MAGA left dizzy by Trump's "shock and awe" spectacle

It took one of Europe’s democracies only 53 days to succumb to fascism. America’s already ailing democracy feels like it will reach that horrible moment much sooner. The Trumpocene is a surreal, disorienting spectacle that has conquered so much of American culture and politics.  

Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s shock and awe campaign against American democracy and society is moving very fast. It's left the American people, their responsible leaders, the mainstream news media and the so-called Resistance spinning and dizzy.

In an aptly titled Associated Press news story “Trump moves with light speed and brute force in shaking the core of what America has been”, Calvin Woodward recounts the last six weeks:

President Donald Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad. He likes the ring of calling himself king.

No one can absorb it all. By the time you try to process one big thing — he covets Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and Gaza; he turns away from historic alliances and Ukraine; fires many thousands of federal workers, then brings some right back; raises doubts whether he will obey laws he doesn’t like; orders an about-face in the missions of department after department; declares there are only two genders, which federal documents will henceforth call sexes; announces heavy tariffs, suspends them, then imposes some — three more big things have happened.

Trump’s core supporters are thrilled with what they see. Those who don’t like him watch in horror. The nation is far from any consensus on what makes America great and what may make it sink.

What’s undeniable is that Trump has ushered in the sharpest change of direction for the country at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression. But the long-term implications of Trump’s national reset, and by extension his own legacy, cannot yet be determined….

“The last month has been entirely distinctive in American history,” said Cal Jillson, a constitutional and presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University. “We have never had an American president who moved this decisively in the face of the law and the Constitution. We are in a dangerous place.”

Those voters who put Trump in office for a second time should have expected such an outcome. Moreover, that is exactly what many of them desired from an elected autocrat-authoritarian who literally promised to be a dictator on “day one” of his “presidency.” What many of Trump’s voters may not have expected is that they too — not just the Democrats, the news media, the Black and brown people, the LGBTQ community, feminists, the “takers” and other so-called enemies — would be left spinning, made to feel vulnerable and hurt by their president and his MAGA Republican Party’s policies. Public opinion polls show that Trump’s voters wanted a leader who would shake things up and break the rules for people like them. The first part of their dark wish came true; they have earned everything that comes with it. However, they erred in believing that Trump actually cares about anyone other than himself and his pursuit of corrupt and absolute power in all its many forms.

In a very sharp and insightful essay at the London Review of Books about the Trumpocene and its main character Donald Trump, T.J. Clark observes: 

It’s not news that Trump is a creature of the society of the spectacle. Creature and master, emanation and accelerant. He is the image. The mugshot. He’s the picture of himself on Fox he sits watching for hours each day – rightly understanding that doing so is doing politics, politics as our society now practises it. Governing? We leave that to our servants. (What a lovely bygone sound there is to Michel Foucault’s term of art ‘governmentality’. Only ascendant powers think the state is for governing. Leaders of empires in decline look across at Xi Jinping and wonder if he can be serious about infrastructure and censorship and party discipline and the size of the army. Wasn’t that yesterday?)….

The spectacle knows itself, after a fashion. It likes to nod and wink at its subjects, including those in on the joke. The fact that Trump is absurd is part of his mastery; the fact that he knows he is – knows what his absurdity is for – another….

The politics of an empire in decline are invariably a mixture of the cruel and the ludicrous. (Ask the Brits.) Nonetheless, the American case is distinctive, and its special character worth examining, if we’re to understand the kind of imperial disintegration that might take place over the next fifty years. We’re at the beginning of the end of American hegemony. A preponderance so crushing will resist to the last. 

Clark continues:

Trump is an early warning signal. He’s a phenomenon of transition, only half adjusted to emerging reality. Of course, he’s not such a fool as to believe that he will, or anyone could, Make America Great Again; but his politics has to steer a course between those in his audience who do believe it, or make-believe it, and those, perhaps the majority, who are there for fun. They’re as cynical as he is. Or rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is. They know what politics is not allowed to interfere with: that is, everything just described about empire.

The point often made about MAGA voting to worsen their own condition may be correct (for most if not all of them), but it has no bite when voters are persuaded that the other party has no intention of bettering it. Shallow state, deep economy. On Trump’s style. His mixture of insult, ressentiment, and buffoonery is a work of genius.

A series of new public opinion polls show a growing wave (albeit modest) of disapproval for Trump’s policies and behavior. More Americans also appear to finally be orienting themselves and realizing that Trump’s existential dangers to democracy, the institutions and norms, freedom, the Constitution, the rule of law, and the civil and human rights of the American people are very real — and not just partisan bluster by the Democrats and others who oppose Trump. 

Trump and his advisors view politics through the lens and framework of existential battle. As a military strategy applied to American politics, the success of “shock and awe” and “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) is measured in large part by how the target(s) will be left so disoriented and confused that once they recover (if at all) it will be too late to effectively regroup and reorient themselves on defense and then counterattack.

Among their many failures of imagination, corporate Democrats, centrists and other establishment voices refused to accept that they were in such a personal and societal struggle. These failures are some of the main reasons why, for example, they have been so easily outmaneuvered by President Trump and the architects of Project 2025.  

But American democracy is not yet terminal.

The Democratic Party is finally beginning to act like an opposition party — albeit a weak one that does not know what “opposition” truly means. Still, there are some signs the Democratic Party is finally finding its steel. The Democratic Party’s leaders are refusing, at least for now, to cooperate with passing Donald Trump and his Republican Party’s budget that will take trillions of the American people’s tax dollars away from the neediest and most deserving and give it to the millionaires, billionaires, and other kleptocrats and plutocrats.

Challenges to Trump’s unconstitutional and other apparently illegal executive orders and other diktats and commands are being successfully made in the courts (by CNN's count 80 legal challenges have been filed). The question is now how and if the Trump administration will abide by the rulings.

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The Resistance movement that took to the streets during Trump's first term appears to have decided that such a strategy is obsolete and is trying to figure out what effective opposition looks like in 2024 and beyond. But there are encouraging signs that the Resistance is finally waking up. The Washington Post reports:   

Little by little, after an initial phase of stunned confusion, the broader resistance to Trump is beginning to wake up.

“There is a lot more anger building, such that we are seeing in deep-red Republican-held districts that people are coming out,” said Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s chief political adviser. “They are surprising those [Republican] members of Congress who don’t expect that when they try to defend Elon Musk they will get aggressive booing. You couldn’t manufacture this if you tried.”

Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible, said it has grown roughly from 1,000 local groups to 1,500 since the election. Activists from MoveOn organized 60 events last week, including protests outside the offices of Republican House members, some drawing several hundred participants.

The opposition to Trump arose immediately after his election, Levin said, but it has become far more visible in recent days. “We have been seeing a surge of energy we haven’t seen since 2017,” Levin said. “It is now becoming more visible beyond the community centers, the living rooms — it’s now in the public eye.”

This year’s resistance is taking a different form than it did in 2017, when celebrities issued emotional statements and opponents launched mass street protests. This time, the president’s adversaries are aiming their fire more selectively, directing political and legal attacks against specific Trump policies they believe are both damaging and unpopular.

What about the mainstream news media? Out of fear and self-preservation and maximizing profits, the mainstream news media, as an institution, has mostly chosen some version of preemptive surrender and anticipatory compliance that involves normalizing President Trump and his administration and the larger antidemocracy movement. For example, journalists and other voices who are considered to be “problematic” by the Trump administration and the larger MAGA movement and right-wing are being forced out. Columnists and other voices are being both actively censored by management and learning to quickly adapt to the boundaries imposed on them — even if those boundaries and muzzles are not explicitly communicated. Perhaps most troubling for what it will ultimately mean for America’s democratic culture and the First Amendment, media outlets are censoring themselves to avoid the wrath of the Trump administration and its allies who view them as “the enemy of the people.”

“If Democracy dies in the darkness” too many of the country’s elite news media have chosen to dim their own lights. The American people will be left groping in the dark. Donald Trump and the right-wing propaganda and experience machine will be there to illuminate it with their own version of reality and the approved “patriotic” truth and facts.

A few weeks before Donald Trump’s (second) inauguration, I asked leading media critic Dan Froomkin for his thoughts about how the news media was responding to Trump's return to power. Froomkin told me the following:

I’m disgusted with how the mainstream traditional media failed to convey to the American people that Trump is an extreme danger to our national security as well as any number of core American values. I’m disgusted with how the media refused to give the Biden administration credit for the roaring economy and allowed so many people to believe that crime was up and immigration was an existential threat. I’m also disappointed that the media was misled so easily and so long by White House officials about Biden’s fitness to run for re-election. All in all, it was a wildly horrible year for the mainstream media.

I was surprised by Trump’s election. I remain surprised. I still cannot believe so many Americans got suckered so badly. I despair. I’m preparing myself to work harder. In addition to my work as a media critic, I am starting a newsletter about the resistance. The newsletter is called Heads Up News.

I don’t think we are even vaguely ready for what’s coming. I anticipate a full-scale attack on the government by the people who will soon be leading it, and I expect catastrophic results in terms of legions of good people getting fired, justice being weaponized, and life-saving government regulations being effectively abandoned. I worry that civil society isn’t up to the task of effectively resisting, but I hope I’m wrong.

Weeks are like years now. Donald Trump has been president for 36 days. Matters are now far worse.