I exploit you
Still you love me
I tell you one and one makes three
Oho, I’m the cult of personality
– Living Colour, Cult of Personality
Happy New Year!
Eh, not really. I am not at all expecting this to be a happy year. This week is more about celebrating the fact that 2024 is finally over.
In less than three weeks Trump is going to resume his throne in the country that was once a democratic republic. And if I have to keep talking about him for the next four years (at least) I have to decide how he is to be addressed.
I am now willing to call Trump ‘President-elect’ because clearly he did get elected with a slim majority and a large margin in the Electoral College, but I am not calling him ‘president’ because while he likewise got elected fair and square in 2016, he lost all right to that title with his actions in office.
Likewise I am willing to use the expression POTUS, (President Of The United States) except that we are clearly no longer a “united” states, thus Trump would simply be President Of States, or POS.
I had called Trump Viceroy of Russian North America, but that may no longer be the case. Because now that Vladimir Putin has been grinding his army to death in Ukraine for the better part of three years, and had to pull out of Syria because they needed all the troops they could get for Ukraine, Russia is clearly getting weak. And Trump is like a shark, for example in terms of morality and higher brain processes. But specifically in that if the shark smells blood in the water, it’s going to dive for it. And right now, Putin is literally bleeding. So is Ukraine, but based on the fact that Trump’s foreign policy team includes hawks like Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg, Trump may not be as supplicant to Putin as he has been. Probably his staff told him he can get a lot more money from having Ukraine in the Western fold than he can get from having America in the Russian fold.
Which gets to another thing with Trump. Even during his first term, it was often noted that Trump didn’t have a policy on anything, his actions were basically dictated by the last person who talked to him. Well, at this point, Trump is so old that he can’t find his own dick without a smartphone app. He was basically running for president just to feed his Id and stay out of jail, and thanks to his cult, he achieved that goal. So he doesn’t need them anymore. And he doesn’t really need to actually be president, he can just hang around in the White House and Mar-a-Lago and fly everywhere with the Secret Service and overcharge their accomodations on the taxpayer dime and have two scoops of ice cream at every dinner and not have to actually do anything for it as long as the people around him are doing what the Republican brain trust wants them to do.
Coming up to the election it was becoming obvious to a lot of us that the people behind Trump were using him as a celebrity figurehead to sell an autocracy to the masses, and once inaugurated they would be the ones in charge, but now that it’s done and no one can do anything about it, they’re just making it that much more obvious to everyone else.
Which is why I decided that Trump’s new title is:
Vice President Trump.
Because really, has anyone even seen JD Vance recently?
What made Trump’s real status clear even to the Trumpniks is the recent “civil war” over H1B visas. His tech bros, President-elect Elon Musk and councilor Vivek Ramaswamy are in favor of them, ostensibly because we don’t have enough qualified professionals in the States but really because we don’t have to pay immigrant professionals as much and the status of an H1B visa is conditional and can be revoked, giving employers leverage over these employees. Of course people like Elon Musk would never be so unethical as to exploit such undue advantage.
Whereas Laura Loomer and other MAGA nativists object to the H1B not because it allows exploitation but because we’re getting more people of Indian descent – like Ramaswamy – into the culture of this country. And they’ve been saying so. And not unclearly.
Which allows people like Ramaswamy and Musk to actually flip back and pose as defenders of classical liberal capitalism and equal opportunity after playing to the same nativists for all this time. And after the Trumpnik backlash to his policy, President-elect Musk first posted on X “FUCK YOURSELF in the face” and then “Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform”. Twitter was never about positive, beautiful or informative content even before he took it over, and it is certainly not so now.
And of course Musk also de-monetized the accounts of people like Loomer, to prove his commitment to free speech.
And after all this everyone in Trumpworld was waiting to see how the czar would react given his own criticisms of H1B, Trump told reporters this weekend that he’s “always liked” the visas. At his New Year’s party a reporter asked him what made him change his mind, and he said “I didn’t change my mind.”
Well, he IS senile.
December 27, Trump posted “Anyone – of any race, creed or nationality – who came to America and worked like hell to contribute to this country will forever have my respect. America is the land of freedom and opportunity. Fight with every fiber of your being to keep it that way!”
And one of his followers responded “Wtf is going on here? This is NOT what we voted for.”
You can’t show it any better than that.
I mean, certainly Trumpniks didn’t vote to keep America as a land of freedom and opportunity for anyone who is willing to work for it.
This is the problem with representative government generally and the American “democracy” in particular. Elected officials only answer to voters every two to six years, but they answer to their donors every single day. So who did you think Trump was going to side with?
Charlie Kirk recently said that we didn’t vote for an oligarch. This just a few weeks after Steve Bannon told the fan club that Trump should run for a third term and put political opponents like Rachel Maddow in prison. But you didn’t elect an oligarch.
Bullshit you did. You wanted a thin-skinned oligarch with delusions of competence, you just wanted it to be Trump. Because you’re a cult of personality and style matters more than substance.
So congratulations, your personality cult just elected a thin-skinned oligarch with delusions of competence, it’s just a different personality.
That’s what you wanted, Trumpniks. That’s what you’re going to get.
And there’s a word for people who conned themselves into getting something they thought they didn’t want.
The word is sucker.
So here’s your sign:
I expect you to be wearing this for me every damn day for the next four years, or however long it takes for people to start CAD-producing guillotines.