This is All Completely Normal - Part 1
On Iran, the Seasons of Trump, and the Coming Fall of the King
Who among us, at some point during their long, slow mental and moral decline, hasn’t impulsively invaded a brutal, heavily armed, and paranoid rival? And who among us hasn’t done so with the perfectly reasonable expectation that - after a bracingly therapeutic orgy of explosions and a sufficient number of widely-televised deaths - they would be allowed to wander off to destroy the next shiny object, while leaving someone else to clean up the mess?
Who among us can honestly say they’ve never threatened to annihilate a vast and ancient civilization if they don’t do exactly as they’re told? Who among us has never had a secretary of war who has - puckishly and repeatedly - proclaimed that the Geneva Convention is for sissies and that real men don’t worry about slaughtering civilians while demonstrating their manliness to other manly men?… A secretary of war whose boyish enthusiasm on this matter has, of course, been properly received by all as the endearing and provocatively ironic musings of a highly philosophical and deeply moral man. A secretary of war who, after the killing is done, smokes a cigarette and naughtily flexes his Nazi-adjacent tattoos, then staggers home to sleep it off as everyone hugs and applauds and all is forgiven and promptly forgotten as, of course, it should be.
Lastly, who (among us) can honestly say that - while indifferently raining death on the civilian population of their chosen enemy - they’ve never been unfairly and viciously attacked for the simple act of posting an ever-so-slightly-enhanced image of themselves as the actual living Son of God, while at the same time descending into a shrieking slap fight with the actual Pope in Rome?
Which is to say, all of this is completely normal.
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These last few years, Long COVID has periodically flattened me and prevented me from being able to write about the Trumpocalype as often or as promptly as I’d like. I only mention this because my frequent involuntary lie-downs have kept me from getting caught up in Trump’s daily atrocities, even if I wanted to, and have obliged me to consider Trump’s insanity from a more periodic and “seasonal” perspective. Life under Trump is a seemingly endless and undifferentiated storm of chaos and destruction. Partly, this is because Donald Trump is an easily distracted and incompetent lunatic, and partly this is because making decent people feel overwhelmed and disoriented is a fundamental part of the fascist playbook. While it’s true that life during the time of Trump has been consistently stressful and hellacious, it’s also true that - when viewed from a longer perspective - significant ebbs and flows become visible in the chaos, changes of direction and tempo and intensity that mark the end of one period and the beginning of the next. By my count, we have now lived through three full seasons of Trump’s madness.
This last few weeks, in the midst of all the violence and chaos unfolding in the Middle East and closer to home, I’ve paradoxically noticed myself feeling an unexpected wave of relief, and also a rising sense of hope — “hope” not just as an abstract moral obligation but as an increasingly tangible reality. The source of these unexpected feelings in the midst of such brutality and uncertainty is this: I believe we have now definitively and inescapably crossed into Donald Trump’s fourth and very final season. Welcome to the Fall.
THE FALL OF TRUMP
With the benefit of hindsight, Trump’s first term - which felt so dangerous and so depraved at the time - now seems almost quaint, adorable even, in it’s lack of actual slaughter and actual widespread destruction. As it turned out, Trump’s first term was just a prelude: a loud, tacky opera full of bluster and bad actors; a long winter of largely unconsummated menace throughout which our wannabe king mostly just sulked and scowled like some minor kabuki villain. During this period of relative inactivity, Trump was prevented from bursting into full, noxious bloom largely by his own incompetence and inexperience, but also by a hedge of not-entirely-insane advisors who, for the most part, prevented him from doing things which were obviously incredibly illegal or apocalyptically destructive. Thus passed the long winter of Trump.
The beginning of Trump’s second term brought with it a head-spinning change of seasons. Having planned and plotted for years, and having successfully liberated himself from adult supervision, Trump’s second administration sprang up like some nightmare garden of those flowers that smell like rotting meat, accompanied by an eruption of transgressive crusades which, together, aroused and emboldened those who are excited by destruction and decay. Think back to those first weeks, the manic joy and fury with which so much was destroyed, how we stood blinking in the wreckage as we (all) tipped - in slow motion - across the bright, clear line that separates the Before Times from now. Springtime for Donald and Elon was spent bulldozing guardrails and brutalizing civil society in a thousand different ways, all of which - like waves of missiles before a ground war - were intended to reduce our ability to resist, and to clear the way for all of the Very Bad Things to come.
Following his inevitable breakup with Elon - and believing he’d overwhelmed our ability to defend ourselves - in his next season Trump set about occupying the “hostile” territory he thought he’d conquered. Occupying conquered territory, in practice, is all about effectively intimidating and subjugating the people who live there. As recently as a few months ago, during the height of Trump’s ICE-filled summer, it looked like Trump might be able to pull it off: that his chaotic, everything-everywhere-all-at-once crazy fascist blitz might be enough to break the last of our democratic traditions and drag us all over the edge. But it wasn’t. We pushed back, without becoming the incoherent mob Trump wants us to be, and we held out long enough for the tide to turn.
The tide has definitively turned. It is now clear that Donald Trump is doomed. Praise be. We’ll explore the dynamics that lead to this conclusion in later installments in this series, but for the moment please take solace in the fact that the clock is now unstoppably ticking down towards the end of the vicious and ridiculous spectacle that has been Trump’s time in power. To be clear, Donald Trump is still a deadly and unpredictable threat and he or his depraved minions could still cause all kinds of disastrous trouble, but Donald Trump himself will not walk away - cat-like and unscathed - from his current, self-inflicted plummet. He hasn’t hit the ground yet, but Donald Trump is on his way down.
COMING SOON:
THIS IS ALL COMPLETELY NORMAL - PART 2
On the Shadow of the Past, the Four Acts of Trumpism and How Iran is Us
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