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The Trump Code, Part 2: What to Do [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-01

Code - What to Do

.. I remember when the crisis hit and the Great Recession followed, I thought of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler and the Axis powers that followed.

People lost everything and the institutions that they believed in, the banks, Wall Street, the concept of the security of owning your own home, that was all revealed to be a house of cards. Not only did people lose everything, they lost their belief in the foundations of our society.

Then Covid hit in 2020. We shut down, lost our community, our belief in each other. Other people were potentially deadly, our health system was close to collapse, we lost the ability to travel, to congregate, to see family members, to publicly mourn the death of loved ones.

We recovered but the damage to our society was done, we lost faith in all the bedrock supports of our world. When that happens, people will seek anything to feel secure again.

Many things in this country tend to isolate us from each other. The long commutes from work which tends to keep us isolated in our homes. TV, smartphones, social media, they have all replaced real life connections.

- @spoot (continued later)

Part One of “Trump’s Code: Exploring Trump’s ability to move people without evidence, logic, or truth” outlined the way Trump has weaponized the shame to marshal the army of MAGA and keep them in line and sending in the checks. Shame is in all our personal and relational lives and broods over our society and politics. The death of the American Dream in the GFC of 2008-09 ignited that latent shame with millons of traumatic sparks. The bailout of the banksters turbocharged resentment. Trump, the maestro of the con and hypersensitive to shame via his psychotic narcissism, developed a code that spoke directly to the shame and outrage, and locked millions of formerly coherent citizens in with a cult-like discipline.

Now what do we do?

There is plenty following here, but at the top I’d like to plant two flags of emerging situations.

(1) Many MAGAs are amazed by the instant dictator Trump has revealed since his election. They sincerely did not believe he would rocket off the deep end if elected, nor did they anticipate he would turn the keys to the White House over to the billionaire who financed his campaign. Their votes were more anti-elite than pro-Nazi. The big tent needs these people.

(2) The coming economic slump, which could bottom out in a 2009-level collapse, can be an opportunity for making the big changes that need to be made. The enterprise of rescuing America from Trump and the oligarchs can stabilize our psychology, reduce the oligarchy, restructure the economy away from consumer capitalism, and finally even guarantee the basic economic security of the citizenry.

[This version of Part 2 is still pretty draft-y. I’m encouraging comments such as followed Part 1 to inform what comes next. @Spoot’s quote at the top here comes from those comments. ]

“What to do” is organized as follows.

1. What NOT to do.

2. Options for messaging

+ Turn Trump’s shame-based code against him

+ Shift the emotional ground to non-binary (winner-loser, patriot-traitor)

- Empathy

- Give opportunities for pride in agency

- Shared stakes story-telling

- Tone matters: calm not loud, solutions not screaming

+ Shift the object of shaming to the super rich

+ Utilize the coming crisis to tell the betrayal story

+ January 20, 2025, DJT betrayed everybody but the super-rich

- and Vladimir Putin

+ Highlight 2025 as a power grab, with looting like 2008-09

+ Spread the word to our side

- Acknowledge the shaming

- It’s not pandering, it’s strategy

3. Fix the sources of shame

+ What grows self-esteem? James Gilligan’s experiment

+ Reducing consumer capitalism (hence status mania)

- Move the economy to an efficient, sustainable foundation

- Using the downturn to reduce corporate power

If corporations are in distress, let them fail, or gain public ownership of companies and industries; no more bailouts.

- Promote targeted consumer actions

- Encourage simple and sustainable, low-profile households

+ Reduce personal and household debt

- Speculative reparations for 2008-09 and 2025

+ Shrink the grotesque income disparity

- Tax the rich

- Assess the damages from rule by the rich

What Not to Do: Shame the MAGAs

It is reflexive, natural, deserved, realistic, but wrong to shame the MAGAs in a loud voice. This has been a change for me personally. As incompetent, corrupt and transparent as Trump was, I was of the opinion that he still could not be the root of the problem; he must be the front man for a bigoted, stupid, fascist element in the body politic. Trump was the totem, not the leader. I no longer think that.

It is apparent that Trump has weaponized the shame that is in such plentiful supply today. It IS Trump who is the necessary catalyst for a toxicity that would not occur without him. Shaming MAGAs now will only reinforce the Trump effect, and the Mango Mussolini might even send us his thanks.

The “owning the libs” campaign was perplexing to many of us. An (often imaginary) victory in public shaming would rocket around the Internet and be celebrated on Fox News. MAGA gesticulated wildly in its sack dance when the QB was not only still upright, but had often completed the pass for a big gain. It was all tribal display. Capping now on the sad, sorry MAGAs is of the same efficacy as that owning the libs – none. It may feel good in a kind of shame-displacing way, but the object is to win the game, not do the sack dance.

Winning this game, defeating the Trump/Musk/Project 2025, and devloping a long-term cure for oligarchy will require a big tent and a good chunk of MAGAs to defect or not vote. They are not the enemy, they are stuck. Trump and the oligarchy are the enemy. The sooner we get to “This is a mess for all of us, and all of us together can fix it,” the better. We cannot allow Trump to regain his polarized playground.

It should not be too big a stretch. These were people we could once tolerate at Thanksgiving and even find something to talk about. The intensity of the polarization will dissolve once we recognize we’re all in the same foxhole.

Messaging Options

Turn Trump’s shame-based code against him. How very tempting. Reverse the visceral vector. The most successful example of this was Biden’s “Will you shut up, man,” in the 2020 debate. A famous blunder here was Hillary’s “basket of deplorables,” which MAGA took on as a badge of honor. The problems with trying to reverse this are several. First, it is a battle of emotional resonance, not truth or facts. Second, Trump is the master shame-based coder. Third, Trump’s megaphone is louder, so he wins any shouting match. Fourth, the shame-based coding may be a weapon, but it is effective only if it isolates Trump’s hypocrisy and not their faith, and it is counterproductive if it fuels his martyr act, where an attack on Trump is perceived as an attack on MAGA.

Shift the emotional ground away from shame. Move the base out of its defensive crouch to a less armored, more open stance. This is not as tricky as it looks. It is a shift from polarized hysteria to real world, well, reality. Just moving from black-and-white to any shade of gray reduces the shame volume immediately. Shame also thrives on threat. Empathy, a shared world, disarms it. “We get it. You’re angry. We are too.” Not shaming Trump or them, but meeting their hurt without judgement. “We feel your pain. Let’s do this together.”

Offer pride in agency. Agency is an antidote to powerlessness, and an antidote to shame. Give THEM the power, not Trump. The “Hands Off” protest on April 5 is an opportunity for agency that is direct medicine for this powerlessness. For some disaffected MAGAs, participation will not be signing on to the libs agenda, but registering opposition to the Trump/Musk coup.

Shared stakes story-telling. In the context of the opening of communication, facts flop and stories stick. In the real world – colors, nuance, human beings struggling – it is stories that have the complexity, empathy, and realism that are antibodies to the two-dimensional virus of shaming. Stories are visceral, but not combative. If you can put yourself in the same boat, there’s no room left for Trump’s demonizing.

Stories are so important as a means of communicating in this territory, they deserve more here. Painting a picture without blaming can bind the world in place long enough to get a point through. This is confirmed by research: Narrative messaging shifts emotions better than arguments. Take the present draft-y article. It proceeds by logic and evidence (and some gratuitous invective), and uses the story is an illustration. On the political/emotional ground that is open to connection, the story IS the evidence and the logic, and the argument.

“My brother is a welder. During the last slump he had to find work and it 225 miles away. Eventually he had to move his family. Now he’s bracing for another slowdown, and maybe another move. He’s resourceful and his wife is smart. They will be okay. You hope the same for others.”

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris outlined plans for debt relief and housing assistance that would have been a boost for millions of people in the working class demographic she was targeting. The proposals did not resonate, possibly because it was a transparent transactional politics. A story has a person with a background coming from somewhere and going somewhere. It is that story that matters, being able to see the person, not just contrive a product for him or her. The stories of rapacious brown people were identified, exaggerated and broadcast 24/7 and they persuaded credulous MAGAs.

A prominent story line for many is the GFC and the Great Recession. It needs to be told, not only because it resonates with the issues of today, but because both Democrats and Republicans failed, and both can learn from it. The story of 2008-09 resonates a decade and a half later. It is the object lesson for a generation, proving that the rich can game the system every time and even make money in crises, while the normal citizen gets caught in the wringer. This incident should be an element of as many stories as possible. It reaches to the core of the shame and recognizes a real world in a way that is human, not abstract.

Tone matters. Calm, not loud. Yes, the daily 360 panorama of BS is outrageous, ridiculous, even treasonous. But in adopting a loud, bombastic tone we are communicating shaming, not the message in our words. Cold steel. With the right, level-headed tone, perhaps even humor, a much deeper message can get through. Think MLK’s cadence – firm, not shrill. One study found specifically that low-arousal, steady, not fiery messaging lowers tribal walls. People hear it instead of bracing.

Shift the object of shaming to the oligarchs, the super-rich. This is the strategic pivot. It is not waving a wand and dispelling the ubiquitous shame, it is redirecting the reaction to those who deserve it. The rich are elites in only one dimension, financially. Neither intellectually, morally, artistically, academically, socially, athletically, or in any other way except financially are they elite. They got to the land of the rich largely by being born there, secondarily by being ruthless and exploitative of people and markets, and only thirdly (and very rarely) by brilliance and hard work.

Universally, the rich see the number of dollars as the points on the scoreboard that lets everybody know who is winning the game. The superiority and entitlement they assume is rarely merited. As a group, they wouldn’t stand up to the attendees at a random PTA meeting. In fact, the rich seem to become more stupid over time, lulled int it by constant deference to the money in their pockets. Shamelessness comes with the stupidity. “It’s just business,” is a phrase that excuses and validates the most brutal and dishonest practices. Comparison and competition are by no means absent from the penthouse, of course, but the shaming applies only in relation to their fellow rich.

The perfect use of the rich is as the object of a strategic pivot. They are the perfect shame sink. A super-rich foreigner taking a chainsaw to institutions that have stood since the founding fathers is not a sympathetic character. Reckless bungling with the VA, Social Security, the institutions of law and order that are the bedrock of the sociey’s stability is not popular. These problems and those which lie ahead are literally creations of the oligarchs’ design. The capture of government by the moneyed is a manifest reality, not a deep state conspiracy. The subversion of the electoral process and legislatures at all levels is an acknowledged fact, not a figment in a fevered brain. The capture of regulators by the industries they are supposed to regulate may not be well known, but neither will it surprise very many.

Per the fascist playbook, the objects of Trump’s shaming to date have been the weakest and most marginalized sections of our population. The shame has stuck largely because of vigorous and continuous coaching. These scapegoats will not be satisfactory, however, the day after the first Social Security check is missed. In this late stage of the political cycle, the culpability of the rich becomes ever more apparent and ever more difficult to defend.

The shared stakes story-telling, again, should reference the GFC. “It’s the same financial elites who got serviced by the political establishments of 2008-09 who are running the 2025 game on the government.” “The same crop of fraudsters who took your house who line both sides of the table in Trump’s cabinet.” “ All of us felt the shock and the crunch of the GFC. All of us except these guys, and they are back for more.”

This pivot in the object of shame might be effectively back-dated to January 20, 2025, Trump’s inauguration. Many MAGAs are going to remember that as the day he took off his red hat and put on the mad king’s crown, then went to work full-time as front man for the super-rich, plainly moving on from being the blue collar billionaire. His constituents are now exclusively the oligarchs (including Putin). Made-for-TV deportation flights are a weak shadow of the detention camps he promised. The abductions off the street and illegal renditions are bombing as substitutes. Meanwhile the real agenda seems to be cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, Parks, AG, NIH grants, USAID, etc. These were not on the list given to Trump voters during the campaign. Nor were tariffs on long-time trading partners, alienation of military allies, or invasions of Gaza, Panama, Greenland, and Canada. Canada?!

Are you better off than you were 70 days ago? The economic downturn coincided with the crazy attack on government and the abuse of the legal system. This connection will be much clearer in hindsight. But as it comes into view, the connection should be cemented together. The economy was humming on January 19, 2025. The 180 change in politics has meant a 180 in well-being for Americans. Trump mandating the opposite program of Biden has produced the opposite result. When the economic slide becomes an observable fact, it is going to get the public’s focus and the politicians’ in a way nothing to date has. If it is accompanied by the first missed Social Security check, nothing Trump does will wash except with the most fevered cultists.

At the end of the day, the chaos isn’t red or blue – it’s green. President Musk is the poster boy, with the keys to every office on every floor. His AI will work about as well as his self-driving cars – well enough to get you killed. If MAGA feels as betrayed as they should, the consequences for the Mango Mussolini might be serious.

Spread the word to our side. Do you want to shame them or do you want to win the game? Providing Trump with bulletin board material for his team does not seem worth the short-term emotional uplift. The followers are NOT the problem, their being locked into Trumpworld is the problem. Shame has locked them in, empathy can pry open the gate. Shaming the shamed does not work. Screaming at the screamers only means nobody can hear. Use what works, stop punching down, start pulling in. They’re not the enemy, they’re stuck. Call them players, not pawns. It is not pandering, it is strategy. Rah, rah, rah.

Fixing the Sources of Shame

This section is ambitious. Having identified the streams of shame sludge that have filled the toxic reservoir, we are going to speculate about possible action to reduce those streams. We will find an obvious, and perhaps surprising, coincidence. At the same time the sources of shame are reduced, the structure and efficiency of the economy is improved. The chronic streams of shame are: (1) consumer capitalism and its hyper-focus on status in its ubiquitous advertising, (2) the chronic, extreme and growing income and wealth inequality, and (3) high levels of personal debt. These are all serious economic problems for households and individuals, and in the aggregate they are costly, inefficient, and prone to corruption.

First, before we get to that, What promotes healthy self-esteem, the opposite of shame? A striking test on this front was organized by the godfather of shame research James Gilligan. He did extensive work in the Massachusetts prison system with often violent offenders. Gilligan found that the single biggest predictor of not reoffending was acquiring a college degree while in prison. Over a 25-year period, 200 inmates acquired a college degree and none returned for a new crime. Compare that to a nearly two-thirds recidivism over only three years for the comparison population.

Also instructive was the response by authorities. When they found out about it, although the program cost very little (instructors donated their time), as soon as it was discovered, it was shut down. Prison itself is a place to shame people, not rehabilitate them.

Taking the lesson directly from Gilligan’s test, the best antidote to shame is accomplishment, certification, esteem, and the trust of others. The healthiest community comes from good jobs, security, education and community.

Eliminating the chronic sources of shame

1. Reducing consumer capitalism.

A list of most destructive industries would begin with Big Oil, consumer capitalism and Finance. The first two are killers of the climate, the third is the tool for the rich to get richer off rents from the rest. The long run is very short whenever any one of them dominates, largely because their appetite is so great, they tend to kill their hosts. Consumer capitalism promotes shame in the individual, as discussed in Part 1, and at the same time over-consumption, waste and pollution that a more productive activity would not.

The giant corporations of consumer capitalism are very vulnerable to an economic slump. Their output depends on artificially generated demand created by scientific advertising. When economic uncertainty appears, prudent people tend to pause their spending. The more precarious one’s finances, the more likely a voluntary reduction of spending. This echoes to producers and retailers, which exaggerate the pause a bit by putting capital investments on hold. Both tend to produce job losses, and if, say, chainsaw firings in another sector add to unemployment, the downer can begin to spiral.

Within this consumer sphere lie media, sports, Amazon, and a range of other business types. That is, when the advertising dollar dries up, the pain is felt rapidly and widely.

A particular vulnerability of many consumer capitalists is their debt exposure. Extreme caution is indicated when gaming out how debt exposure might express itself. Any precise forecast would certainly be wrong. But the overall exposure of corporations to debt is coming off historic highs. A downturn would likely raise that level again, even as it squeezes revenue available for debt service.

Private Debt: Corporate (blue) and Household (red), 1948-2025

What is notable is that the behavior of a prudent citizen facing uncertainty is pretty close to the behavior of one who is simplifying for sustainability reasons. That is, both reduce spending from consumer capitalists. We see now with the Tesla takedown that companies can be vulnerable to targeted boycotts. While Tesla may be a special case, it is not unique, as the oligarchs continue to expand, they become more appropriate as objects for mass action. Even general boycotts, as follow naturally from simpler lifestyles can be effective. A one-day spending fast was attempted in late February without notable news as to its effect. Such action in a more distressed environment might have greater effect.

Keep in mind, too, that a wide swath of America is living paycheck to paycheck, and while discretionary alterations to their spending are not a thing, they too are exposed to debt. As reported in the Kobeissi Letter, “credit card defaults jumped to $46 billion in the first 9 months of 2024, the highest since 2010. Defaults of seriously delinquent credit card loan balances have more than doubled over the last 2 years. Bottom-income consumers were hit the hardest due to years of elevated inflation and interest rates. Additionally, the savings rate of the bottom third is now 0%, according to Moody’s.”

High impact policy change: The simple policy change that would most directly rectify the condition of consumer capitalism is the one least likely to happen. If the tax deduction for advertising were eliminated, the fiction that demand manipulation is a legitimate element of production would be recognized in law, advertising would be reduced, along with its detrimental effects. The impact on sports and media would likely be profound as well.

Summarizing, consumer capitalism will end within this century, either because it destroys its host, or because it is exchanged for a more productive line of industry. The likely recession ahead will leave the society fundamentally changed, for good or ill. There may be opportunities to reduce the Amazons and Teslas of the world to reasonable dimensions, sizes compatible with human well-being.

[A footnote here: Along with credit card debt, another very vulnerable debt center is in commercial real estate. Debt exposure is high in that sector, along with very high vacancy rates and poor prospects. A lot of property is carrying more debt that it can service and substantial properties are sitting on creditors books at valuations higher than are warranted. The mortgage-backed security (MBS) which blew up to such devastating effect in 2008-09 is back in play here and under stress.]

If we learned nothing else from 2008-09, it is that there can be NO MORE BAILOUTS. At such a point they are needed, the people’s representatives need to pick winners and losers, take ownership rather than hand over money, and let the repeat offenders just fail, along with their owners and stockholders.

Reduce personal and household debt.

High personal debt a source not only a source of shame, it is also a burden on the individual and the market economy. Households in total carry about 70% of GDP in debt. Corporations are higher, as mentioned, at above 75% of GDP in debt. In a healthy economy, the total of private debt would not be above 100% of GDP, preferably closer to 80%. Ours today is 145%.

This number needs to come down for households. Mortgage debt, student loans, medical debt, all deaden the prospects of those who hold them and create a wider economy that is both sluggish and unstable. One might begin to ask why it is so high. The open secret is that banks make their money on debt, so they produce as much as they can, and they don’t worry too much about the big picture. Regulators still repeat the “market knows best” mantra, because that is what their clients want to hear, not because there is historical evidence to support it. History, to the contrary, shows that if investors and banks get caught short, the government will bail them out. Again that practice needs to end, for banks and consumer capitalists. NO MORE BAILOUTS. At the critical point, the people’s representatives need to pick winners and losers, take ownership stakes for any money handed over, and let repeat offenders just fail. Let the “market” reduce the oligarchy.

High impact policy change: While programs of loan forgiveness should be instituted wherever possible and justified and full bankruptcy protection should be returned to citizens, these efforts are too modest to make a significant dent in the problem. But here is a number.

$6.75 trillion.

A large number.

This is the size of the Fed’s balance sheet. One side is composed of securities of many types. On the other side, the liabilities side, the $6.75 trillion is cash in possession of the former owners of those securities. Minus the roughly $1 trillion on the balance sheet at the time of the GFC, leaves $5.75 trillion as a legitimate proxy for the size of the Fed’s bailout to the financial sector and investors between 2008 and today.

Fed Balance Sheet: Assets, 2000-2025

This is not a source of funding for anything, but it is a perfect representation of what a bailout for households might look like in a fair and balanced economy. Should another recovery from economic collapse be indicated, one avenue would be reparations to households in the form of debt relief (or access to credit, for those with no outstanding debt). Such a program would be complex in design and execution, in that it has many parts that need to mesh, but in concept it is simple. A progressive reduction in outstanding debt, helping households get out of the paycheck-to-paycheck treadmill, would compare favorably one-time cash payments from the government as in past recovery programs. If financial institutions were sufficiently distressed, the debt relief might be incorporated in their revised structures. It might also close the circle for victims of the GFC, if only as an admission that they were left holding the bag last time.

Once again, though, a source of shame and a source of economic dysfunction are the same thing – excess private debt.

3. Redress and restructure the class system.

Every society has its classes, but not every society has an oligarch class, or a super-rich class. Those without the benefits of the super-rich also lack an enormous range of societal sicknesses – social, personal, institutional, political. See again the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two epidemiologists (Spirit Level) [Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book) ]

They gathered the statistics and ran the correlations, both across nations and then across US states. Countries and US states with high income inequality also ranked high for a plethora of malaise.

An unequal society makes also for an inefficient economy, both as empirically observed and in theory. How much simpler would government and life be if each person had an adequate basic income and adequate insurance for health, disability and retirement? Conservatives would have what they want, less bureaucracy. Liberals would have what they want – no poverty and a chance for everybody.

Instead (and this IS a choice) we have tremendous wealth and tremendous poverty. A trivial and possibly unnoticed luxury for one is valued at fifty times a day’s food for another. Millions of undernourished and under-served people are required for each dozen of the super rich. One can legitimately propose that we don’t have super-rich people because America is rich, we have them because a large part of America is poor.

Of course, germane to the whole spiel, a society with an oligarch class also tends to fascism and autocracy, not because that is efficient for making money, but because it is the logical extension of elitism, shamelessness. It is literally rule by the rich.

High impact policy change:

Scrapping the cap on payroll taxes and extending it to all forms of income, including investment income and interest, should be the first, easy, powerful act of a recovery administration. Currently the social security tax is 12.4% on the first $168,600 of earned income. Somebody who earns $800,000 per year, pays roughly 3%. A revision which ended the caps and exemptions, would be an instant 12% tax on the income of the wealthiest, redressing the patent regressiveness and solidifying both social security and the entire federal budget.

“In your dreams,” you say. Granted.

In conclusion, there is a point that deserves repeating: That which promotes self-esteem is also good for the society and particularly the economy, which is less burdened, less top-heavy, and more efficient. The obverse is also true. The societal processes that promote shame are bad for the society and the individual, and tend toward dysfunction. On the other hand, or maybe just secondarily, when reform comes, it comes with a lot of forward motion, and broad-based forward motion.

@spoot (cont.)

..

Maybe Trump and his minions are doing us a favor, if we take his existential threat to our nation and world as a call to switch our default reaction of passive consumption to a commitment to action, to engage and organize into a stone cold resistance and counterattack movement.

I see it starting in the town hall meetings and the protests and politicians are beginning to tune into the rebellion of the voters and start their own responses to the Zeitgeist. Trump has only been in office for 63 days and the revolt of the people have just started.

I feel such optimism for our fight and our country and the only thing that could destroy this tsunami is if we bicker and fight among ourselves over ways and means. I say let a thousand flowers bloom. Each of us in our own way can pick up our swords and fight!

##

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