Through the spiked Washington Post endorsement editorial to the recent spiked editorial cartoon, it’s been difficult to get a precise read on Jeff Bezos’s cozying up to Donald Trump. As I wrote back in late October, there are very rational reasons for Bezos to want to avoid being on Trump’s shit list. Above all else, Trump isn’t nice. Amazon is a phantasmagoria of anti-trust problems. Trump wouldn’t need to break a lot of norms to sic the Justice Department on it. Amazon is also a major, major federal contractor. Same applies there. There’s no right to government contracts. Then there’s something that doesn’t get discussed much. SpaceX now has a dominant hold on satellite deployment and owns and controls like half the operating satellites in near-Earth orbit. But Bezos’s BlueOrigin isn’t quite an also ran. It still has a shot at being a competitor to SpaceX and Bezos reportedly now focuses most of his energy there. He at least needs Trump’s friendship to have a shot at that.

In that context came news last night that Amazon has agreed to underwrite and license a documentary about the life of past and future First Lady Melania Trump.

The defeated often hearten themselves with the belief that the verdict of history will be on their side. The reality is that history seldom has a verdict. It’s not like a trial where an unchanging judgment is handed down. That whole concept is mostly wrongheaded, and when there is such a judgment it is always contingent, subject to perspectives of future people we can’t hope to understand.

Today we’re seeing some commemorate the January 6th, 2021 insurrection as a shameful chapter of the past while we see a more consequential replay of the formalization of the 2024 election which looks more like a present-day vindication. Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, resorted to chicanery and eventual violence to upend the results of that election and to overthrow the republic itself. He failed, managed to evade legal repercussions for his actions and is now returning to power as the result of a subsequent election. Those seeking to commemorate that day four years ago as a shameful chapter upon which we are now hoping to close the book seem to ignore that we are beginning a whole new book written by the author of that shameful chapter.

A better way to look at all of this is that we remain in an intense, sometimes violent and close to deadlocked struggle over the future of the country. It is no more done today or tomorrow than it was four years ago.

Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “purged” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

It’s some testament to our times that there was an immediate and big hunger among many people to find some way that Matthew Livelsberger’s suicide-cum-Cybertruck fireworks incident in Las Vegas was tied in some way to the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in New Orleans. The chances of that being the case now seem increasingly remote. I have yet to see any clear theory of what “message” Livelsberger was trying to send by torching his rented Cybertruck in front of a Trump building. But a pretty dark picture is emerging of the man himself, which provides some background for the ideation if not the “message” itself. Livelsberger appears to have been a hardcore Trump supporter and, in the description of at least one person who knew him, a chronic rage case who was abusive to multiple partners.