Disorganized Crime

 

Disorganized Crime (1989).

Frank Wilhoit in comments:

"...don't think he's got the stuff or the staff [to do a full-scale Netanyahu and get elected]..." How are you using the word "got" here? He has been kiting off free media the whole time. Negative partisanship is the wind beneath his stubby little wings, and it is now self-perpetuating. Trump has no friends, no admirers, no sympathizers, never has had; he is purely an avatar for the rural mindset. Any avatar would do: undeniably he has been, down to now, a very good one, but there is a structural imperative to keep escalating, and I do not take for granted that Trump will be able to win that race to the bottom. Someone will arise who will outflank him on the right. The Republican nomination will go to someone who says -- explicitly, no more codetalk, no more allegories, no more private-versus-public: "You, the People, will save America, and you will do it by killing all the liberals, and I will bless you and hold you harmless."

And my response:

I meant "in his body" and "on the payroll". He's a racket boss. That doesn't mean he's a mastermind who works his will through his employees. Rather he's the flag under which they—from Stone and Bannon and Graham down through low-rent crooks like Boris Epshteyn and Jason Miller—have sought to work theirs. "Our boy can become president!" said Felix Sater to Michael Cohen. He was right on that, on two things: he did become president, and he was their boy—he doesn't own them, they own him. They're not the reason he became president, but they sustained him while it was happening, and I personally don't think they can do it again, I think the legal actions especially in Washington are giving them a very hard time (one of the reasons the New York demonstration was so pathetic yesterday was that so many guys who knew how to organize such things in 2021 are in jail or under indictment themselves), and many of the conditions that favored Trump in 2016 have changed.

I agree with you, of course, on the nature of his relationship to the Republican Party (except to note a good number of professional politicians have been willing to serve the mob as his employees, courtiers, couriers, court jesters, enforcers, "friend" simulacra, to be his made men as it were, while others are just using that flag to make their own political connections with the rustics).

But I don't think there's anybody who can really outflank Trump. "No more codetalk" means no more free media. The forked tongues like Youngkin and DeSantis who know how to keep the media sweet don't persuade the rustics (Florida and Virginia fascists aren't really rustic). I think Trump wins the nomination as he did in 2016, by doing that naturally, without needing to think about it.

It later turned out that Frank meant something different by "media"—the hardcore apparatus that spreads disinformation, where I was thinking more of the normalizing media, CNN and New York Times and so on. What I was trying to say, though, remains of some importance in the wider perspective: complaisant journalism, the overlapping Rosen categories of "He Said She Said", "View From Nowhere", and "Church of Savvy", are an essential element in the Republican project of sneaking authoritarian government past voters whose interests it threatens. Resolutely partisan newspapers in France and Germany are part of the way voters keep showing up when fascism looks likely to conquer (even Italy, where Giorgia Meloni's anti-Russian version of far-right has been able to dominate over her pro-Russian coalition partners Berlusconi and Salvini). 

In the post-Trump world where even Peter Baker and Susan Glasser are willing to express disapproval of the Former Guy, you might think our own situation was improving, but it seems that their book, The Divider, is devoted to showing how hard administration Republicans were willing to work to save us all from Trump so it's really all OK—to letting Republicans off the hook, which is what I really don't want to do. It's one thing to offer them an offramp, but we really need to see them clamber down it—it's not our job to magic them down without any effort on their part.

It's always enjoyable to contemplate Trump as standard bearer for the "party of personal responsibility" given his complete lack of personal and business ethics, or the "party of ideas" with his plain inability to process an idea, but it's important to remember that he's also just too stupid, or limited in his perception of others, too lacking in what cognitive psychologists call "theory of mind", and also too lazy, to seriously lead or manage an organization. I could go on about this, relating it to the ADHD some knowledgeable commentators say he has suffered from since at least the age of 7, and the developmental language disorder of which his specific reading comprehension deficit would be a case... but let's not, for now.

The thing I want to stress is the structure, or calibrated lack of structure, of the Trumpian enterprise, and how Trump doesn't exactly run it. As we've known for quite a while, his flunkeys do try to figure out what he wants and keep him from yelling at them. But he wouldn't know how to formulate a plan and delegate responsibilities for carrying it out. Nobody is really doing that.

Rather, Trump is at the center of a gang that has been sharing territory over the past seven or eight years or in particular cases longer with a couple of other gangs, on one side the post-1980 Republican party and on the other the confluence of the Russian mafia and the post-Communist Russian state. It's fluid. Nobody's really in charge. But there's a huge parade of self-righteous authority.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.