On Teflon Don:

“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” ~ Sun Tzu

This past week Donald Trump was hit with three separate scandals that, in a sane world, would mean political oblivion. First Jeffery Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic reported that Trump had disparaged the Troops. Specifically those who had fallen in World War I.  Later, a whistle blower at the DHS came forward to reveal that White House officials had forced him to downplay the danger posed by Russian interference and domestic white supremacist terrorism, while overstating the danger of Antifa and assorted anarchist elements. But the most damning of all was the revelation contained in Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book that Trump had known full well how serious a threat the corona-virus and COVID 19 was as far back as February, but intentionally lied about it to the public. A decision he said was made in order to prevent a panic but ended up being responsible for the deaths of thousands if not hundreds of thousands. 

Of course Trump and his people have denied that he ever called the Troops losers and suckers. Despite the story being confirmed by multiple separate news outlets, including Fox News. As of now, neither the White House nor DHS has commented on the whistle blower complaint, but it’s not a huge leap to assume that they will dispute the claims and insist that Democratic operatives are trying to unfairly smear the administration. But there is no real room for a ‘he said, she said’ with the Woodward story. Bobby the Kingslayer has Trump on tape, a recording made in February of this year, saying directly he was lying to the public about the threat of corona-virus. We’ve heard the receipts. 

Even for an administration that has been incapable of going two weeks without a major scandal, this is a big fucking deal. Everyone knew that Trump was lying about corona-virus. He is still lying about corona-virus. But now we know that he knew he was lying about corona-virus. He wasn’t being purposefully ignorant or just plain stupid. He was aware of how fast COVID 19 was going to spread and how deadly it was, and he intentionally told the American people that it was contained and not that serious of an illness. 

On the surface one could supposedly argue that his stated reason for lying at the time was reasonable. Not wanting to cause a panic may have been an honorable goal, if ultimately extremely misguided. But that kind of credulity is piss poor comfort to the loved ones of those who have been claimed by the virus. The fact is, there is no way that anyone told him that the resulting panic from being honest and frank about COVID would even come close to the devastation caused by people not taking it seriously. He did not lie out of concern for the American people. He lied because the economic damage done by necessary shelter in place orders might hurt him in an election year. He was planning on running on his awesome economy after all. At best he had a massively tragic error of judgment and has proven he is not fit to hold the office. At worst he killed a lot of American people for a political advantage, and he should rot in jail. 

(Hint: It’s that second one.)

And yet there is a very good chance that this scandal, along with the two others that came this past week, and the hundreds that came before, will have little, if any effect on the election. Most likely Trump will go on to either win or lose by a narrow margin in November and that outcome will not be based on the fact that he lied us into the highest COVID death toll in the world. 

So why is this? Why doesn’t anything ever stick to Donald Trump? He is the exact opposite of a savvy political operator. He told the guy who brought down Nixon that he was lying about a deadly virus. He is profoundly dumb. He isn’t exactly known for making friends. How come this fucking guy gets to get away with it? How come he gets away with it every time?

For Liberals one need not look further than his legion of racist, reactionary supporters and the venal Republicans who enable him for their own political advantage. Fake news and Russian interference have so pervasively warped the minds of Trump voters that there is nothing he could do that would turn them against him. And that notion is partially true. I literally couldn’t think of a hypothetical example hyperbolic enough that it would convince the average Trump voter that he shouldn’t be allowed to roam free in society much less be president. But to charge this singular and outrageous sociological phenomena entirely to the sycophantic nature, unrestrained resentment and extreme gullibility practiced by a large chunk of the American populace is a woefully insufficient diagnosis of the problem. You must know your enemy in order to defeat them. Simply calling them names isn’t knowing shit. 

Leftists have been screaming from the mountain tops that Trump is but a symptom of a larger sickness in American politics. He is merely exposing what was already there. Part of what was already there was a sharpening partisan divide. Complete and total party loyalty has all but rendered fact based analysis obsolete. Trump does not suffer from scandals because for Republican and conservative voters there is nothing he could do that would make him worse than a Democrat. While Liberals and moderates are more than capable of understanding the culpability of the reactionary right and the recalcitrant left for this particular political rot, they typically demonstrate very little self awareness for their own contributions. A timely and exquisite example of this is Chris Cillizza’s amazing article on CNN. Trump’s first attempt at defense against Woodward’s story and the incontrovertible audio evidence was to say that if Bob thought that his lying was so problematic, why didn’t he make the tapes public right away? Cillizza’s response to this, and I’m not making this up, was that it wasn’t Woodward’s responsibility to report Trump’s downplaying of the virus immediately because Trump is president and Bob Woodward is a mere……..prize winning, world famous journalist with a massive platform. 

There is no good way to argue that Woodward isn’t a massive piece of shit for getting evidence that the president of the United States was lying about a deadly virus and not releasing it until he we was done with this fucking book. Not as he sat by and watched the bodies pile up. Both things can be true here. Trump bears responsibility for Americans not taking COVID seriously and exacerbating the spread and the death toll. Woodward bears responsibility for not doing anything about it when he had a damn good chance to. Trump stans will focus on Woodward’s lack of action in order to obfuscate and overlook what Trump did. And Liberals and moderates will do the same for Woodward. If no one can understand why “Trump is president and Woodward isn’t!” is not a serious attempt in persuasion, then every attempt to end Trump’s presidency with revelations of his incompetence and criminality will succumb to blind partisanship. 

It’s not easy to be honest with yourself. We on the left have that problem too. We struggle to reckon with how much our constant infighting and lack of a unified, coherent political strategy is holding our project back. We tend to place all of the blame on corporate capitalist influence and the nefarious machinations of neoliberal politicians. Those things do exist as formidable enemies but until we on the left can understand and compensate for our own limitations, we will be regrettably full of shit. 

Republicans are full of shit. Democrats are full of shit. Trump is full of shit but his people love him because he is so nakedly full of shit. Unlike Democrats and bog standard Republicans who assert a veneer of respectability and institutionally afforded authority, Trump makes no attempt to be respectable and draws his power from popularity rather than institutions. Institutions are full of shit. For the average American, both on the left and right, these institutions move without their consent or contribution. Not even the hollowed military is sacrosanct anymore. The Troops sacrificed their lives for their country, now they can sacrifice their honor to own the Libs. As distasteful and distressing as this may be, it is incumbent on Liberals to understand it as the result of numerous and complicated causes. Not the least of which is the failure of neoliberalism to meaningfully address people’s problems. 

People love to say “Remember when Obama’s biggest scandal was a tan suit?” Yea, that was pretty stupid. But I would say that Obama’s biggest scandal was engineering an economic recovery that resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1%. Either that or the fucking “Beer Summit.” Yes racism and the politics of resentment play a substantial part in the existence of Trumpism, but if institutions actually worked then people would be more resistant to letting Trump destroy them. 

That is not to say that Republicans and Democrats are the same or that Biden or even Hilary would be just as bad as Trump. Democrats and liberal institutions have done some measure of good. And I’m not arguing that Democrats need to adopt the reactionary and retrograde policies of conservatives in order to defeat them. What I am saying is that the standard Liberal reaction to Trump’s bullshit is not working and the reason is because Liberals aren’t interested enough in why Trumpism exists. 

Trump is merely an avatar for one side of a larger culture war. A culture war that both sides have propped up since it began in the 60’s and 70’s. The problem with culture war isn’t so much that culture shouldn’t ever be fought over. Culture is pretty important. The problem with the culture war is that it has been so thoroughly separated from material interests. Democrats fight for hollow representational victories. Republicans fight to make Liberals mad. Both get paid. And within this theater of war, facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings don’t give a frothy shit about facts. And feelings are the only thing we ever fight over politically anymore. Both sides have basically agreed that we cannot meaningfully address the problems facing this country and the world at large. All anyone can do is make their side feel good about it. 

That is why Trump is immune to scandal. Scandals are a problem for people. Trump isn’t a person. He is a feeling. He is a representation of an idea. He is a meme. He is both the signifier and the signified for a particular brand of reactionary nihilism created by our failed neoliberal state and cultivated by a conservative grievance complex for profit. This is gross, bad, dangerous and it may ultimately end up bringing this country to ruin. It is also complicated and it cannot be defeated simply with stern admonishments from Serious People. 

You need to understand why your enemy is fighting you and what they are fighting for if you ever hope to make them stop fighting. Empathy is hard. Dropping a relentless torrent of bombs is easy. American’s like doing things the easy way, and as such we tend to never defeat our enemies. Trumpism exists to trigger Libs and as long as Libs keep getting triggered the Trump cult will continue to support him, even if it means we all die in the process. 

I am not Sun Tzu. I don’t have the perfect strategy to combat this. And in the short term, overwhelming the Trump faction with votes in November may be the only realistic course of action. But in the long term we need to be cognizant of what our enemy is thinking and more importantly feeling if we are to prevent another Trump, or something more kinetic (i.e. civil war). We don’t have to like them or care about them. But we need to understand them and our own role in why they fight us. In the end we aren’t just fighting against them, we are fighting for them as well. They may not care about a climate catastrophe or a militarized and murderous police apparatus, but those things are going to come for them too. Corona-virus doesn’t see color or political affiliation. The Trumpist’s goal is to own the libs. They don’t care if they win as long as we lose. Our goal is to save lives. We need to start taking this fight seriously because we don’t have the luxury of merely feeling good about hollow victories. Solidarity with our allies and understanding of our enemies is the best weapon we can employ.

I wonder what Sun Tzu would have thought about Twitter.

Solidarity Forever.