Trump’s Flash-Bang Fakery, and the CEO who was the Master of Disaster

My big worry for Dems at the moment is not the danger of the wrong response to the LA protests, but getting mired in the return of deported Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. If Abrego Garcia does turn out to have spent the last nine years transporting undocumented migrants from Houston to Maryland, rather than minding his own business as a family man and sheet metal apprentice (who, uh, abused his wife, according to her two petitions for protection, a revelation that gave me my first moment of unease about Abrego Garcia), then he’s an unfortunate poster boy for ICE overreach.

Due process, a bedrock of American civil liberties, is also, sadly, a pointy-headed legal term that just doesn’t cut it in today’s raucous political playing field. If the details of the Abrego Garcia indictment are true, ire about his treatment starts to guiltily slip away, and we are back in that arid no man’s land of first-term impeachment trials, looking at the pursed mouth of then-Congressman Adam Schiff banging his gavel, or listening to professorial rants from esteemed Congressman Jamie Raskin, a noble defender of the U.S. Constitution, who I just wish- unless he has an effective game plan - would shut the fuck up.

Which untapped communications genius can make these vital points of Democratic principle sexy when we are living in a new ratings-spiked episode of Trump’s reality show every day? His absurdly unnecessary National Guard call-out is, as the Atlantic’s David Frum says, Trump's dress rehearsal for the midterms, seeing how much mayhem he can stir up and then supposedly quash as the party of law and order. (I hate to invoke the H word here but the LA conflagration is just a bit reminiscent of the Nazis’ still-debated false flag operation, setting fire to the Reichstag in 1933 and blaming it on Communist saboteurs in order to consolidate Third Reich power.) Like any good entertainment producer, Trump knows location is key: He doesn't need to be told that deep-blue Los Angeles, a city of immigrants and a place of historical protest, with an ambitious, mane-tossing governor and a mediocre mayor most recently derided for being MIA at the start of the inferno that burned down some 12,000 LA homes, is the perfect setting for his military mise en scène. Now, just as he hoped, the mayhem is spreading.

The problem is that the Trump show runners, as I think of his circle of charlatan advisers, are so fast and inventive, it causes Dems to make mistakes. (Remember that raft of august signatures from the Biden national security apparatus in the first term, claiming the info on Hunter Biden’s laptop was a phony Russian plant?) Either pausing to consider how to correctly approach a problem while Team Trump races ahead, or jumping too fast on what seems like an exploitable political asset, can be a strategic elephant trap for Democrats. Will upstanding Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen’s April trip to El Salvador to lobby for Abrego Garcia’s release and sip coffee with him at a San Salvador hotel feature in Van Hollen’s 2028 campaign ad? Or will the senator’s morally correct attempt to win due process for his working-class constituent be more effectively weaponized in a sneering Republican mash-up about Democrats’ love of immigrant criminals? If the people-smuggling charges against Garcia are proved to be wrong, there’s nothing Trump is better at than doubling down on a lie.

In his first term, Trump was prevented from deploying active duty forces to put down the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests by his Defense Secretary Mark Esper and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley. (Esper has recalled Trump musing to him and Milley, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs?”) But now, all the grown-ups are gone and we have the excitable, chisel-chinned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security babe Kristi Noem competing for daddy’s approval by egging him on. It’s a strategic nightmare for Democrats, but by the time they have argued amongst themselves and figured out a way to present their own argument, the Trump show will be on to its next hit episode.

Watery Doomsday

If you are in masochistic search of more moneyed arrogance in full cry, I recommend Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, the new documentary airing on Netflix tomorrow, about the doomed 2023 submersible mission to take four affluent thrill-seekers paying $250K apiece to dive to the wreck of the Titanic, and which met the same tragic fate. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush is the personification of ignorant conviction. A scion of one of San Francisco’s most prominent families, with a Standard Oil fortune in his pedigree, he is surrounded by competent, qualified, and increasingly alarmed professional engineers, who warn him that the Titan’s engineering flaws could make it a floating coffin. (The amplified recordings of cracking and creaking sounds in the straining carbon fiber and titanium during test dives are something to haunt your dreams.) Stockton’s response is to blow them off on the grounds that industry regulations stifle innovation. It is clear Rush fancies himself a mini Elon Musk, for whom rule-breaking for the hell of it is the sine qua non of being in the big boy club. (In the doc, OceanGate bookkeeper Bonnie Carl says Rush “referred to guys [like Musk] as big swinging dicks, and he loved that term.”)

One of the heroes of the film is the salt-of-the-earth Scottish former director of marine operations David Lochridge, who bombarded Rush with memos about the submersible’s deadly engineering flaws and got fired for his pains. When Lochridge took his case to OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), OceanGate tried to drive him into financial ruin by suing him, and, agonizingly, the OSHA investigator, who had a pileup of other pressing cases, dropped the ball.

I came to loathe Stockton Rush with a passion and would be only too happy he imploded if he hadn't taken four trusting passengers with him. Genetically blessed with a Marvel hero jawline and crown of heartthrob silver hair, Rush’s unfounded belief in his own expertise resonates horribly with the utterances of another entitled fool RFK Jr., who just fired all seventeen experts from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization.

The unfettered arrogance of the privileged is the curse of our times. The CNN host and historian Fareed Zakaria once blithely characterized his relationship with the oligarch class to me as, “You make me rich. I make you smart.” Unfortunately, this maxim has been turned on its head in the Trump era. He makes us dumb and we make him rich. Will we all go down in his cracking submersible?