The Mounting Toll and Absurdity of Trumpism

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Mourning All We Have Lost

Laying awake last night processing the Supreme Court’s latest galling decision, I reflected on how many evenings over the past decade have been consumed by late breaking bad news of another historic setback.

My professional reactions to such news have slowly changed over time, from rushing to alert readers because it felt like an alarm needed to be sounded to waiting until I could provide better context to a growing sense that I have unwillingly become an obituary writer, chronicling the losses here each day.

This isn’t a lament. It is not self-excoriation that my hair isn’t sufficiently on fire 10 years into the Trump era. It’s not resignation. It’s an observation that over the course of a decade, the response to repeated losses, the next more serious than the last, takes on certain patterns.

The initial gut punch. The disbelief. The shock, but not really anymore, of another setback. The immediate urge to do something in response and finding few good options. Casting about for someone or something that explains what is happening better than I can. Coming to grips with where the new battle line must now be drawn, but with less confidence each time that it will hold any better than the last one did. Not feeling enervated exactly, but finding it harder over time to direct my energy productively.

Each setback brings its own constellation of losses, often deeply layered and spreading outward until they get entangled with all the others you haven’t yet fully processed.

Last night’s losses are staggering, even when seen through the prism of history, which usually mellows the perspective: a constitutional amendment born of the carnage of a civil war; a century of enduring Jim Crow’s base indignities; a grand mid-century civil rights movement; another half century of painstaking work to try to hold on to those gains.

Seen through a personal prism, the losses are of a small scale but no less difficult to fathom, a jumble of disparate anecdotes and the flickers of fading memories. That interview with David Duke in the mid-90s when Pat Buchanan was foreshadowing the GOP’s 21st century agenda. Discreetly pointing out John Lewis to my wide-eyed kids at a Capitol Hill diner while showing them a photo of him with Martin Luther King, Jr.

The losses on any given day come so fast and across such a wide spectrum of civic life that it overwhelms our capacity to mourn. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Rest in peace, 60 Minutes and the military’s merit-based promotion system, but also the deep-ocean observation system that you probably hadn’t heard of before now but which you’re glad existed independently of naked partisanship and the raw urge for power.

Living through the Trump II presidency is an exercise in repeated loss and extended mourning for what is gone — while being daily confronted with the farcical and the absurd.

Bill Pulte as acting DNI. A Jan. 6 rioter hired in a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations. Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), his prison sentence commuted by President Trump, now under investigation for allegedly manipulating prediction markets by front-running on whether he would show up for Trump’s State of the Union address. Elon Musk’s coming IPO for SpaceX potentially catapulting his net worth past the unfathomable $1 trillion mark.

In looking for historical parallels to the current moment, I’ve often fallen back on 1942, America’s first year in World War II, when Imperial Japan was marauding across the Pacific. We know it as the darkness before the dawn of an Allied counterattack that eventually swung the war, but they didn’t know then when the tide would turn or if it ever would. A lesson for us, perhaps, in enduring setbacks and uncertainty.

In an astute analysis this week, Ned Resnikoff posits that Trumpism is hyperfascism, by which he doesn’t mean turbocharged or souped-up fascism, but “hyper” in the sense of over the top.

“It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found,” Resnikoff writes. “[I]t is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else.”

Hyperfascism eschews the hard work of sustaining itself, preferring the next spectacle to the grind of consolidating and entrenching its power through bureaucracy and structural advantages, at least as compared to other long-running authoritarian regimes.

“The good news is that this means hyperfascism can’t survive long as a governing ideology, because it has no program for long-term institution-building,” Resnikoff argues. “The bad news is that there may be no limits to the damage it can cause if left unchecked.”

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