In the United States on Sunday, the leader of the ruling regime once again signaled his intent to violate the nation's Constitution and stay in office for more than the legally mandated two terms. President Donald J. Trump, who assumed the office in 2017 despite garnering fewer citizens' votes than his opponent, suggested yet again that he will seek to serve more than four more years in office if re-elected. In the same public address, the North American strongman sounded his support for the extrajudicial execution of certain undesirables, making common cause with his counterparts around the world like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.
That is the story you might read if this was happening in another country. But because it's happening in The World's Greatest Democracy, we all must pretend it isn't really happening—or that Donald Trump, a man who does not genuinely laugh except when asked about whether racial inequality exists, is "joking" about serving more than one more term. It's not a joke, because it's not really meant to be funny. As he's trotted it out over and over again over the last weeks and months, his Trigger the Media Libs tone—which is what passes for comedic delivery within this movement—has slowly morphed into something else.
The president has long used "jokes" as an ex-post-facto excuse when he says something phenomenally stupid, like suggesting people inject themselves with bleach, or unacceptable, like when he said publicly he'd told "his people" to "slow down" Covid-19 testing. (Jesus Christ, that is still enraging.) But it's also a way to introduce things normally beyond the pale into the discourse, by kicking a familiar machine into gear: the non-believers attack him for it, the tribe rallies around him to defend him. Soon enough, they're not merely defending it as a joke that various uptight observers couldn't take. They're defending it on the merits, or at least on the basis that he said it, so there's something to it.
Soon enough, they will defend this six-more-years rhetoric on the basis Trump has regularly been supplying: that he was somehow robbed of some of his first term by the various investigations into him. He needs another couple years, it's only fair.
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Notice the difference from around when Trump was first really regularly "joking" about this last year:
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It's getting more direct now because that is the objective. To make it real. In this era of postmodern politics, the irony and the trolling are a kind of Trojan Horse for very real, very dangerous shit. Once you get the True Believers to circle the wagons around something, they will defend it to the end—first as farce, then as tragedy.
Then the president got more direct still. For the second time in as many days, he appeared to endorse the summary execution of a murder suspect by federal forces.
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There is a reason that, even if the system regularly falls short, the protections of due process theoretically apply to every citizen. You do not forfeit your right to a trial because someone, even the president, says you're "a bad guy" who shot "a very fine young man." Even if that is all true, law enforcement has some obligation to try to arrest you peacefully so you can be tried in a court of law. The details of the Portland incident are still in dispute: the U.S. Marshalls say the shooting of Michael Forest Reinoehl was legitimate, while an eyewitness disputes that. But Trump did not bother to justify the shooting on the basis it was necessary and legitimate: he simply endorsed the shooting—"it was taken care of in 15 minutes," he said with relish—just as he did in an interview with the Fox News Judge the day before.
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Good Lord. "There has to be retribution." And as Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times pointed out, his government is simultaneously engaged in an active campaign to manipulate intelligence to paint Antifa, a movement Reinoehl appears to have been active in, as a domestic terror threat—in sum, "a systematic effort to put a group of Americans outside of the most basic legal protections."
And still, the mainstream political press seems unable to grasp the totality of what is happening right in front of them. There is an insistence—a tick of psychological self-preservation, almost—that this is another election pitting a Republican against a Democrat. Will taxes be raised, or will they be cut? It's difficult to report on the regime up close if you allow yourself to be full in the knowledge that the institution you represent, the free press, may cease to exist as currently constituted if the incumbent president wins re-election. Prominent media figures still pronounce it "puzzling" that the president would completely disregard what happened in objective reality in favor of bullshit that feeds his narrative.
It's not "puzzling" at all. He doesn't care what actually happened. Where have you been the last four years? The president is currently running on the counterfactual that Joe Biden is actually the president right now. Last week he completely inverted reality on the issue of protecting pre-existing conditions. The chairwoman of the Republican National Committee took to Twitter Sunday to slam Joe Biden for "his disastrous record responding to the coronavirus." They are not playing the same game. They do not acknowledge your rules, and if they get the chance, they will make sure there aren't any worth acknowledging. Maybe it's time to shake off that American Exceptionalism and accept that it can happen here.
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The Link LonkSeptember 14, 2020 at 11:18PM
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Trump Went Full Strongman on Sunday - Esquire
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Joke
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