This is All Completely Normal - Part 2
ON KARMA, THE FOUR ACTS OF TRUMPISM & HOW IRAN IS US
THE SHADOW OF THE PAST — KARMA AND CAUTIONARY TALES
Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when one season ends and the next begins. Not so with the fall of Donald Trump, which we can date with great precision. Donald Trump’s fall began at approximately 1:30am Eastern Standard Time on Saturday, February 28, when the first wave of American and Israeli missiles exploded in the Iranian capital. It’s not yet clear when his fall will be complete. The process will probably drag on past the midterms and into the new year. What is clear is that Donald Trump is falling, and that it was the Shia clerics of Tehran who gave him his final push, or - to speak more precisely - it was his need to demonstrate his irresistible power over them which led Donald Trump to fling himself down from his lofty throne.
Donald Trump will not be the first American president to be destroyed by the mullahs of Iran.
In 1953 - in the name of defending freedom, democracy and the American way - President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the CIA and the Brits overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and imposed upon the people of Iran an actual honest-to-god king. Over the following decades, it was the grotesque corruption, incompetence and brutality of this American-imposed king that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979, the seizure of 52 American hostages, and the rise of the appalling mullahs. It’s literally the textbook example of “blowback”, the law of unintended consequences in espionage and international affaires, where selfishly or unwisely intervening in one difficult situation often leads to an even worse situation farther down the road. Imperialist karma, if you will. Eisenhower’s Machiavellian adventure in Iran set in motion an avalanche of terrible consequences which have impacted all of the following generations and which have conspired to deliver us over the years - along multiple paths, both obvious and unexpected - into our current collective nightmare.
The most immediately relevant of these involves the rise of Reagan. In 1980, unwilling to risk an October surprise, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan struck a deal with the mullahs - long-documented and recently corroborated yet again - that they would not release the hostages until after the US elections in November. The mullahs’ decision to help undermine the reelection bid of Jimmy Carter - the liberal American president whose concern for human rights had facilitated their rise to power - led immediately to the ascendency of the conservative right in American politics. Once in office, Ronald Reagan went on to preside over the gutting of the American middle class and a transfer of immense wealth to the already extremely rich. The immiseration of the middle class and the rise of the oligarchs led in turn to the rise of Trump and MAGA in the decades that followed, all of which leads us - rather directly - right back into the insane moment in which we now live.
IRAN IS US — THE FOUR ESSENTIAL ACTS OF TRUMPISM
Thousands of pages have been written trying to analyze and systematize the endless, slow-motion train wreck that is life under Donald Trump, but nothing can more brutally and effectively summarize the Four Acts of Trumpism than the recent experience of the people of Iran.
Things being as crazy as they are, It’s hard to remember that Donald Trump only burst onto the Iranian scene a couple months ago - hissing and swerving through the Persian sky like some drunken, red, white and blue meteorite - promising the people of Iran that he would be their savior, that he’d be the one to finally liberate them from their corrupt and dictatorial leaders. Iranians at home and abroad allowed themselves a brief moment of hope.
That hope started to fade during the first minutes of the ensuing war, when a cascade of very expensive American missiles obliterated an elementary school and then, a bit later, a sports complex, killing dozens of little girls and a women’s volleyball team, among many, many others who died that day and in the weeks that followed. With the passage of time, Donald Trump has made it increasingly clear that he’s not particularly concerned whether the people of Iran manage to survive the process of being “liberated” by him from the tyranny of the mullahs. Four weeks ago, just before declaring the current, extended ceasefire, Trump proclaimed (in a social media post, of course) “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”. He ended this same genocidal missive with a cheery and deranged thumbs-up to the people he’d just threatened to eradicate: “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”. A week later, with the ceasefire due to expire, Trump told a Fox news reporter that “the whole country is going to get blown up” if the Iranian government doesn’t make a deal that he likes. Yesterday morning Trump was at it again, saying that if Iran doesn’t do as he says then “the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”
In Iran, watching Trump toggle fecklessly back and forth between his impulse for violence and his desire to move on to smash the next thing, we should be reminded of the many other precious things Donald Trump has smashed during his relatively short time on the world stage, and of the ruin he leaves in his wake. These things are the essence of Trumpism.
Donald Trump is all impulse and appetites, and he’s never met a marshmallow test he hasn’t failed. His relentless, unconsidered improv of unaccountable bullshit and grievance and aggression has served him well in his takeover of the Republican Party here at home, but Donald’s normal schtick doesn’t translate all that well to the international stage, where his opponents are not in any way beholden to his firehose of ignorance and wishful thinking and lies. Who knew that facts matter and that reality still gets a say in Donald Trump’s post-truth carnival of mayhem and depravity? In the opposing corner, the mullahs of Iran have proven themselves over the years to be patient and brutal tacticians who’ve never been squeamish about spilling the blood of their people - or about inflicting carefully calculated pain on their enemies - in order to keep themselves in power.
The mullahs aren’t buying Trump’s usual bluff and bluster. At long last, at 79 years of age, Donald Trump appears to be experiencing actual consequences for his actions for the very first time in his long and reckless life. He does not appear to be enjoying the experience. While this apparent beginning of Trump’s reckoning is welcome, it doesn’t change the precarious position of the people of Iran, or of all the rest of us who remain hostage to Trump’s endless campaign of destruction. More than 2,000 Iranian civilians - including 431 children - are reported to have died so far, and what might happen next is unclear. What IS clear is this: Donald Trump promised salvation to the people of Iran, but he’s only brought to Iran the same disastrous plagues that he always brings, no matter where he goes: chaos and destruction and greed and death.
Trump’s war of choice in Iran is a human, political and economic disaster. It is also a cautionary tale. In Iran, we can see the entire grotesque essence of the ten-year saga of Trumpism condensed and essentialized into a few horrendous and blood-covered weeks. The experience of Iran throws into high relief what we should recognize by now as the endless four act structure of Trumpism :
Act I: “Enemies” Identified and Salvation Promised.
Act II: “Enemies” Harassed and Indiscriminate Destruction Delivered.
Act III: A Meaningless, Disinterested Crescendo of Suffering and Wreckage and Greed.
Act IV: An Abrupt Loss of Interest, During which Trump Wanders off to Create the Next Brutal, Destructive, and Utterly Unnecessary Crisis. Rinse and Repeat forever.
We are now, in far too many aspects of our lives, approaching the third act, except in those places - like Iran - where Act III is already well-underway. In Iran, we have been allowed to see our future, and it’s not the kind of place you’d want to live — full of smoking wreckage and fear. We have been warned. Donald Trump has spectacularly failed in his stated mission to protect the people of Iran, either from their murderous rulers or from his own endless campaign of demolition. Trump has also failed to topple the Iranian dictatorship or to end Iran’s nuclear program. These obvious failures - in the context of a declining American economy and the squandering of at least $25 billion of US taxpayer money on yet another awful and unnecessary war in the Middle East - are having a sobering effect on MAGA disciples everywhere. Watching the destruction in Iran as gas and groceries become ever more expensive, a growing number of MAGA fans are awakening to the reality that their little red hats will not protect them as Trump’s disinterested chaos descends on the wide world — and also on their own vulnerable communities here at home.
We are all, of course, in the same position. If we can’t find a way to end Donald Trump’s reign of destruction, and soon, then MAGA and all the rest of us will just get to sit and watch as our liberty, our democracy, our hospitals, schools, infrastructure and economy are all wiped out by shameless greed, indifference, incompetence, cruelty, corruption and neglect, just as surely as if they’d been hit by the same fancy, expensive missiles that reduced the Good Tree Elementary School in Minab to blood-covered rubble.
COMING SOON:
THIS IS ALL COMPLETELY NORMAL - PART 3
THE OCCAM’S RAZOR OF TRUMP: DONALD THE DESTROYER AND THE GREAT UNMAKING
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