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The US-Canada trade war is
offonoffonoff! Retaliatory 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum that is. The rest are still on.Even if Canada agreed to become a US state, Congress wouldn’t go for it because it would permanently cede every national election to the Democratic Party. Surely someone has told Trump!? Disregarding statehood as the {only way to stop this}, I’m guessing steel factories take longer than 4 years to build. An agent of chaos indeed!
So, what is the off ramp? The US annexes Canada and changes its name to Canada? Border state republicans take away Trump’s
toystariffs until he can play nicely? Global depression? Or the continuation of flip flopping tariffs to placate boredom?https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/trump-raises-canadian-steel-aluminum-tariffs-to-50percent-in-retaliation-for-ontario-energy-duties.html
Is this an example of the introduction of aesthetics into political life? How about this? I'm pretty sure I could provide additional examples, but let's start with these two.
Could you lay out a general case for what the "dislocation of politics from materiality and its fusion with aesthetics" means? My understanding would be that politics stops being about concrete facts and rational analysis, and instead becomes about nebulous, likely irrational beliefs. Would that be accurate?
It seems to me that this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters, and assert that the reason you are noticing it is some combination of less-polished execution and a more acute situation.
I understand that my claim here is isomorphic to a low-effort dismissal, but that is not my intention. To the extent that this is an accurate description of a real problem, the problem did not even remotely stop with Trump, and it certainly will not end with him.
Trump represents a difference in kind. Whether he is a fascist is the sort of question that generates more heat than light and so is not a terribly interesting question, but certainly his actions and rhetoric toward a US ally and fellow Liberal democracy are totally illogical, nonsensical, amoral, and speak to a man who has an extremely inaccurate model of the world and/or thought processes that are not coherent. This is not an alike thing to e.g. Having a snappy propaganda-esque poster of yourself made as per your counterexamples. Previous presidents/administrations have been anchored in reality (and morality) in a way that Trump et al are not. Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.
I know that you see Trump as your last, best hope against woke and progressivism, and so you use your intellectual horsepower and debate techniques honed here in themotte to carry water for him. But there is no intellectual basis for trumpism, and your attempts to create one is nothing more than sanewashing. Tracingwoodgrains had the right of this: as true as it is that Harris was a soulless avatar of The Machine, Trump was unworthy of defeating that machine.
I know that you will never agree that Trump is a piece of shit, if for no other reason than you see it as bad tactics. But I would hope that, at least, when you are alone with your thoughts, you might idly wish that your philosophy had a better spokesman.
Over the last decade, the prediction/warning/whatever I've most frequently heard about a Donald Trump presidency has been that he is a white supremacist KKK neo-Nazi with concrete plans to transform the United States into a white ethnostate (optionally also a Christian theocracy), which necessitates rounding up anyone who isn't white, cisgender, heterosexual or Christian and herding them into concentration camps. I literally don't think there was a single day in 2016 in which I didn't see or hear the "Trump = Hitler" comparison at least once. A distant second was "Trump is a Russian asset".
After four years of Trump in the Oval Office, this accusation became increasingly untenable, so his critics abruptly changed course and started accusing him of being a crypto-fascist with no respect for democratic institutions. In this regard, his critics are on much firmer ground (I've been saying for a decade that Trump has far more in common with Orbán or Berlusconi than with old Adolf), so this pivot made a lot of sense.* What doesn't make sense is that his critics are now pretending that this was the only class of accusations they'd ever been levelling at him. (The "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see" thing still gets periodically trotted out, courtesy of slow learners who haven't yet gotten the message that we're no longer at war with Eurasia.)
This is the same kind of blatant goalpost-moving and historical revisionism Scott complained about when grading his Trump predictions. Throughout the run-up to the 2016 election, all I heard was a never-ending stream of "Trump is Hitler, Trump is going to round up all the Muslims, Trump is going to kill all the Latinos, Trump is going to round up all the gays and trans people, Trump is going to turn America into Gilead". After four years of nothing even remotely like this transpiring, the people who had made these predictions just cited a bunch of other random bad shit Trump and his supporters did (e.g. January 6th) and turned around and said "see? We warned you!"
It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared. Show me the concentration camps, then we can talk. At least have the humility to acknowledge that careless accusations of genocidal ambition on Trump's part have only helped him: when facing more reasonable accusations of taking a cavalier approach to the rule of law and democratic institutions, Trump can quite reasonably defend himself by pointing out that his critics were crying wolf when they accused him of being Hitler, so why wouldn't they be crying wolf now?
I know when you said that he's showing himself to be "everything" his opponents feared, you were speaking figuratively, and you don't think that literally every criticism/accusation/whatever levelled against Donald Trump was well-founded. But I feel like there's some kind of Pareto distribution, where 80% of attacks/criticisms/warnings about Trump took the form "Trump is a genocidal white supremacist" (optionally also a Christian fundamentalist, heteronormative etc.), then "Trump is a Russian asset", then "Trump is a fascist with no respect for democratic institutions". I think honesty and humility behooves people to acknowledge that 80% of their predictions failed to come to pass. When 80% of your accusations/predictions fail to come to pass (90% if you include all the utterly baseless accusations of Russian collusion), I don't think you deserve a prognostication medal because some of the remaining 10% were accurate.
*Google Trends shows the precise point at which "Trump is going to turn America into Gilead" stopped being The Narrative, in favour of "Trump is a fascist authoritarian". The obvious objection to this interpretation of the data is that most of the searches for The Handmaid's Tale pertained to the novel's television adaptation (which, incredibly, is still running); the even more obvious rebuttal to that objection is that the only reason the television series even exists is because of hysterical scaremongering about the alleged parallels between the novel and Trump's America.
I also recall much hay being made of Trump being a terrible racist. Even here in Germany. The next-biggest accusation was him being an Idiot, which always seemed extremely shaky. An idiot millionaire who manages to become POTUS? And in third place was a vague notion of "Orange Man Extremely, Uniquely and Urgently Bad" without further explanation.
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