Los Angeles, Donald Trump and the moronic inferno
Photo by David Swanson/Reuters
Just as Vladimir Putin hungers to occupy Ukraine, it seems that Donald Trump hungers to occupy America. At time of writing, the president has ordered 4,000 members of the National Guard along with 700 US marines to California to put down protests there against the random arrest of (possibly) undocumented immigrants. Cars ablaze, charging phalanxes of soldiers, protesters' bloody faces: Trump's actions seem likely to provoke the demonstrators to levels of violence not seen since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Perhaps that is the intention. The effect is ominous. Trump's overruling of a state governor to deploy these troops is the first such presidential action since Lyndon Johnson sent federal soldiers into Alabama in 1965, and that was to protect civil rights protesters, not attack them. It appears no precedent, or lack of one, can constrain America's leader.
Trump simply has nothing to lose from whatever he does. Not from the violence he is unleashing in California, and certainly not from his obsessively covered and commented-upon falling out with Elon Musk, Trump's adviser and patron until recently. Musk, the world's wealthiest man, runs no real risk, either. Worth nearly $400bn dollars, Musk might, if Trump cancels his federal contracts, lose some mere billions. In fact he lost far more after the value of his companies sank thanks to his alliance with Trump. This hasn't stopped the American media from milking their row for all the page views it is worth. The brouhaha is wearying.
More consequential, especially in the light of Trump's actions in LA, is a lesser-noticed split between Trump and another former ally: Miles Taylor, the former homeland security official from Trump's first administration. In an anonymous 2018 op-ed in the New York Times, then in a book published anonymously, he questioned Trump's fitness to hold office (Taylor revealed his identity in 2020). In April, Trump publicly suggested that Taylor had committed treason, a crime punishable by death. Trump has directed the Justice Department to investigate Taylor, who, with his family, has been in hiding since 2020. Now the family are trying to raise money for a legal defence.
No American president has ever had an American investigated for committing treason for merely criticising the government, let alone publicly slandered them as a traitor. The New York Times glancingly mentioned Trump's accusation of espionage against Taylor in just one article, which covered several subjects of the president's vindictive rage. Yet at one point, the paper had no fewer than ten stories about the spat between Trump and Musk at the top of its homepage. The usually more sober, though Trump-whispering, Wall Street Journal had five up top. Meanwhile Gaza and Ukraine burn, China and Russia gloat, Europeans move so far away from America that it will take another Columbus to rediscover the place, and Trump's wanton slaughter of American institutions and values rolls forward.
The world's most powerful man breaking with the world's richest man is newsworthy. But the idea – as pundits have said, again and again – that in the light of the rift American politics will change profoundly is absurd. Trump's persecution of one of his critics as a traitor is what will change American politics profoundly. Musk, who is unpopular, lacks the stature to stand the political order on its head. His threat to form a third party is as toothless as it is standard for an embittered rival to make. For all his wealth, he could not even get a Trump-supported judge elected in Wisconsin in April.
And rather than the two men emerging as losers from their quarrel, they both come out smelling like roses. Trump was glad to have the chainsaw-wielding Musk serve as his fall-guy for the unpopular gutting of vital American agencies. Musk was happy to have the opportunity to move bureaucrats who were attempting to regulate his businesses out of the way. The limited and short-lived repercussions of Musk's antagonism with Trump are nothing compared to the ongoing consequences of their collaboration. As for the much-touted break between Maga and tech, Trump recently signed a mammoth contract with Palantir, the data analysis and technology company co-founded by Peter Thiel.
This is not to say that the Trump-Musk rift does not offer an illumination. At its heart, it is an encounter between two present-day American archetypes: Musk, a digitally formed persona who seems lacking in emotional intelligence; and Trump, an old-fashioned analogue figure who makes up for what he lacks in knowledge and intellect with his preternatural ability to grasp people and what they fundamentally want. Consider his actions in Los Angeles: a level of policing brutality that plays up to the 'law and order' fever dreams of parts of the American public.
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After all, it is Trump's emotional canniness that has allowed him for decades to play the media like a farmed salmon. As the all-consuming uproar over his break with Musk showed, his strongest talent is to create smoke and mirrors in order to obscure the reality of his actions. His sweet spot is to rivet attention. The media's sweet spot is also to rivet attention. This is what lends such a fatal momentum to every spectacle Trump creates. The more the media conscientiously portrays Trump's cruelty in LA, the more his followers thrill to his power. It is Greek tragedy: every motion of American freedom now has the effect of turning freedom in America in on itself.
[See also: Trump's nuclear test]
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