GROUCHO TRUMP TRIES TO USE US AS HIS MARGARET DUMONT

Yeah, that was a weird press conference yesterday.

There was talk of the rising number of beached whales in Massachusetts, the victim, the president-elect said, of those windmills that have been erected off the coast. They “are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

There was a vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico, by presidential decree, to the “Gulf of America.” And then there was Donald J. Trump’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the 51-mile Panama Canal on national security grounds, along with the 836,000 square miles of Greenland, the world’s largest island....

He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”

Is it dementia? Is it a brilliant scheme to dangle shiny objects before reporters so they won't pay attention to Trump's corruption or his degradation of the rule of law?

Regular readers know that I think Trump has mild cognitive impairment at worst. He's still sharp enough to approach a press conference like this with an intuitive sense of what works for him.

What works for him is impropriety. Usually, as in this case, it's aggressive impropriety. Sometimes it's just Trump doing weird shit, like dancing to one of his mix tapes for more than a half hour at an event that was supposed to be a town hall.

The point of it -- and I don't believe Trump has analyzed this as much as intuited it, because he has a lifelong instinct for how publicity works -- is that the critics respond by saying, in effect, This is unseemly! It's preposterous behavior and it's unbefitting of a national leader!

That reaction is why it works.

My grand unified theory of why right-wing populist parties are on the rise globally is as follows: The super-rich want more and more, and it's a zero-sum game because ordinary people are hurting as inequality rises. Mainstream right-wing parties don't even want to help the non-rich, while mainstream liberal parties help the non-rich only in small, incremental ways, because the super-rich won't permit real progressive change (as genuine leftists learn when they gain power in some countries).

So no one is going to improve the lives of the non-rich -- but right-wing populists will at least make a great show of scapegoating and hurting immigrants, LGBT people, racial and religious minorities, and other groups they've taught the working classes, in particular, to despise. Ordinary people's lives never get better, but right-wing populists at least give them focused hate.

Some of that hate is focused on "elitists." Elitists, of course, aren't actual elitists -- for instance, Elon Musk, according to this worldview, is a swashbuckling iconoclast who's the richest man in the world because he deserves to be. The real elitist is the college professor with a low-six-figure salary who hates Musk and watches MSNBC at night.

If you're reading this, you're an elitist, as Trump's base sees it. You're an elitist because, among other things, the impropriety of Trump's public appearances bothers you. You think it's buffoonish and reckless to call for annexing Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal. You say, logically, I thought people voted for Trump because they were upset about the price of eggs. How does this lower the price of eggs?

You represent propriety, and Trump's base is delighted that, as they see it, you're "triggered," that you have "Trump Derangement Syndrome." You are -- and I'm really dating myself with this reference -- Margaret Dumont.

Margaret Dumont played an upper-crust woman in seven Marx Brothers movies between 1929 and 1941. The brothers, Groucho in particular, uttered impolite quips and did inappropriate things while she looked on, aghast.



Marx Brothers movies had a vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the time when the Yippies and other groups were trying to use violations of propriety to help start a left-wing revolution. When the Yippies introduced a pig as their candidate for president in 1968, it seemed Marxian in the sense of Harpo, Groucho, and Chico.

I don't know if Donald Trump has ever sat through a Marx Brothers movie. I'm sure he found the Yippies repulsive. But he's intuited that millions of voters think the system sucks, and that defenders of the system, and of propriety in general, are enemies.

That's us. When Trump does crazy shit and we recoil, we're Margaret Dumont. He uses us as his foil.

But that's absurd. We're not actually defending propriety -- we're defending sanity. I think there are millions of other voters who understand that.

By coincidence, yesterday on Bluesky I saw this paragraph from a July 2024 profile of John Fetterman:

I could point out that the Fetterman aide who's quoted here, Adam Jentleson, is a Columbia graduate. I could also point out that the winning presidential ticket in November included a Yale Law graduate.

But there's something to this. Maybe a little scruffiness would help the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, the 2024 Democratic ticket had some scruffiness, or at least non-"elitism." Tim Walz was a Midwestern guy with no elitism in his pedigree. He called Republicans "weird" until consultants, presumably, told him to stop.

Walz shouldn't have stopped -- and maybe John Fetterman should pick up the slack. Maybe the message Trump wants to buy Greenland? What a weirdo! should be coming from a guy in a hoodie and cargo shorts.

Instead:

This is not the senator Pennsylvanians elected... themindshield.com/fetterman-bu...

[image or embed]

— Covie (@covie93.bsky.social) January 8, 2025 at 9:11 AM

Here's a passage from that July profile of Fetterman:

Igor Bobic, a senior politics reporter for HuffPost, told me that Fetterman first caught his eye that fall, during then Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-fated effort to impeach President Joe Biden. “The words he was pulling out were just totally words that you wouldn’t normally hear in the Senate,” Bobic said. “You know, like ‘jagoff’ and ‘circle jerk,’ and calling Republicans ‘dicks.’”

Maybe Fetterman's response to Trump's Greenland talk should be "He's a dick. People can't afford groceries and this is what he's talking about? That's a dick move." Maybe he should have said this in cargo shorts on Fox News. He would have pissed some people off and he wouldn't be invited back, but he'd be framing this in a way that Margaret Dumont never would.