White Monday

It's been a noisy week. Here's some signal

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What he is good at is the attention game. And since returning to the presidency on Monday, Donald Trump has played to win.

But as we all get used to another four years of this, the familiar feelings rising in us, the familiar errors and postures and reactions returning, one lesson of last time is ever more clear. He will create noise. He is noise. But we must pay attention to the signal.

He will talk. We must pay attention to what he does.

He will trigger. We must not only react but also focus on what could be built instead.

So what is the signal in this week’s noise?

For some, the meaning of what we will call White Monday was that the American mask has come off, as argues economist Jayati Ghosh in a conversation with The Drift. With Trump returned to power, and the forces of public and private power consolidated around him, there’s an opportunity for understanding what the country really is and what its place is in the world.

There’s less hypocrisy. For most of the rest of the world, it was almost unbearable to see the devastation, the destruction, the carnage being inflicted on Palestine while members of the U.S. government wrung their hands, talked about humanitarian aid, and simultaneously gave Israel more arms and more bombs. They allowed Israel to bomb Palestinians, and then they dropped food packets afterwards. Let’s face it, it’s been hard to see the U.S. as a moral force in the world for a while. In a peculiar way, you could argue that Trump is going to be to the U.S. what the U.S. has been to the rest of the world — completely amoral.

But that kind of understanding means first taking a good, hard look in the mirror. As historian Stephen Kotkin told Foreign Affairs:

Trump is not an alien who landed from some other planet. This is not somebody who got implanted in power by Russian special operations, obviously. This is somebody that the American people voted for who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture. Think of all the worlds that he has inhabited and that lifted him up. Pro wrestling. Reality TV. Casinos and gambling, which are no longer just in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but everywhere, embedded in daily life. Celebrity culture. Social media. All of that looks to me like America. And yes, so does fraud, and brazen lying, and the P. T. Barnum, carnival barker stuff. But there is an audience, and not a small one, for where Trump came from and who he is.

But who are we, exactly? One thing that’s been clarified by the inauguration itself, as Arwa Mahdawi wrote in The Guardian, is who the spectacle was staged for, and what it says about who’s most equal among equals nowadays:

It wasn’t what Trump said at the inauguration that sent the strongest message, however – it was all the billionaires and CEOs he was surrounded by. “Big Tech billionaires have a front row seat at Trump’s inauguration,” noted Elizabeth Warren on Twitter/X. “They have even better seats than Trump’s own cabinet picks. That says it all.” Perhaps sunlight really is pouring over the entire world: it has, after all, never been so clear that American carnage has been replaced by American oligarchy.

And speaking of the new ruling class (the concentration of power Biden warned about in his farewell address), Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic at The New York Times, reflected on the rejection of the old norms of Washington society embodied in Melania’s wide-brimmed hat:

Mrs. Trump’s fit also offered a clear contrast with the image she had conveyed at her husband’s first inauguration, when she went hatless and wore a baby-blue Ralph Lauren look that recalled no one so much as Jackie Kennedy. At the time, the look seemed to imply that Mrs. Trump was, indeed, cognizant of Washington mores and was making an effort to situate herself firmly in the continuum of first ladies who had gone before.

This time is different.

The inaugural hat was like nothing so much as the broad-brimmed white hat Mrs. Trump wore during a state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife in 2018, which likewise made waves and which she auctioned off in 2022 as an “iconic broad-brimmed one-of-a-kind hat.” Her reference was herself.

But a bigger departure from tradition (or at least the biggest embrace of — to put it gently — an alternative tradition) was Elon Musk's pair of Nazi salutes, which were clear enough to international observers, even if, as Dalia Lithwick noted at Slate, they were mystifying or invisible to those at home.

On Monday night, in a roomful of people, on live television, in a speech that was neither spontaneous nor unplanned, the unelected government employee named Elon Musk threw out a Nazi salute to the crowd. Then he did it again. With all due respect to the folks willing to swallow a teensy bit of fascism with their victory lap, this was neither an awkward gesture nor a Roman salute. Although it was assuredly yet another sad, adolescent effort to troll the libs, own the woke, and trigger the snowflakes, it was also interpreted by the Nazis—who tend to be awfully adept at speaking Nazi—as Nazi. In a classic piece of misdirection, Musk and his well-oiled mini-Musks have already attempted to place blame on the millions who saw what we saw with our own eyes and to launch another did he/didn’t he debate that you may recall from the past 10 years. I don’t care what Elon Musk thinks about what my eyes saw, and you shouldn’t either. Far be it from me to enter into another four years of attempting to assign sober meaning to Nazi physical comedy, but when the actual fascists think you’re one of them, it’s a pretty good indicator that the woke left is not the problem.

Perhaps the most jarring of the executive orders Trump signed on Monday called for an end to birthright citizenship as defined under the 14th Amendment. As Marcia Valdes wrote in The New York Times, the order aims at the heart of the Reconstruction Amendments and the core statement of what it means to be an American at all — and the stakes are higher than ever.

Efforts to end birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized migrants date back more than four decades, but Trump’s return will most likely present one of the greatest challenges in the 14th Amendment’s 157-year history. Legal arguments that were once regarded as fringe have moved to the mainstream. The Supreme Court has proved itself willing to break with historical precedent in cases involving other conservative priorities, like abortion and presidential immunity. And Trump, who campaigned on the idea of restricting birthright citizenship, is entering office with a majority of the vote.

A big part of the problem, historian John Ganz points out, is that, in embracing Trump, American institutions are entering into what amounts to a doomed romance, and we can look to Vichy France for a model — and a warning.

We will find out very quickly what lines in civil society still hold. And people will grow exhausted from this too and miss the old days. Another quote, this time from Irène Némirovsky, “The French grew tired of the Republic as if she were an old wife. For them, the dictatorship was a brief affair, adultery. But they intended to cheat on their wife, not to kill her. Now they realize that she is dead, their Republic, their freedom. They are mourning her.” People will come to regret their dalliance with Trump, who is not a lover, but something else altogether.

It’s easy to despair over the 1,500 pardons for the January 6, 2021 rioters, and former capitol police officer Michael Fanone expressed what a lot of people are feeling as they watch the new president endorse that day’s political violence — an endorsement that signals to many that the insurrection was successful.

“This election, at least in part in my mind, was a referendum on Jan. 6, and it was a referendum on me and my outspokenness and the things that I’ve said. And the American people said ‘We don’t care,’ and I mean, they don’t care,” he said. “The American people don’t care, and therefore the media doesn’t care because the media these days is mostly ― I’m not going to paint everyone with a broad stroke ― but is mostly only interested in stories people are going to read. Nobody cares about Jan. 6. They just don’t care.”

But however much Trump might represent the American people, normalizing him can only go so far. The day-one agenda doesn’t do much good for most people, and there’s work to be done to stave off the worst. Comedian and critic W. Kamau Bell asked why the media is participating in a great normalizing — again.

All those headlines should just be, “Elon Musk does a Nazi salute twice at Trump event.” And the subhead should be, “No surprise.” Simple and to the point. But our media has shown us that the only person softer than a billionaire is someone who wants to be a billionaire's friend. People started explaining his clear Nazi salute away with nonsense like, “It was a Roman salute!” What the f*ck is that? “Here are a bunch of still photos of Democrats extending their hand in the same way.” So weird that you don’t understand that video is different from still pictures when you love a guy who is supposed to be a technological genius. “It is because Elon has Aspbergers. He doesn’t know what that gesture means. You are being ableist against someone with autism!” Oh, so this is like the thing you do when you blame gun violence on mental health when most people with mental health issues only kill time or pints of ice cream.

So if the courts and Congress can’t provide checks and balances, if the Fourth Estate doesn’t seem up to the task, and the private sector is all-in with the administration, who’s left to make the case for America’s better angels? For the moment, the Democratic Party remains in disarray. But there’s a race to head the DNC on now, and people like former Bernie Sanders campaign chief Faiz Shakir want to remake the Party into one that can do something, buck the Vichy complacency Ganz points out, and articulate a vital, meaningful alternative — as a real opposition party.

That purpose could come out of the capture of Trump’s government by unelected billionaires, what Shakir called “the largest merger and acquisition in American history.” It could come out of contrasting that with the real work policymakers like Lina Khan did to look out for the public. It could come out of the defining legislative initiative of the next year: Republicans paying for tax cuts for elites with spending cuts for the needy.

It’s a big task, as Nathan Robinson points out at Current Affairs — and depending on how the next four years go, it might be on par with the biggest projects the U.S. government has taken on.

Roosevelt, of course, took office amidst a catastrophe. What the New Dealers accomplished was only possible because the previous administration had been utterly discredited in its failure to deal with a serious crisis. Does it take a disaster to make a visionary social democratic politics possible? Let us hope not. But that can’t be proven either way. What we do know is that the New Deal era shows us a possible way out of the political dead end the Democratic Party has reached. Leftists often argue, perhaps rightly, that Rooseveltian social democracy helped neutralize revolutionary currents and “save” capitalism. (Roosevelt himself said that “It was this administration which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.”) But few today would wish for a world without Social Security. And every leftist can benefit from studying how an administration can win popular support through providing tangible gains and demonstrating leadership that builds public confidence. If we are to come back from and reverse Trumpism, it may require a Second New Deal.

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Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images