Trump’s F-you Flex
Matt Gaetz reminds me of the Tasmanian Devil in Looney Tunes cartoons, his face twisted with opportunism and low intent.
The great thing about being in London the week of Trump’s cabinet announcements was I missed the surround sound of exploding liberal heads that gives me PTSD from the first Trump era. The announcements came through as discrete news bombs that gave me five seconds of agita before subsiding into the new passivity of an anesthetized shrug. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor Jim Hoagland, who died on Nov 4, used to say that he was a historical optimist while his wife Jane Hitchcock was a hysterical pessimist. Choose whichever you want to be for the next four years.
Appointing true believers means perhaps Trump will have a higher percentage of cabinet secretaries than in the past who will ally with him until the end of his term. (The average tenure for the heads of key security agencies — Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security — in Trump’s first term was 10.5 months.) But, at this point, he’s like the megalomaniac Roman emperor Commodus, whose obsession with spectacle ultimately required constant deaths in the Colosseum. Trump casts high-profile appointees whose power will ultimately be minimal but who create more drama when their heads roll. It’s all a giant flex, a chain of in-your-face fuck-yous, as if he were imagining the most outrageous names he could come up with and shoving them in front of us like a series of flipped birds. In this context, his Secretary of State appointment, the erstwhile Little Marco, looks like George Kennan.
In fairness, there’s been a trend of reducing the power of cabinet officials over the last few years. Is diplomacy in Biden’s administration really led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken or is it orchestrated by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan? The last time there was a truly powerful Secretary of State was Henry Kissinger, who shrewdly demanded he occupy both jobs.
Setting aside the miasma of sexual sleaze from the suppressed House Ethics Committee report, Trump's AG choice Matt Gaetz should be disqualified solely on the basis of having one of the single nastiest faces I have ever beheld in public life. He's like a rabid cur or the Tasmanian Devil, Taz, in Looney Tunes cartoons, a face twisted with opportunism and low intent, which is undoubtedly why Trump picked him to wreak vengeance on his enemies. Let’s not forget that Gaetz is such a Trump lickspittle, he was even willing to claim on the House floor that some of the Jan. 6th mob were members of the lefty activist group Antifa masquerading as MAGA supporters. Now, if he slithers through his confirmation, Gaetz will preside over the prosecution of the hundreds of remaining Jan. 6 cases, which AG Merrick Garland has called the most wide-ranging investigation in DOJ history.
I am less perturbed about Elon Musk’s new role with Vivek Ramaswamy as head of the new, Orwellian-sounding Department of Government Efficiency. There is plenty of deadwood in government agencies that could use Musk’s radical business mantra of “delete delete delete” and, once he’s done with it, I wouldn’t mind him scything through the UN’s layers of ossified desk jockeys having meetings about meetings. But I suspect Musk will soon tire of jiggling around in Trump’s orbit once the emperor demands not just loyalty but toadyism. Musk is nobody’s toady. He's having fun as a kingmaker and is poised to extract all he can from the promised anti-regulatory detonation that will make the world’s richest man even richer. But when he’s asked to bend the knee to show who’s really king, Musk will walk away. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, will bend the knee and add a voluntary ass-smooch while he’s at it.
Elon and Oedipus
The endless fascination of Musk’s bromance with Trump misses the point made so clear in Walter Isaacson’s insightful biography written before Elon’s political ascendance. The genius evident in Musk’s mastery of so many mind-bending challenges has brought him unimaginable wealth and power but also removed every last normative guardrail. Is he starting to resemble his anarchic father Errol, the “engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist” who terrorized his childhood?
“Unlike his father, (Elon) could be caring with his kids but, in other ways, his behavior would hint at a danger that needed to be battled, the specter that, as his mother put it, he might become his father,” writes Isaacson. The impact of the abusive Errol on his son’s psyche has never diminished. According to Grimes, Elon’s former girlfriend and mother of three of his eleven children, Elon “zoned out” as he recalled memories of his father’s humiliation. Elon’s first wife Justine told Isaacson, “The shut-off valve made him callous, but also [made him] a risk-seeking innovator because he had learned to shut down fear.”
Today, father and son rarely speak.
In recent years, the crazy Errol has spouted conspiracy theories about Covid, alleging Bill Gates knew about it in advance and profited from it. (Errol also declared on Facebook, “This man [Dr. Fauci] should be fired!”) He called 9/11 a lie and ranted about how the 2020 election was stolen. Consciously or not, Isaacson writes, Elon has followed his father down some of his rabbit holes. In a reckless joke in 2022, Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/ Fauci,” which outraged even his brother. At a Philadelphia Trump campaign stop this past October, Elon amplified the discredited myth, for which Fox News paid a whopping $787 million defamation settlement, that Dominion Voting Systems’ voter machines were rigged against Trump.
Musk told Isaacson about one of his meetings with Trump in 2016: “Trump may be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever. Like my dad.” Here the Oedipal psychology gets even darker. Is Musk’s almost giddy embrace of Trump a sublimated filial reunion? In that viral shot of Trump, Musk, Don Jr., RFK Jr., and Speaker Mike Johnson poised to tuck into a feast of fries, Big Macs, and Cokes on Trump’s private plane, Elon glows like a happy 12-year-old on a family outing. Is Donald Trump Musk’s new crazy dad?
Yulia Shows Us How
Meanwhile in London, the heroes of the human rights community I mingled with at Sir William Browder’s annual Magnitsky Awards were the best antidote imaginable to the surreal clown show in Washington.
Browder, the maverick financier who made his fortune in Yeltsin’s Russia, founded the awards to commemorate the courage of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was beaten to death in Russian police custody in 2009 after exposing an outrageous government corruption scheme. To avenge Sergei, Browder conducted a global geopolitical barnstorm to win passage of the Magnitsky Act, which freezes assets and denies visas to human rights violators worldwide. Incredibly, he prevailed, and the U.S. passed the Magnitsky Act into law in 2012, followed by the UK, the EU, Canada, the Baltic states, Australia and others to come. Putin very badly wants Browder dead, yet with suave bravado, Browder keeps fearlessly ramping up his campaign, now pushing for the $350 billion in frozen Russian bank reserves to be given to Ukraine.
The night of the awards, one of the honorees — for Courage under Fire — was Yulia Navalnaya, widow of murdered Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In person, she has the tall presence of a silvery aspen tree, exuding melancholy, unbending grace. “It wasn’t my choice to be under fire,” she said in a quiet voice from the podium. “It happened that my husband was killed by Vladimir Putin while he was in a Russian prison. And after that, he [Putin] labeled me as a terrorist… It’s not me, but Vladimir Putin, who is a terrorist.” She momentarily lost her poise when she spoke of her husband while, behind her, a slide show displaying her joyful wedding photo and images of tender family moments with the charismatic Alexei and their children made clear the enormity of her personal loss.
At the small pre-awards dinner the evening before at a Mayfair restaurant, I sat next to Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian dissident and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who survived two poisonings by Putin and was released in August after two years in prison for speaking out against the Ukraine invasion. It is hard to reconcile his gentle academic demeanor with the tensile resolve that lies beneath.
In his introduction to Yulia, Kara-Murza likened her to the “strong, devoted, determined” wives of the so-called Decembrists who were banished to Siberia after their failed coup d'état against the Russian empire in 1825. The wives could have stayed home in their stately St. Petersburg mansions but they chose to share their husbands’ fate and follow them into the freezing hardship of Siberia. It was clear to us all that, as Yulia now devotes her life to fighting for Navalny’s mission to bring democracy to Russia, the Siberian cell in which he died is the spiritual locus where Yulia will always dwell.
Want to know what resistance looks like and the price paid for refusing to give up? It was humblingly clear at this stirring occasion in London.
I'm loving these dispatches. At last, ballast against all putridly pungent pundocracy (as Bill Safire might have put it) sucking us like so much quicksand into despair. Nellie Bowles, watch your back.
Whether I agree or disagree with her conclusions , I always enjoy Tina’s commentary, her insightful musings and trenchant wit. I this case I am grateful for the descriptive summary of the Magnitsky awards, I was only vaguely aware of the event and totally unaware of the details which she provided, and providing the historical context for Putin’s regime of terror reminds us of how abysmally the arc of history has treated the Russian populace in comparison with own history, regardless of how imperfect our republic has been.
As usual, I am in total agreement with her description of the horrors inflicted upon the citizenry of Russia by the KGB thug who maintains his iron grip on the levers of power while attempting to reunite what he believes to be the historical Russian empire. However, while I understand her concerns about President elect Trump and certainly second her view that he has many far from ideal traits, between the two candidates and the two major parties his election was so preferable to that of the Obama puppet candidate who either had no opinions of her own or as Bernie Sanders suggested knew hers were so unpopular and far leftist that she had to run away from them during her campaign. As Van Jones and James Carville stated, a campaign consisting of on joy, platitudes, broad generalizations , identity politics , and fringe issues was bound to fail when the opposing candidate Trump was running a populist campaign appealing to all spectrums of Soviet who were increasingly upset by the condescension of the well educated costal elites (look at the electoral map) who are the epitome of those who knew everything and understood nothing - no better examples can be found than the Biden administration and their sycophants in the press continually preaching to individuals living paycheck to paycheck that they didn’t understand hie good the economy really was or Biden continuing his record of being wrong on practically every major foreign policy decision that he had ever made ( think Afghanistan withdrawal and unbelievable appeasement of the terrorist Iran regime) and his appointee Jake Sullivan opining on how stable the Middle East had become and the reduce threat level just as the Hamas savages funded and encouraged by Iran committed their horrific acts of genocide and kidnapping of innocent civilians including several American citizens some of whom still are not freed or accounted for due to the feckless diplomacy of Sullivan and Blinken
Once , thanks Tina - happy to continue this debate/ discussion concerning Trump at any time - I suspect that the range of opinions concerning his part and future presidencies will continue to range as is currently the card literally from one our best and most consequential presidents ever the the absolute worst ( at least certainly in modern history) , since his accomplishments remain a work in progress I will withhold judgement , but certainly am glad that he enabled The Revolt of thevMsses ( thanks to Ortega y Gasset) against the tyranny of the elites