good time, Bobby.”
RFK Jnr taps into a mixture of covid conspiracies and anti-vaxx ‘theories’ as well as riding on the back of the opioid epidemic and America’s vast problem of diet-related disease. He successfully channels fears and insecurities about the role of Big Pharma and, although he has recently been trying to backtrack on his vaccination position, his position is crystal clear. Read for example this on his disgraceful involvement in the Samoan measles outbreak in 2019 ‘Samoa’s Perfect Storm’.
According to his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK Jr. believes that Fauci and Gates are members of a “vaccine cartel” trying to kill patients by denying them hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Nor is it true that Kennedy’s wild views contained to vaccinations. Here J.D. Wolf outlines some of his other views on issues as diverse as AIDS, 5G Networks and the feminisation of frogs.
In response to Kennedy’s nomination, Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit organization focusing on consumer advocacy, said: “Robert F Kennedy Jr is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at the department of health and human services (HHS), let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency.
“Donald Trump’s bungling of public health policy during the Covid pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of lives. By appointing Kennedy as his secretary of HHS, Trump is courting another, policy-driven public health catastrophe,” the organisation added.
The conservative pundit George Conway also commented on Kennedy’s nomination, along with that of Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz saying:
“Very little of what Trump does these days amazes me. Any one of the last three of Trump’s Cabinet-level picks (Gabbard as DNI, Gaetz as AG, RFK Jr for HHS), standing alone, would arguably have been the worst in American history. The fact that Trump made all three in a span of roughly 24 hours is astonishing,” Conway wrote.
Robert Garcia, Democratic representative from California, called the nomination “fucking insane”, writing on X: “He’s a vaccine denier and a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist. He will destroy our public health infrastructure and our vaccine distribution systems. This is going to cost lives.”
The appointment of someone who has no grasp of the most basic tenets of scientific facts has potentially disastrous consequences for research, public health and safety at an unimaginable scale.
In a very competitive group the appointment of the former Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as Attorney General has been met, perhaps, with the most disbelief and astonishment. Gaetz has faced multiple allegations of wrongdoing, including a federal sex trafficking probe that ended without charges against him and a House ethics inquiry that he dodged being released by resigning this week.
Four months ago, Tulsi Gabbard was alleged to have been placed on a secret domestic terror watchlist by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Now, she’s been appointed the Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard’s extraordinary career has involved multiple chameleon-like changes over the past ten years. She has been a Bernie Saunders supporter, and now a Trump loyalist endorsed by David Duke and Steve Bannon.
As the journalist Michael Tracey explains: “Tulsi Gabbard ran an entire presidential campaign advocating for such things as: federal codification of abortion rights, eliminating fossil fuels, banning “assault weapons,” unraveling virtually all US sanctions, condemning Israel for its “illegal occupation” of Palestine – as well as denouncing Trump for betraying his voters, violating the Constitution, and running an “imperial” foreign policy that was hurtling the world into war and nuclear apocalypse.”
“She subsequently abandoned these positions, because an opportunity arose to insinuate herself into the Republican Party — which of course requires abandoning any critique of Trump. This was to be accomplished by a steadfast campaign of aggressive memory-holing, along with throwing a bunch of Culture War red meat to Republican voters (a tactic she also used to ridicule.)”
Abigail Spanberger, a House Democrat on the intelligence committee, said on X that she is “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination.
“Someone who has aligned herself with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and trafficked in Russian-backed conspiracy theories is an unsuitable and potentially dangerous selection,” Spanberger wrote. “The objections to her nomination transcend partisan politics. This is a matter of national security.”
Listen to Mike Prysner’s two-part podcast) who explores Tulsi Gabbard and her family’s intimate involvement with the Science of Identity cult.
Project 2025
These appointments are disturbing and collectively utterly disastrous. These people are clearly chosen for their loyalty rather than any skillset, and it remains to be seen how such a group will be able to work together. Certainly the last time Trump was in office his reign was characterised by the chaos of endless feuds, sackings and constant recriminations.
But behind the extraordinary collection of individual extremists and oddballs is a theory of government.
This comes from Project 2025, created by the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation whose 900-page Mandate for Leadership sets out in detail what an incoming Trump administration should do. As Jill Filipovic writes (‘We’re going to find out how bad Project 2025 will be’): “Core to Project 2025’s mandate is the unitary executive theory: the idea that the president is the only source of executive authority – that his whims should dictate those of every agency under the executive umbrella. That means that the Department of Justice, instead of operating independently, would work at the behest of President Trump, with its resources dedicated to his priorities (even prosecuting his political opponents).”
It’s in this sense that these appointments might matter less. They will all be expected to bend the knee to the president, and such is their craven nature, or complete lack of suitability for their posts, or their absolute commitment to Trump, this will not be difficult.
Project 2025, Filipovic argues “is a wholesale remaking of American government. It is one of the most terrifying political documents drawn up in modern American history. And we’re about to see how it plays out.”
There are good reasons to see how Trump’s second presidency will be quite different from his first. First, he is wildly emboldened by his election victory and considers, rightly if tragically, that it has given him a mandate to carry out his plans.
The connecting idea behind Trump’s appointments is that government is bad, and the Deep State (however defined) must be abolished. This taps into deeply held fears and beliefs in America about the nature of the US government and its institutions.
Filipovic explains: “The US government is a huge bureaucracy, staffed by almost 3 million civilians. This workforce keeps the country running, from implementing specific policies to maintaining long-standing ones. Project 2025 proposes not just downsizing federal bureaucracies but firing career government employees and staffing whatever agencies are left with Trump loyalists. In Trump’s first term, he was hemmed in from two directions: the more traditional Republicans who at least prevented him from carrying out his most extreme desires (for example, the then vice-president Mike Pence certifying the 2020 election), and non-partisan government employees who kept the country grinding forward. Eliminating huge chunks of the federal workforce could mean, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency would essentially cease to be able to carry out its mandates. Trump could also simply fire government employees he finds insufficiently loyal.”
This overarching thinking is why Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy have been appointed to something called DOGE “Department of Government Efficiency”. It is why Curtis Yarvin, often cited as the “house philosopher” of the New Right, has talked about “rebooting” the American government. He coined the acronym “RAGE”, which he defined as “Retire All Government Employees”.
‘Draining the Swamp’ and the idea of dismantling the ‘Deep State’ offers carte blanche to the MAGA government to do anything they like. The proposal for the Department of Education involves dismantling it entirely. Americans are about to find out that the government that they hate so much actually does a bunch of stuff they need, like healthcare, education, or environmental regulations. Far-right libertarians may dream of dismantling the state, but may be ill-equipped to live in the conditions their politics creates.
Equally, the hatred or denial of ecological problems that characterises much of the far-right doesn’t make any sense. You can ‘deny climate change’ all you like but it’s here now. Even those poor people who explained the wild storms that hit the southern coast of America just before the elections as created by the US government, needed assistance when their homes flooded. You don’t hear much objection to the ‘Deep State’ from residents of Valencia these days.
Nor is it likely to be popular should Project 25 be implemented. The proposals for immigration are predictably fascistic. Project 2025 proposes calling in the military and local law enforcement to end undocumented immigration, and suggests that those people should be rounded up anywhere and everywhere. This has prompted fears of vigilante groups enacting this themselves, and given the armed and febrile nature of the MAGA forces, this would seem to be well founded. As with Brexit, the political language and messaging will give ‘permission’ for the most racist and violent actions. Again, this may be popular on the stump, but how will America respond to the actual logistics of, say, deporting 11 million people? The appointments of Stephen Miller as Deputy Chief of Staff and Tom Homan as Border Czar will be key here to pushing these policies through, and, perhaps, having someone as extreme as Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense if serious resistance becomes a response.
If all of this sounds dystopian it’s because it is. I don’t think anyone fully understands the reality of what’s about to happen. It’s as if people are so traumatised and exhausted by the election that they have no response. It’s not just that ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘left’ America has been defeated, it’s that rationality itself has.
Added to this, progressive America has been sleep-walking into this nightmare. Surrounded by the comfort-blanket of centrist media, the losing side of the electorate were just as siloed and cut-off as the Trump supporters. All the talk of the election being ‘too close to call’ was just a liberal fantasy.
It remains to be seen if the impending regime, the most extreme the USA has ever seen, will be a wake-up call for the American Left to learn the political lessons that the electorate have given them: that the Harris-Walz strategy was misconceived at a fundamental level and repeating the same politics over and over will get the same result. As Richard Seymour, author of Disaster Nationalism has put it: “The ruptures on the right thrive as much on the pattern of liberal decay and demoralisation as on its own toxic emotional gyrations. To break out of this deadlock, the left needs ruptures of its own.”
He is right and there are lessons for us here in Scotland, where the persistence with a continuity centrism will be countered (and potentially defeated) by the politics of Project Fear.
The right, deranged as they may seem, were able to run as the insurgents, the disruptors. The old order has collapsed. Traditional western democratic parties don’t have the solutions to the critical problems that late capitalism manifests, and the simplistic solutions that are offered by the far-right – vicious and stupid as they are – have appeal. As Joe Myall lays out here (‘The Election That Ended Liberalism‘): “The Democratic Party’s centrist liberalism has failed. It can neither provide the change Americans desire nor fulfill its single redeeming quality, defeating Republican fascism.” The danger of this administration is not just the violence and calamity this fascist clown show will bring in the short-term but the long-term wreckage to American society.
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FFS ! The inmates really HAVE taken over the asylum !
I am absolutely no supporter of Trump, and the direction of travel for both US and UK looks frankly terrifying; but as far as Robert Kennedy is concerned I welcome his appointment. Kennedy is not mad at all.
It’s unfortunate that he had to get into bed with that bunch of dangerous hooligans because of the binary nature of American politics.
The US election was not really ‘won’ by Trump. It was lost by the equally corrupt and far more hypocritical
and insidious Democrats. Democracy is being destroyed to usher in totalitarianism. And where the US goes today, we’ll follow if we are not careful. Already Farage is talking about Trump coming to our ‘rescue’.
However Robert Kennedy, for all his faults, is right about Big Tech and Big Pharma.; and I wish him
the best of luck, because he’ll need it!
I look forward to seeing Fauci, Gates and the rest facing the ICC for their crimes; and Big Pharma and Big Tech broken up. I just hope he survives long enough to do that. His father and uncle were both assassinated and he needs to take great care. It’s really unfortunate that the way the US system works he had no chance as an independent candidate.
I think it’s highly unlikely the Trump administration will last a full term. In fact I foresee mounting civil unrest in the US which Musk, Farage &co would be happy to see the UK dragged into.
It’s all a Big Lie … There’s a great deal more I could say about all this but since I have been, since Covid, a self confessed and unapologetic tinfoil hat and antivaxxer I’ll leave it there!
What ‘crimes’ of Fauci and Gates that they must face at the ICC are you referring to? It is easy to say such things but a crime is a specific claim – so what crimes?
Mike’s piece is spot on, including about Kennedy. The linking of vaccines to autism has never been substantiated, and the evidence against it is overwhelming. Rejecting such a link – and supporting the use of vaccines as part of a preventative public health policy – does not imply uncritical support for Big Pharma.
Andrew Wakefield initiated this autism connection in relation to MMR vaccine. (I believe he had a commercial interest in the individual vaccines?) The evidence was extensively reviewed and no link could be found. The upshot was that primarily due to high profile Wakefield was given in media, uptake of MMR slumped in several areas of UK and incidence of measles, a potentially serious illness in children, consequently rose in these locations. Wakefield has been discredited and banned from acting as a medical practitioner.
There is however a scepticism of vaccines that has not gone away. This was not helped by Boris Johnson politicising the development of AZ vaccine for his own ends. This fed into the vaccine sceptics narrative and some of this could have been avoided if Johnson had left the publicising of vaccine roll out to the scientists who were, not unreasonably, far more trusted by vast majority of public than politicians especially Johnson.
Thanks Paddy. As the cliche goes ‘Post Truth is pre fascism’. It doesn’t matter that none of this is true it just becomes a reality. Terrifying.
@Paddy Farrington, presumably the saner option is to nationalise pharmaceutical corporations. After all, they seem to spend considerably more on marketing (which they do directly to doctors in the USA, I gather) than research, and are therefore grossly inefficient as private, profitarian concerns, with cartel behaviours to boot. Does anyone suppose a future Trump administration is going to nationalise pharmaceuticals, or other health services? Let alone take the greater step of internationalising and open-sourcing pharmaceuticals (vaccine communism etc).
I don’t think that nationalising the pharmaceutical industry is on anyone’s agenda just now. The issue in the USA is whether effective regulation of the industry by the FDA will survive a Trump presidency, and whether public health surveillance, policy and funding by the likes of CDC and NIH will contine to be science-based. Trump’s previous presidency (remember the injecting disinfectant episode?) and, at state level, the experience of Florida (under Governor Ron DeSantis), suggest the worst.
Hi John
do you think Elon Musk will ‘break up Big Tech’?
Worth reading John:
The announcement that Donald Trump has appointed Robert F Kennedy as the US secretary of health and human services has sent shock waves through the health and scientific community. Kennedy ran as an independent presidential candidate before bowing out and supporting Trump’s run in exchange for an influential position, so we have a pretty good idea of his positions on public health.
The main goal Kennedy has trumpeted recently is to “Make America healthy again”. At face value, it’s a noble aim. That’s the essence of public health: how to reduce risk factors for disease and mortality at a population level and improve the quality of health and wellbeing. But behind this slogan comes a darker, conspiracy-laden agenda. As someone who has spent a lot of time researching global public health, these are the positions I believe could be the most dangerous.
Anti-vaxxer views
Kennedy is well known as a prominent anti-vaxxer. He has claimed that vaccines can cause autism, and also said that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective”. He called the Covid-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made”. None of these claims are true: repeat studies have shown that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism, we have numerous safe and effective vaccines against childhood killers such as whooping cough and measles, and the Covid-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives globally.
Much of what he is saying is what people want to hear: being anti-vax is increasingly a way to build a fanbase. I have seen this as a scientist: if you talk about childhood vaccinations, you get daily abuse. If you talk about the dangers of vaccines, you can end up with a cult following, as Russell Brand and Andrew Wakefield have. It’s not even clear that Kennedy personally believes what he’s saying: guests invited to a holiday party at his home in December 2021 were told to be vaccinated or tested for Covid-19 (he blamed his wife).
The big question is about how much harm he can do in the next few years as the man who oversees health agencies in the US. Will he roll back budgetary allocations for vaccination campaigns? Eliminate research into new vaccines? With avian flu continuing to spread in mammals and birds, will he support the stockpiling and rollout of H5N1 vaccines if necessary in a future outbreak or pandemic? If his appointment is approved, experts say that vaccines will be “the first issue on the table”.
The “benefits” of raw milk
Similarly, he has tweeted about the benefits of raw milk, which has become a bizarre Maga talking point generally. Raw milk consumption is a risk factor for a number of dangerous illnesses from E coli to salmonella, but is even more worrying with the widespread infection of dairy herds in the US. While pasteurisation has been shown to kill the H5N1 virus in milk and prevent its ability to infect, raw milk retains its pathogens. This year, 24 cats who drank raw milk on a farm become infected by avian flu; 12 died and 12 suffered from blindness, difficulty breathing and other serious health problems. This is when we need federal agencies to regulate what is being sold to the public and ensure clear communication of the health risks. Instead, raw milk demand has gone up, with some vendors claiming that “customers [are] asking for H5N1 milk because they want immunity from it”. (There’s a certain irony in the logic behind vaccination – training our immune system in how to respond to a pathogen – being used in this situation.)
Anti-pharmaceutical conspiracy theories
Part of the problem of the “Make America healthy again” campaign is that it contains nuggets of truth within a larger false narrative. We know that the prices charged by “big pharma” in the US are a problem – but instead of thinking this is a conspiracy to medicate the public when that’s not in their best interests, it’s worth reflecting on how the UK has managed to negotiate more reasonable prices. This is where government can have real power: ensuring fair prices for healthcare providers and individuals, and going after the extraordinary profit margins of pharmaceutical companies. But instead of taking this on – for instance, Trump could have negotiated Covid-19 vaccine prices in his first presidency – it is easier to demonise all pharma companies. Many of them of course play a valuable role in trialling and bringing drugs and vaccines to market. They just need to be regulated.
Taking on these ideas will be a challenge when their proponent is leading US health policy. How do you try to engage with those who believe things that are simply not true? It’s hard: a recent Nature study found that the more time you spend on the internet trying to validate what is true and not true, you more you go down the rabbit hole of false information. Those who believe outlandish theories are generally people who think of themselves as more intelligent than the average person, have a lot of time to do their own research on the internet, and are convinced that everyone else is being duped.
The US has a big health problem. Life expectancy is going dramatically backwards, Covid-19 killed a huge number of working-age Americans and trust in the federal government is at 23%. But the solution, if we look to healthier countries such as Denmark and South Korea, involves basic public health interventions, access to affordable medical care and trust in government. And not drinking raw milk.
Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh
What did we on Scotland or anyone else expect?
To be surprised is to misunderstand the man’s nature, he’s a complete nutter with a blank cheque!
Imagine being a sane US citizen abroad, your skin must be crawling with acute embarrassment!
@Iain MacLean, well, quite. There are so many trope variants on President Evil, Evil States of America etc it is hard to imagine how anyone familiar with popular culture could have avoided such warnings (and this applies to every USAmerican President since Truman; Reagan might have nuked us all to bring on the Rapture). Was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar right, and fat men and hedonists are less likely to blow up their world? Although Henry VIII instituted misogynistic Christian totalitarianism and waged a Tudor War on Nature. A risk not worth taking on anyone, I guess. No to thermonuclear monarchy.
Trump is an altogether different animal from Carter or Clinton!
Trump courts racists and those who seek to taint democracy so it becomes irrelevant.
The tories and Grage are watching closely to see where their next trick may be!
Sad day for US and World when Trump was respected, a day some time in the future we will all come to deplore!
Trump is an arse who fronts we know not what!
An irrational system routinely misrepresented as business as usual, produces societal breakdown, baseless propaganda, and detachment from reality. Welcome to late-stage capitalism, which historically has been “saved” only by fascism. You summed up the clown show, Michael; the coming stage will produce only the most macabre laughter.
Trump is a narcissist and therefore loyalty to Trump trumps all other considerations. Most of these appointments have professed loyalty to Trump rather than Republican Party or US constitution. Many commentators think that some of these appointments are aimed at trying to find out which Republican representatives in Senate & House of Representatives are loyal to Trump or the governance of USA.
In addition never underestimate personal vindictiveness of a narcissist. Trump did not win popular vote in 2016 or election in 2020 and this would have been very difficult for Trump to accept- hence his refusal to accept defeat in 2020 because it would have crushed his view of himself. Now he has won both popular and electoral vote in 2024 he is revelling in it. These appointments meet twin goals of getting everyone talking about Trump while upsetting many of the people who do not hold him in high esteem that he thinks have done him down.
In short it is the politics of the kindergarten.
As Brecht said “The rich are not good for much.” “And to those who are still laughing they have not heard the terrible news.”
@Fay Kennedy, shouldn’t that be “the rich are good for mulch”?
https://www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/mulch
Eveyone is, eventually…
*everyone
@Derek, as Shakespeare says:
“Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/5/1/?q=caesar%20clay#line-5.1.214
There are various takes on the Circle of Life.
Beautiful quote, thanks Fay
I guess politically you fit into the Democrat category.
Like you, the Democrat party are struggling to understand what went wrong.
One word sums up the Democratic party’s problem: AUTHENTICITY.
The Republicans now have it, and the Democrats don’t
The blistering language of moral superiority doesn’t help either.
The minority groups the Democrats fawn over don’t believe or trust them.
Overusing derogatory terms like white supremacists, racists, Far-right, etc., is just not credible. Just because you say it, doesn’t make it so.
So, I’d suggest dumping the critical social justice ideology, and go back to original liberal social justice and critical thinking. Debate your opponents not denigrate or demonise them.
Say what you believe, not what you think you have to in order to win the admiration of other graduate class people.
Question your own thoughts and beliefs and of those in your ideological circle. Don’t reinforce ideas and beliefs because you are afraid to challenge the groupthink..
Be true to yourself and not to an ideology.
I love it when the right gets all offended for being called-out.
As Steve Bannon said (to the French National Front Party): “Let them call you racists,” Bannon . “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”
Donald Trump refused many further debates with Harris after the first by debate.
Trump is a primary exponent in demonising and denigrating opponents. Unfortunately far from being behaviours to avoid the 2024 US election would indicate that they work.
As inauthentic, entitled elites go, Kennedy Jr takes some beating.
Authenticity mainly inheres in those who seek validation of themselves through whom they authenticate. It can be a kind of virtuous circle. Hence those many who do not find Trump remotely authentic are just as right as those who do since it is they that make something authentic or not *for them*.