Trump’s Crazy Train Leaves the Station
Going Off the Rails; How to Mock; Traylor to the Rescue; Avoiding the Identity Trap
Going Off the Rails: All aboard! As Donald Trump’s crazy train pulled away from the first station in Iowa this week, I could almost hear Ozzy Osbourne’s maniacal laughter in the wind, steam and guitars building up. We’ll all be going off the rails on this crazy train soon enough.
Results from the first presidential contest showed just how thoroughly Trump dominates the Republican Party, winning 51 percent support, a record-breaking 30 percentage points more than his closest rivals. Only about 15% of voters took part in this frozen caucus, so the results could skew fanatical, but it still shows cult-level devotion.
Meatball Ron DeSantis managed to snag second place with 21 percent after his sputtering campaign blew its wad on Iowa, while surging Nikki Haley finished a close third with 19 percent after some recent stumbles. MAGA enfant terrible Vivek Ramaswamy finished in single digits, ended his campaign, and endorsed his guru Trump.
I was struck by voter entrance polling reported by the Washington Post that two in three Iowa GOP voters don’t believe Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020. Asked whether Trump would be fit to serve as president if convicted of a crime, more than 6 in 10 voters said yes, and that number was close to 7 among those who voted for Trump.
What does this mean? For one thing, it means way too many Americans are living in a fantasy world built by Trump’s chronic lies. In their minds, Trump well-documented crimes just become more evidence of the conspiracy against him and of malfeasance by Democrats. It’s a vicious cycle where truth doesn’t stand a chance.
And it’s starting to make some folks desperate for ways to derail the Trump train.
On Mocking Trump: When I got the chance to interview Democratic consultant James Carville years ago, I chose to confront the Ragin’ Cajun over his marriage to right-wing flak Mary Matalin, asking whether he thought politics was just a game. He wasn’t amused. Yeah, I was pretty self-righteous about my earnest progressive politics back then.
I no longer doubt Carville’s seriousness about our country’s dire political situation, particularly after watching his new “How to Mock Trump” video. Carville opens with real anguish over Trump’s resilience and how even well-done efforts to bring him down — from excellent journalism to the Jan. 6 committee’s damning work — are failing slow Trump’s return to power.
Desperate for some new tactic, Carville has turned for inspiration to the movie Animal House and says it’s time for “futile and stupid” gestures. We need to start mocking and ridiculing Trump in the same petty and mean-spirited ways that he mocks others, he says. Get under his skin in myriad creative ways.
Two puerile pathways Carville suggested are going after Trump for being fat and stinky, the latter a revelation that the Lincoln Project has already started mocking. “Let’s mock him mock him back, mock him better, mock him more effectively,” he said. “My strategy is mock, mock, mock.”
With so much at stake, he says, all our concerns about body shaming and decorum and high roads need to go out the window. It’s time to get nasty. But I’m not so sure about this strategy. If we’re all riding the crazy train to the last station, shit flying out the windows, blood on the floor, we’re gonna have one helluva mess to clean up afterward.
Traylor to the Rescue: If you don’t want to go low, we can take the high road — and there’s none higher than the one Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are traveling right now. If this superstar celebrity couple campaigns for Biden this year, which seems likely, Trump is toast.
The couple dubbed Traylor just exudes positivity and star power. When Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins Saturday night at Arrowhead Stadium, in one of the coldest playoff games in NFL history, with a wind chill of less than 20 degrees below zero, the sweet scene of Swift beaming between Kelce’s mom and QB Patrick Mahomes’ wife was so warm it seemed to melt the ice around the VIP box. The two players’ sweeties were even wearing adorable custom parkas with their guys’ names and numbers, made by the crafty wife of 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk (Go Niners!).
Swift, the pop singer megastar who Time just named Person of the Year (causing heads to explode in MAGA world); and Kelce, one of football’s best-ever tight ends and a telegenic pitchman for COVID vaccines, are pairing almost too good to be true. That’s why cynical minds initially spawned so many conspiracy theories about whether it was some kind of publicity stunt. Yeah, as if these two need more publicity.
But they’ve endured and a real epic romance seems to have blossomed, with Swift recently moving into the $6 million mansion he just bought in Kansas City to house their larger-than-life love and fame.
Trump, who loves to compare dicks with his opponents, regularly derides Biden for the smaller size of his average political rally. But the Biden campaign is going to need to rent the biggest stadium in the country to handle the crowd for a reelection rally that has Swift and Kelce as headliners. Swifties and football fans unite!
False Identity: For several years now, I’ve been reluctant to engage in the public square. As a big personality and member of historically dominant groups, I felt like I should just shut the fuck up for awhile. Let other folks hang onto the talking stick while I just tried to be a good ally.
I’m a white, straight, cisgender male; raised in the middle class, and someone very sympathetic to the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. At my last job, I did weeks worth of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) trainings — much of it illuminating and powerful, some of it tedious and repetitive, like many lessons in life.
Particularly after spending over 30 years as a journalist and media spokesperson, I was content to let others speak and just listen for awhile. Now, as an opinionated, well-read guy with lots of journalistic experience, particularly in California, this wasn’t easy. I got lots to say, believe me.
But a growing sense of doom and disappointment in humanity — fueled by Trumpism, climate inaction, pandemic-induced dysfunctions, and rising illiberalism — made me feel a little guilty about just sitting on the sidelines as this ugly endgame played out.
A couple things have prompted me to suit up and get back in the game. One is the sheer momentousness of 2024, a pivotal year for people and the planet. Maybe mine is just one more voice in the cacophonous roar, but I can’t stay silent as the crazy train wrecks the country. The other is a couple books I just read and the clear imperatives they lay out.
I wasn’t really familiar with political scientist Yascha Mounk until September when I read his “How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into a Reactionary” in the Sunday opinion section of The New York Times. It was a revelation, a validation of my growing concerns, and a call to help correct the fatal errors of the progressive movement and the reactionary backlash its current tactics are provoking.
So I read his book on the topic, The Identity Trap, and became even more convinced of the dangers of embracing what Mounk calls the “identity synthesis,” which seeks to supplant the universalist values of classic liberalism with analysis and advocacy based on race, gender and other cultural identifiers and the societal debt owed to historically marginalized groups.
The reason this is so dangerous, and so important, is the belief of progressives like me that systemic racism and sexism are real and present dangers. We’re repulsed by the crass nativism and misogyny of the MAGA movement. So we’ve accepted and embraced the rapid ascent of identity politics within the Democratic Party and other mainstream institutions, including the academic and nonprofit worlds, even if we have doubts about its logic and implications and concerns about the galvanizing effect it’s had on reactionaries and conservatives.
The credo’s call to always defer to representatives of identity groups isn’t always the best strategy. Indigenous groups don’t need to be centered on every environmental issue. Making everyone state their pronouns irritates many folks and elevates gender in ways that don’t actually help the trans community. LatinX isn’t a label most Latinos like, nor do many even like being singled out as a distinct race. Black activists who pushed the “defund police” and “abolish police” slogans during the BLM protests maybe needed a little more pushback so we weren’t all saddled with such a bad slogan. Even most Black voters rejected that call.
All that misguided lefty nonsense is part of the reason why Trump actually gained electoral ground will all minority groups in the 2020 election, despite being a racist piece-of-shit. The point is, none of these groups are monolithic, and everyone has something to offer this year.
But now, I feel that balance tipping. We need to speak up in favor of the classic liberal values that Western democracies were founded on rather than ditching them because society hasn’t fully lived up to them yet. We must be able to critique the identity politics of our allies when they go too far and the noxious reactionary politics that have subsumed the Republican Party. We can and must do both.
We’re now living through The Great Experiment, Mounk’s previous book that I also just read and appreciated, of figuring out how to make a multi-cultural democracy work and not fail, as so many have before. The key to success isn’t essentializing our differences; it’s essentializing our commonalities.
Because we’re teetering on the brink, approaching The End, if we can’t figure out how to develop a more just and equitable society. And this tough, complex job is going to take as many of us as possible.
As Ozzy sang aboard the crazy train, “Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate.”