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He Is Most Definitely Who He Is [1]
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Date: 2025-01-02
“It is what it is.” That’s how folks console themselves when they’re in a pickle without a clear way out.
“He is what he is.” That’s how people refer to a dog who won’t stop digging in the trash.
Not surprisingly, that’s also what they say about the incoming president. “Well,” they shake their heads, “he is what he is.” That mutt is just going to dump the can over and nose through the potato peels and leave tin foil scraps and sticky paper towels and coffee grounds all over the linoleum.
He is what he is. It’s kind of a contradiction, on account of we haven’t ever really believed that he is actually who he is. I mean, who would believe it? This man, who has shorted out our mental circuits for a decade, causing us to wonder if our brains were even working anymore, if our purchase on reality had ever been all that firm, has fooled us all, into thinking he’s unpredictable. What might he do next, we all found ourselves wondering, right after we found ourselves wondering, what did he just do?
But he’s so far from unpredictable. That’s a con, and it has worked wonderfully. A wooziness overtakes us every time he makes statements that make his own associates woozy at the prospect of plausibly defending. Like when promises to pardon thugs who biffed and pounded with poles and bear spray the thin blue line of cops he swore he supported more fervently than anyone ever had, inside the Capitol of the government whose laws he had sworn to faithfully execute and which the unsupported supported police were faithfully protecting, as they had sworn they would.
Or when by means of a fiat Sharpie he expanded a hurricane’s official extent, daring actual rain and wind to say otherwise. Or this gem—his recent boast that his razor-thin electoral margin in fact constituted the greatest presidential landslide in 129 years. (We wonder: did he choose that number because 129 years ago Grover Cleveland was president, or because William McKinley won the subsequent 1896 election by 51 to 47 percent—a majority greater than his mere plurality—or because President Big Mac knows 129 is divisible by 43, and 43 is the largest non-McNugget number? We will likely never know.)
We should have seen it coming. A man so obsessively lacking in honest self-examination is by nature straightforwardly who he is. Who he has always been. He will act in precisely the way he has always acted. We just haven’t been able to bring ourselves to believe it.
That’s on us, I’m thinking. We should have seen it all coming.
Gertrude Stein wrote,
I am Rose,
My eyes are blue.
I am Rose
And who are you?
I am Rose, and when I sing,
I am Rose like anything.
As it turns out, Trump is Trump like anything. And when he proceeds, he does so in discrete, awful, completely predictable steps.
What sort of steps, exactly? Glad you asked. As it happens, the fine British news magazine Economist has, in a great act of public service, laid out a fairly clear summary of their framework, a clear and detailed understanding of how the best con man since Charley Gondorff gets away with it.
Here’s the way it goes. Let’s say you are Dear Leader. You’ve inherited a country that is muddling along, by and large minding its own business—a good habit sadly fallen recently into neglect—and trying to get by the best it can. That’s a problem for you, El Jefe. You can’t very well carry on a feud with people who you claim don’t believe in Making America Great Again, if America is already feeling pretty okay about itself.
The more you look at it, the more troublesome it gets. It is as if the damn place is in some real danger of getting comfortable in its own skin, as they say, almost satisfied with being America. You can almost hear the voting public saying to themselves, sure, there are things that need improvement, but that’s the way things always are, and ain’t we just about the best country there is, after all? And oh by the way, I b’lieve there’s some barbecue that needs eaten, along with some coleslaw.
Not good. Not good at all, things being seen as pretty much the way things always are. You need folks to be agitated. You need people to feel that things are unusually bad, b-a-d. This is when, Dear Leader, you narrow your eyes and scan the horizon (or the internet) in search something that folks are likely to regard as a spot of national bother—oh, let’s just say, inflation, for instance.
Certainly a bother, all right. It’s a problem. But, someone says, one like we have faced down before. We beat it in the 70s and 80s, when inflation ran to more than 13%, far in excess of the 7 or 8% we had just recently. Still, somebody should be—and, well, to be fair, some are—working on making it better.
But here, now. A resolvable problem does you no good. Luckily, there exists what we may call Trump’s Law: there is no situation so slight that it cannot be blown out of proportion. In accordance with that law, you take this somewhat problematic thing and you breathe your magic on it and grow it to Godzilla proportions.
Then you bide your time until some reporter asks a question, say about China. China, you retort. You want to talk about China? You know what they don’t have in China? Inflation, that’s what they don’t have. (Never mind if it’s true or not.) And why don’t they? Because they have incredible leadership, strong leadership. Not like the pathetically weak communist morons we have running things here.
This is the Worst Inflation Ever! you bellow into the microphone. The likes of which there has never EVER been seen before! Huge inflation! Weimar Germany? Ha! Why, I actually saw pictures from Ashtabula, of people fighting over the last expensive egg in the Giant Eagle Supermarket! The whole world is laughing at us!
It’s disgusting, I can tell you. No one can buy anything! A lot of people are saying inflation is much, much worse than anyone is telling you! Everyone is talking about it! (See what you did there, with a lot of people are saying things about it combined with the charge that no one is telling you about it? If you’re going to do this right, it is important to speak in phrases that are self-contradictory. That way no one can say that something, anything, is untrue. If you can take the notion of falsification off the table, you’re home free.)
Once you get the problem sufficiently hyper-exaggerated, it’s time to offer up over-the-top sledgehammer-after-a-mosquito nutso solutions. Close down the Federal Reserve! Abolish the FDIC! It’s not working, close it down. Lock the low-competence Jerome Powell up! Give the Treasury over to cryptocurrency! Give the nation’s money to Elon Musk for safekeeping!
Then you can sit back and watch people become frantic. Over either the embroidered problem or your proposed insanely dangerous solutions. This helps you, because it highlights who is in charge of the issue (another Trump Axiom—the more bad press you’re getting, the more you’re winning). You are who everyone is attending to.
If some folks shake with fear over the overstated problem, great—stampeding frightened people into forking over their freedoms, whatever freedoms you like, is easy. If on the other hand they shake with fear over the bonkers solution, that presents a different opportunity. To exploit that, let a little time has pass. Then announce gravely that maybe, just maybe the solutions you actually put into place might not, after all, have to be quite as extreme as previously threatened.
Which allows people whose faith lies in sensibleness that perhaps reason might prevail, this time, and that gives you some wiggle room. At the same time it will them feel woozy, for fear that reason hasn’t got a chance this time, either, and all you doing is pulling another headfake on them.
Both will work equally well for you. They both create the very space in which you like to maneuver—where a tolerably safe and sane people come sincerely to doubt both their safety and their sanity.
Finally, you can put a fine Trumpian bow on it. One fine inevitable day, you pronounce with great fanfare that the problem has been solved! And all because of you! Inflation has receded—it grew frightened at the majestic magic of you being you, and it backed off.
An easy enough trick to pull off, because the situation was never as bad as you described it, inflation was already receding, because some people were working on it. Now all that’s necessary is to stand aside and allow things to look better by contrast. With themselves.
It was very terrible, that I can tell you, and now, see, it’s not so bad,. Adore me!
And there you have it. A strategy we all should find familiar, since it’s the one he has employed at every single juncture.
But then, what to do? How do we thwart this counterfeit fabulist and the con he runs?
Just ignore the hyperbolics at the outset? I don’t know. That doesn’t seem safe. Although Senor Latter-Day Barnum may not be entirely capable of being serious, or have the attention span or stamina to carry through on what he claims he will do, we have seen that he has thug underlings who will try very hard to do just that.
Not rise to the bait, decline to explain how the solution proposed is more existentially threatening than the problem it is supposed to address? Maybe. But maybe that is how we begin to abandon the very idea of rationality, and maybe assist him in the neutering of falsification.
Personally, I think the answer lies in what Tim Walz tried to do last year. Ridicule. Remember weird? Remember how Trump responded? “I’m not weird, he’s weird.” Remember, he won’t be ashamed. He won’t be self-reflective. But he does live by the rule laid out by the Godfather character Jack Woltz: “A man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous.”
Ridicule is the horse’s head in Trump’s bed.
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