TRUMP'S AMERICA, DAYS 2&3
Okay, so where were we?
Oh, right! Saturday, January 21st, otherwise known as Day Two in Trump’s America, the day on which the President set a new world’s record for being rejected by the most women in a single day!
Yeah, those women’s marches were something, weren’t they? By some estimates, an unprecedented 3.3 million people--that’s one full percent of the American population--took to the streets in cities large and small, from coast to coast, to declare their opposition to the Trump administration. It quite possibly was the largest single day demonstration in the history of the United States of America.
In Washington DC alone, the march drew roughly three times the number of people that showed up for The Donald’s coronation, or, as I like to call it, “the worst episode of Game of Thrones ever.”
At first, however, it was difficult to tell whether Trump even noticed. He certainly sounded a chipper note when he issued his first Tweet in days, describing the previous day as: “A fantastic day and evening in Washing ton DC. Thanks to @FoxNews and so many other news outlets for the GREAT reviews of the speech!”
And then, once again, shit got dark, real fucking fast.
You know what I’m referring to. That speech to the CIA. Jesus Fucking Nailholes… that SPEECH!
As with Trump's inaugural address, you really have to watch or read it in order to fully appreciate the horrifying humiliation of it all. Trump’s comments while standing before the star bedecked, white marble memorial commemorating the 117 members of the CIA who fell in the line of duty wasn't really a speech, per se, so much as it was a rambling fever dream of incoherent blathering.
In a scorching, must-read essay for the New Yorker, veteran Mideast correspondent Robin Wright called Trump’s comments a “vainglorious affront”, and she wasn’t exaggerating. His performance fully earned those fancy, five dollar words.
Considering the magnitude of the intelligence community’s current predicament--if they get some really dangerous information about Putin, and he asks who the source is, do they tell him?--you would think the purpose of Trump’s visit would be to set their minds at ease.
Instead, the 400 agents and analysts who assembled to hear him speak were forced to endure his petulant whining about the media, some textbook gaslighting, and a gorilla dose of bog standard braggadocio.
According to Trump, any insinuation of a rift with the intelligence community--whom he twice recently referred to as “Nazi Germany”--was entirely the fault of the media, “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”
As Trump’s vast touring entourage applauded, hooted and hollered on behalf of his stunned and silent audience, Trump continued, bizarrely: “I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted, and you’re going to get so much backing. Maybe you’re going to say, Please don’t give us so much backing. Mr. President, please, we don’t need that much backing.”
Trump then mused aloud about his suspicions that “almost everybody” in the CIA had voted for him, “because we’re all on the same wavelength, folks.”
No matter the topic of conversation, Trump would invariably bring it back to himself. Here’s how he described Mike Pompeo, his pick to lead the CIA: “Number One in his class at West Point. Now, I know a lot about West Point. I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at M.I.T. for thirty-five years, who did a fantastic job in so many different ways, academically--was an academic genius--and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart person.”
If you find any of the above behaviors strange, troubling, or even disgusting… know that you are not alone. In fact, former CIA director John Brennan--a legendary figure in the agency, who served in high level capacities for both Republican and Democratic administrations--called Trump’s performance “despicable”, and said that he “ought to be ashamed of himself.”
The White House response to Brennan’s comments was to sic RNC PR BS artist Reince Priebus on him, to issue thinly veiled threats of reprisal.
Which brings us to another one of the Trump administration’s yappy little lapdogs, Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
How disastrous was Spicer’s first appearance in the White House Briefing Room that Saturday afternoon?
Right out of the gate, and one hour late, Spicer spent his first daily briefing burying the assembled press under a blizzard of bullshit. He raved about white plastic ground coverings, “Secret Service magnetometers”, and pulled some Metro DC transit numbers from out of his ass, before angrily accusing “the media” of lying about attendance numbers, earning the dreaded Four Pinnochios with his claim that “this was the largest audience ever assembled to witness an inauguration PERIOD!”
Really? Wow. I didn't even know it was Melania's time of the month! Maybe that explains the look on her face.
Anyhoo, after throwing his little tantrum Spicer climbed down from the dias, turned tail, and scooted out of the press room just as fast as his tiny little feet could take him. He refused to answer even a SINGLE QUESTION on his first day as Press Secretary.
And so, to answer the rhetorical question posed a couple paragraphs back: How disastrous was Spicer's first appearance? Apparently, Trump is already looking for a replacement. Kinda makes you wonder what a guy's gotta do to earn a raging narcissist's loyalty these days, don't it?
It's enough to make you wonder whether one of the reasons for Trump's success up until now--a substantial, self-deputized constituency willing to act as ad hoc propagandists for his cause without a need for leadership from above--is fast becoming his greatest weakness. Because the general population is paying closer attention, and it's becoming plain as mud to see that all the competing narratives popping up simultaneously are now negating each other.
“It WAS the biggest crowd ever to attend an inaugural, PERIOD! And the only reason it wasn’t is because either a) Leftist Libtard SJW protestors blocked the real Americans from being able to attend, b) Trump fans actually work for a living, or c) Secret Service magnetometers messed with the cameras or something! Besides, the media that you trust LIES! Look at this here media that I trust!”
Remember what I wrote yesterday about cognitive dissonance being the byword of this administration? Well, that approach may well have worked on a critical mass of the American public as part of an aggressive short game--at least, it worked well enough to allow Trump to cheat, slime, and lie his way to victory on technicalities--but as a long game strategy, it's a proven loser. It's only been four days, and the whole shady construct is already beginning to shake apart.
Eventually, after it was pointed out that shutting down the NPS Twitter updates was fucking dangerous, and could conceivably lead to people dying in any number of gruesome ways, they were allowed to get back to work, but not before issuing a grovelling apology, complete with a lovely buffalo at sunset:
Thus ended Day Two in Trump's America.
OTHER STUFF
It's enough to make you wonder whether one of the reasons for Trump's success up until now--a substantial, self-deputized constituency willing to act as ad hoc propagandists for his cause without a need for leadership from above--is fast becoming his greatest weakness. Because the general population is paying closer attention, and it's becoming plain as mud to see that all the competing narratives popping up simultaneously are now negating each other.
“It WAS the biggest crowd ever to attend an inaugural, PERIOD! And the only reason it wasn’t is because either a) Leftist Libtard SJW protestors blocked the real Americans from being able to attend, b) Trump fans actually work for a living, or c) Secret Service magnetometers messed with the cameras or something! Besides, the media that you trust LIES! Look at this here media that I trust!”
Remember what I wrote yesterday about cognitive dissonance being the byword of this administration? Well, that approach may well have worked on a critical mass of the American public as part of an aggressive short game--at least, it worked well enough to allow Trump to cheat, slime, and lie his way to victory on technicalities--but as a long game strategy, it's a proven loser. It's only been four days, and the whole shady construct is already beginning to shake apart.
In any case, Day Two in Trump's America ended not with the bang of the White House Briefing Room's door hitting Spicer in the ass on the way out, but with the whimper of muted Tweets. Because it was on Saturday night that Trump, enraged that one of the National Parks Service's Twitter accounts had re-tweeted the now-famous image comparing his inaugural crowd size with Obama's, ordered the NPS Washington Support Office to issue an unprecedented and potentially dangerous agency-wide gag order on all related Twitter accounts. The force of this edict was felt far and wide:
Until further notice, all park road condition updates will provided on the Mount Rainier Facebook page https://t.co/JwFuETkGnM.— MountRainierNPS (@MountRainierNPS) January 20, 2017
We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you pic.twitter.com/mctNNvlrmv— NationalParkService (@NatlParkService) January 21, 2017
Day Three wasn't much better, because on that day, Sunday, January 22nd, we found out that 217 people arrested on inauguration day--including non-protesting passers-by and journalists who got caught in a “kettle sweep”--were hit with felony riot charges, and potentially face up to 10 years in prison.
Meanwhile, Trump's blacklist of CNN continues, with the White House refusing to allow any official representatives to appear on that network's Sunday programs.
Considering main Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conwoman's performance on NBC's Meet the Press--where she angrily defended the previous day's pathetic performance by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (see above), infamously describing his blatant lies as "alternative facts" before threatening to cut off NBC's White House access as well--maybe being blacklisted is CNN's good fortune.
To label Kellyanne's neologism "Orwellean", as many in the media have done--even as sales of Orwell's 1984 have soared--is underselling how cutting edge it actually is, owing far more to Putin's sinister public relations adviser Vladislav Surkov's "Nonlinear War" than it does to Orwell's Newspeak.
And there's that cognitive dissonance again.
Well, that's it for today, folks. Be sure to join us tomorrow, when we catch you up to the very latest goings on in Trump's America. In the meantime, always remember, and never let them forget:
Considering main Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conwoman's performance on NBC's Meet the Press--where she angrily defended the previous day's pathetic performance by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (see above), infamously describing his blatant lies as "alternative facts" before threatening to cut off NBC's White House access as well--maybe being blacklisted is CNN's good fortune.
To label Kellyanne's neologism "Orwellean", as many in the media have done--even as sales of Orwell's 1984 have soared--is underselling how cutting edge it actually is, owing far more to Putin's sinister public relations adviser Vladislav Surkov's "Nonlinear War" than it does to Orwell's Newspeak.
And there's that cognitive dissonance again.
Well, that's it for today, folks. Be sure to join us tomorrow, when we catch you up to the very latest goings on in Trump's America. In the meantime, always remember, and never let them forget:
OTHER STUFF
- Formerly entertaining, currently pathetic psycho goofball Alex Jones is apparently going around telling anyone who will listen that Donald Trump has told him his "InfoWars" organization is going to be "the main operating system in the rebirth of the American Republic". No shit.
- Trump's speech patterns are so garbled, nonsensical, and grammatically incorrect that he's driving his official translators nuts.
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SUGGESTED READINGS
1. Thanks to Tim Heidecker for showcasing one of the most wonderful marriages of words, music and imagery that it's been my pleasure to watch in a very long time, indeed:
2. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaelle Chappe's essay "The Supermanagerial Reich" presents the reader with a historically informed and theoretically rigorous look at the current state of world affairs, coming to some conclusions that may give some of you a somewhat uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomachs... and possibly not in the way you're thinking right now. It begins:
POPULAR CULTURE IS REPLETE with cartoonish depictions of Nazism. Hitler seems to emerge suddenly, as if he had been waiting in the wings as a fait accompli. One moment it’s Weimar decadence, really good art, and Stormtroopers and communists fighting in the streets. The next, Hindenburg is handing Adolf the keys to the kingdom and it’s all torchlight parades, Triumph of the Will, and plaintive Itzhak Perlman violins. Hitler rises above a reborn Reich as a kind of totalitarian god. All aspects of life come under his control through the Nazi party’s complete domination of German life. Of course, this is not really how it worked.
Before Hitler achieved his genocidal powers, there were years of what we would now call “intense partisan bickering,” decreasing prosperity, and violence in the streets. In the end, Hitler cobbled together a rickety coalition of business-minded technocrats, traditional conservatives, military interests, and his own radical ethno-nationalists into a plausible government. As the new government consolidated its power, thousands of communists and trade unionists were subjected to harsh suppression and were among the first to be shipped away to what would eventually become the concentration camps. And yet for a time, life for the overwhelming majority of Germans — even briefly for German Jews — went on largely as it had in the Weimar era. There was clearly a new regime in town, but most Germans got up in the mornings in the mid-to-late 1930s and went to work, just as they had in the 1920s. January through March of 1933 was not 1776, 1789, 1791, 1917, or even 1979. Far from the world turning upside down, things were strangely continuous for many Germans as though nothing much had happened at all. For a few Germans, things were astoundingly better.
You might think you know where this is going. And you might be right. But I doubt it. Read the rest of this essay. It's totally worth it, and it's guaranteed to give you food for future thought and stay with you for days, if not for the rest of your life.
3. Our old pal Keith Olbermann again, this time with another calm and collected message for anybody who has supported Traitor Trump up until now:
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English."
- one of America's greatest living authors, Philip Roth.
DDD EXTRAS
It's two... TWO days in ONE! Because I'm lazy. And you don't pay me.
If you want to learn about some cool and/or weird things that happened on the 24th and 25th days of January, check out our sister-site, Useless Eater Blog, where you will find out what year it was that the last Japanese World War II hold-out was found hiding out in the jungle on Guam, and what historic event took the spotlight away from Pope John Paul II's historic visit to Cuba in 1998!
THE TAKEAWAY
It's two... TWO days in ONE! Because I'm lazy. And you don't pay me.
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