THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

Trump 2.0: Random Thoughts

“One day, they’ll never believe it happened.”

That’s what an Auschwitz survivor told me 30 years ago. She said it was her greatest fear.

History doesn’t happen outside of you. The main purpose of my work is too write about the history of my lifetime in the context of how it was experienced by me and others at street level.

Last week, I was up against a very tight deadline to write and then record 5 scripts for BBC Radio 3’s the Essay slot going out this week. The theme is the Holocaust — January 27th marks the 80th anniverary of the liberation of Auschwitz — and why to this day only writers and filmmakers who endured it have created truthful work about the catastrophe. The title of the series is: They’ll Never Believe It Happened.

Anyway, I was stuck on finding a pithy final paragraph in a script about Primo Levi and Vasily Grossman, got up to get some circulation in my butt and hopefully find some clever words, and made the fatal error of checking out social media and saw this:

Ironic to say the least. This isn’t to make a comparison between today and 1930s Germany. That’s way too facile and frankly inaccurate but it happened during the first week of Trump’s second presidency and is worth noting. The Holocaust/Shoah is not forgotten but its impact has now receded far enough into the past that some people close to Trump can be nakedly fascist and face no censure from the President.

Writing the scripts kept me away from the news and, after that Musk gesture, away from social Media. So I was able to avoid being sucked into the world of the Id and his Idiot cabinet and court for a couple of days.

The coverage of the indoor inauguration was focused on the titans of tech seated just behind Trump in the Capitol Rotunda. OLIGARCHY!!!

As if it was a new phenomenon.

The irony of course was this first week of Trump 2:0 was also Davos week. Although it’s been going on for more than half a century, since the early days of globalization as both an economic pursuit and geopolitical strategy — the mid 1990s — the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos has been more of a beauty contest where political leaders show themselves to the world’s oligarchs in hopes of attracting some investment. All the tech company chiefs in those photos are veterans of Davos.

The tech types being otherwise engaged, Davos’s headliner this year was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressing openness to negotiations with Russia, chiding NATO members for not paying more for their own defense, and reminding them they are about to have their place setting at the geo-political top table removed as the 21st century evolves towards a renewed competition for global hegemony between the US and China/Russia. I don’t know how much he believes this kind of thing, but it was certainly a strong signal to the White House that Ukraine will be a team player.

And I was a little troubled by the ad the algorithm served up to me while reading about Zelensky’s speech at CNN.com (a much better source of news than the television broadcast).

Are we anticipating that much violence now that Trump is back in town that I need to buy body armor for myself and my family?

Inauguration Day I did take a break from my deadline to participate in a panel at London’s Frontline Club on the return of Trump. It was a good group including Julian Borger, who did two tours of duty in Washington for The Guardian, and Lucy Carrigan, who spent part of last year in North Carolina — allegedly a swing state — and whose reports, “Worlds Apart, Living next Door” can be found on Substack.

You won’t be surprised to know there weren’t any startling insights. What we saw the first time is what we’ll get the second. And the Democrats still need to get their house in order.

The only fresh idea I came up with during the discussion was to stop making Trump the focus of your thinking and think more about American society and how damn near 50% of voters were willing to overlook the outrage of January 6th and the personality of a man who on the campaign trail told a story about the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick.

Have you no decency, Sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Where has American society got to that either one of those things — one serious, one disgusting — should not have been disqualifying in the mind of an ordinary citizen?

So, in the spirit of taking my own advice, after doing a bit of thinking about American society’s decline that allows Trump to become President here are two small things that contribute to this ethical and moral collapse in the American electorate.

The first is that elite educated, liberal opinion formers speak a language that most people don’t understand.

Example: In social media a former NPR colleague wrote in despair.

“My entire professional journo life has been dedicated to humanizing the other because that was me. And yet here we are. With hatred for the other rampant.”

Othering, empathy, sociopath, authoritarian. You may use those words a lot but these are not words used in ordinary conversation, certainly not in political conversations going on in neighborhood gathering places — at the laundromat, or bar or church —in somewhere like Americus, Georgia.

If you want to be understood don’t call Trump a sociopath, call him a damn liar not a sociopath. Speaking from deep personal knowledge you push people away when you show off your vocabulary on the air, face to face, and especially in social media.

So much discourse (I can say discourse to you because I know you’re smart enough to know the word and how to use it) takes place in the digital topography of twitter, Threads, Bluesky and elsewhere. It offers a false sense of privacy and anonymity but it is public in ways we don’t understand.

It is also the case that virtually no explanation for any event can be boiled down to tweet length. Outrage can be the only byproduct when a person tweets something grossly simplistic and snarky about say, the fires in LA.

This is not a new insight but smart people keep posting and creating outrage. The post I quoted above is quite mild and one gets the sense that the poster probably thought she was just talking to a few pals over coffee. The whole world can potentially see everything you put up and it can become fodder for other corrupted parts of what is now called the media eco-system.

When a person who teaches at Harvard or reports for NPR uses the phrase toxic masculinity in a tweet to a friend and forgets that the whole world might see that post and that at least some in the wider world will extrapolate from it that everyoen who listens to NPR hates me just cause I’m male, they help create the decay in society.

Joe Rogan was up there with the Oligarchs at the Inauguration. The success of right-wing podcasters is a continuation of the success of right-wing talk radio in driving American society into a ditch going back to its first great triumph: the 1994 Republican take-over of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The Newt Gingrich-led pre-cursors to today’s MAGA party made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their caucus.

The whole bro’ podcast thing got me thinking about the worst hour of broadcasting I ever did. For a few years, I used to periodically fill in as a host/presenter on the late, lamented NPR program “The Connection.” Two hours, mid-morning, two topics every days. Live with calls. 10 hours a week, the hardest work I’ve ever done.

One hour, early in the first decade of this century, we did a show based on a study by two young academics postulating that because China’s one child policy had led to many more male than female children being born in the 1980s there was now a surplus of men who would not find wives. This would lead to China becoming more expansionist militarily because all these men would need to find an outlet for their aggression and the PRC’s army is the largest employer in the world.

It was the most meretricious hogwash but the authors were available and 10 hours represents a lot of shows to book in a week so I got lumbered with the discussion. I think I dealt with them professionally. At least, I hope I did.

I’ve never forgotten that hour, I’m probably the only person on earth, including the authors, who remembers it took place. But I think of it whenever I read about young men, particularly, young white American men having a hard time establishing themselves in life.

The degree of disaffection has been measurable and dangerous for years. Public discourse as it is conducted in social media has a very ugly strand of triumphalism about the situation many young white men find themselves trapped in. In some cases people who were begging for understanding of young Black men and their disaffection because of the very real discrimination and economic alienation they endured and which led some to criminal behavior at worst and an embrace of gangster rap at its mildest, now gleefully trash people in the same situation today because they are white.

Others are less vindictive but assert that mandated diversity — whose terms exclude these younger men — is still necessary.

(I won’t go into the sexual politics involved because I haven’t got all day and neither do you.)

It is no wonder that many of these guys listen to these podcasters and then voted for Trump.

One other thing hove into sight as week one of Trump 2:0 reached its end. The Friday night massacre of a dozen independent inspector’s general:

The President broke the law by not providing 30 days notice?!?!?!?!? Clearly Grassley, social media’s anti-Trump outrage machine, and others have forgotten the Supreme Court ruling in Trump vs. United States issued on July 1, 2024

Someone should tell Senator Grassley, an old school obstructionist Republican as opposed to MAGA headbanger, that what the “law demands” is of no concern to the capo of this regime, and he’s got the Supreme Court decision to prove it.

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In addition to the five essays, I also made this program that recently aired on the BBC World Service to mark the Auschwitz liberation 80th anniversary, January 27th. It’s about Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, its history and changing role in Jewish life, grief and worship. It is worth taking its full 26:30 length to listen and learn