Fog Over Foggy Bottom
Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump
On Monday, news broke of a fresh bureaucratic uprising—this time through a memo posted to the State Department’s Dissent Channel expressing the dissatisfaction of nearly 1000 employees with Donald Trump’s executive order implementing a de facto Muslim ban.
Originalism Is Dumb
Donald Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Gorsuch will replace Antonin Scalia, whose death a year ago has left a vacancy that Republicans refused to allow Barack Obama to fill.
In the minds of conservatives, Gorsuch is a worthy heir to Scalia’s seat—far more so than the Obama White House’s centrist nominee Merrick Garland was.
Quick-Fire
In many ways, President Donald J. Trump has followed a script set down by President Richard M. Nixon.
As a candidate for the presidency, Trump cribbed lines liberally from his Republican predecessor. Like Nixon, he claimed to speak on behalf of an aggrieved “silent majority” and waged constant war against a Washington press that he regarded as “the opposition.”
And as much as Trump’s words echoed Nixon then, his actions now raise similar comparisons.
Presumed Terrorists
“Welcome to the United States!” These are words that hundreds of thousands of people traveling to America yearn to hear after they hand their documents to the immigration officials sitting in glass box at the airport. The moments until they are uttered are pregnant with dread and anticipation.
Dynasties of Neoliberalism
Always a spouse, never the president might be how we end up remembering Hillary Clinton, whose near-thirty-year career ended, dramatically punctuated with a period, at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Her appearance was everything we expected: the tight, frozen smile, the deep intake of breath, the clenched jaw, the eyes looking out into a sea of faces that should have been her supporters.
Chelsea Manning’s Existential Threat to American Innocence
You know the story: a court-martialed soldier of an unpopular war granted clemency as the very last act of a U.S. president amid great public controversy.
I refer, of course, to Lt. William Calley, the soldier of the Vietnam War who on March 16, 1968 led the systematic slaughter of nearly five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians—women, children, the elderly—in the hamlet that Americans called My Lai 4.
Pissologies
Why didn’t Donald Trump just piss on the bed himself?
Everything else about the story makes sense; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s accurate or not. The rest of the allegations against Trump—that he’s a long-standing Russian asset, that his entire campaign was run from Moscow—are unscourced and could well have been made up.
Not Unwinnable
As a general rule, it’s wise to steer clear from analyzing memes that originate and evolve on the Twittersphere. Users wield the medium in different enough ways that Twitter is at best a fractured discourse, it moves too quickly to be relevant longer than a day, and the sanest among us have already left (some 8.7 percent of the American population use Twitter every day).
Russia to Our Right
Russian interference in U.S. politics during the elections of 2016 and beyond is one big, fat, ugly squirrel. It commands attention but distracts from the related but more important matter of rising, Russian-supported far-right movements throughout the world, which support has now come home to the U.S.A.
Humane Billboards
Ever pass through a city and feel punched in the face by adverts? Descending into London’s tube network it can seem like I’m the product, one unit among thousands dropping down a human conveyor belt. Here I am presented to corporation after corporation, then a break, and the government barges its way into my internal dialogue.
Your Political Correctness Is Showing, Conservatives
President-elect Donald Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon keep confirming an argument I’ve been making for a while: conservatives are just as “politically correct” as they claim liberals and the left are.
Be Afraid
In the final minutes of Doomocracy—a piece of immersive theater styled after a haunted house that ran in Brooklyn during the month leading up to Election Day—audience members were confronted with three doors. One was labeled “Clinton,” one “Trump,” and the third “Other.” Pass through the Clinton door and you were greeted by a pantsuited actor in a grinning Hillary mask and urged to don identical headgear.
