1. If you didn’t vote for him, or consider it, this performance is basically not for you. It sure as hell isn’t for me or anyone like me. The only message it has for me is my irrelevance.
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Can I change to subject ?(well sort of ) I've just finished reading Tinker Tailor after reading your Karla book and having seen the telly and the movie quite a lot! The reveal of the mole is one if the best pieces of writing I've ever read, so if you bump into the ghost of your father say thanks.
2. Let me take a punt: maybe this is not politics, but alternate reality world building. aimed at creating the Trumpiverse, the running reality TV show/WWE special where he fights villains weekly and never truly loses.
Fragmentation of 21st century globalised capitalism - China calls in WTO, Trump pulls US out of it, system creaks as US retreats into extreme isolationism. Out of chaos comes money for DT and his cronies.
3. The guy who helped me train my dog told me “the dog never thinks she’s wrong. She just does things, and whatever she does is the right thing for her.”
In the Trumpiverse, nothing he does is vindictive, evil or weird. Everything he says is true.
He the naked Id. No thought beyond right this minute. Everything is transactional with him and he sees life as zero sum. You either win of lose. There’s no compromise, no win/win solution.
4. I *know* you know this, because we have all been here before, but I *beg* you to stop imagining that any of this stuff has to make sense by any external metric. That it has to be consistent with reality. The point is to unmoor the discourse from reality.
I feel like that's ascribing too much deliberateness though. If Trump were the shrewd but unscrupulous character he's sometimes portrayed as, he wouldn't do THIS; it has too big a chance of causing a real effect that backfires and hurts him.
His anti-trans stuff, f.e. is more purely performance -- the people it hurts aren't "his people" so he doesn't care, it won't come back on him. But this is different!
The terrifying implication is that he *really thinks this is a good idea*. Somewhere in his melting brain he has acquired a deeply misguided idea of what a tariff is, and it can't be dislodged.
I think this is right. Similarly, my understanding is that expelling the Jews from Germany in the 30s made no sense in economic terms, but that wasn't the point.
6. I gotta go do other things. I think I’ve expanded as much as I usefully can. If the original post gave you a kind of nauseous lurch, I hope this helps.
Ironically, given what I write, I spend a lot of time trying to grasp the real.
It doesn’t help when you’re dealing with this stuff.
I think it’s for the people who voted against him too. I’ve seen a lot of people say “But isn’t this illegal???” and we’re already way, way beyond that.
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But Musk is riding on the back of it. And he knows what he’s doing.
In the Trumpiverse, nothing he does is vindictive, evil or weird. Everything he says is true.
Because you live in the world by trying to track what’s real, like someone tuning a manual radio.
Ironically, given what I write, I spend a lot of time trying to grasp the real.
It doesn’t help when you’re dealing with this stuff.
L8rz.
A narcissist is divorced from reality to begin with; they know how brilliant & correct they are in all things.
Add in a clear cognitive impairment--dementia, Alzheimer's--and that irrationality is magnified exponentially.
All of it is logical to them, untethered from logic or reality.
https://bsky.app/profile/benbarclay.bsky.social/post/3lhcjtjyaas2a