Advice for our times
Donald Trump wants to create spectacles (Thunderdome), Josh Marshall observes. His professional wrestling instincts are not a mere joke. “That whole bombast is not only made to make people feel afraid, particularly the people they’re threatening directly, but to create this aura of power and uncheckable power and to knock people back on their heels and make them feel disoriented, demoralized, and all those things,” Marshall tells Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast podcast:
It’s typical Trump to threaten 10 things a day. And his opponents, his enemies are feeling overwhelmed with all the different threats, and he doesn’t actually have to do anything. So it is really important for people both to be prepared for him to do all sorts of crazy stuff, but also to be attuned to that spectacle, which is his greatest power.
Trump’s goal is an America cowed, Marshall says. Maybe he jails people. Maybe he just threatens. Maybe be actually does bring lawsuits, launch investigations. He doesn’t need to follow through on many for people to cower behind silence.
“It’s all out of the world of professional wrestling,” explains Marshall. Trump creating chaos and confusion, Trump’s bombast and menace, is meant to keep his adversaries off balance like a ship tossed at sea (my analogy). Democrats need their version of gyroscopic stabilizers if the Democratic ship expects to maintain way and fire back.
Marshall suggests something like that at TPM:
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory and promised revenge tour, a number of individuals have proposed the creation of an organization or fund which would take on the job of defending the various lawsuits, prosecutions and generalized legal harassment Trump will bring to the table in the next four years. It’s a very good idea. It’s a necessary one. Over the last six weeks I’ve had a number of people reach out to me and ask who is doing this. Where should they send money to fund this effort? This includes people who are in the small-donor category and also very wealthy people who could give in larger sums. So a few days ago I started reaching out to some people in the legal world and anti-Trump world to find out what’s going on, whether any efforts are afoot and who is doing what.
What I found out is that there are at least a couple groups working toward doing something like this. But the efforts seem embryonic. Or at least I wasn’t able to find out too much.
(Readers, if you run across efforts like this, send me links, please.)
Marshall want to see the left counterpunch, now more than ever. Embarrass Trump. Humiliate his attorneys. “That’s the language they understand,” Marshall says:
Marshall: All of these things are baseless, but most of these things are so baseless that you want to embarrass them. That’s the language they understand. Outrage and very normal and understandable reactions, that’s what they’re looking for. It’s the whole cry-more world. They want people to be outraged: How can you do this? This shouldn’t be possible. And I hope that a group like this, and the opposition to Trump more generally, can cultivate a degree of bring it on. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it, dude, because you will be embarrassed and we love embarrassing you.
Old-line Democrats raised in the pre-internet era of network news eschew any spectacle livelier than a press conference. They want to look dignified. They want to achieve their policy goals even if it means “working across the aisle” with people trying to shiv them. They’d rather front Gerry Connolly than more camera-friendly, more social-media savvy AOC.
Donald Trump couldn’t give a flying f*ck about dignified. He just named Herschel Walker ambassador to the Bahamas, for God’s sake.
Marshall: We need to think big picture. What is the big goal here? It’s creating a population of cowed people. One way you do that is to actually jail people, but there’s a lot of different ways you do that. A lot of this is have the money for the actual court stuff, but also have what is in essence a public communications campaign that is contesting the ground where a lot of this is going to be taking place. You don’t personally need to be subpoenaed or called into a courtroom to make the decision in your head, Man, I better lay low because a lot of bad stuff is happening. You need people who are fighting that fight in the public square, not just in the courtroom.
Or in front of a press room podium. And we need them organized, prepositioned, and properly funded.
We must all hang together, as they saying goes.
Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!