John Ganz is one of the best essayists around and I highly recommend his Substack if this is the sort of thing that gives you sustenance. It does me and I’m grateful for it. Nearly every time I read his site I come away thinking, “damn, that’s good, I wish I’d thought of it.”
Anyway, today he writes on “The Scum Manifesto.” An excerpt:
I’m sure by this point we’ve all seen some horrific videos of ICE abductions of migrants. Something looks off about those guys: They don’t look like feds or even cops; they look more like Proud Boys or Jan 6ers. That makes sense, since DHS is using white nationalist propaganda in their hiring drive. Proud Boys in Ohio publicly brag about being “high on the hog” because of the new hiring spree. Many of the videos portray them not just as menacing thugs, but also as incompetents, clearly unprofessional, out of shape, and sometimes unable to make arrests. Commentator Adam Johnson had a sharp tweet about it: “There are many ways of looking at ICE’s recent terror campaign, but probably the most salient is a bunch of people who can’t get real jobs harassing and kidnapping people with real jobs.”
Another way to put this is that ICE is a central part of the Trump regime’s overall organization of the mob. They are drawn from what Marx called the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes,” Engels called “the depraved elements of all classes,” and what Arendt identified as “declassés of all classes.” In fact, a great deal of Trump’s political apparatus is drawn from those ranks. Arendt summed up the lives of mob leaders as characterized by “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” Semi or even open criminality and the adoption of mob attitudes and behaviors are practically job requirements for service in the administration. Just look at Paul Ingrassia, White House employee and, until some hours ago, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, whose leaked texts revealed a “Nazi streak.” He’s represented accused rapist and pimp Andrew Tate and had connections to the antisemitic demagogue Nick Fuentes.
If you needed any additional evidence that MAGA is more of a kleptocratic demimonde or criminal racket than a political movement, look at how Steve Bannon gravitated to Jeffrey Epstein just as the stench of disgrace became unbearable for most others. Or look at Trump’s otherwise inexplicable commutation of the sentence of fraudster George Santos. Marx wrote that the mob was drawn partially from “discharged jailbirds”—in Santos’s case, it’s literally true. The message there is clearly: “Support me, and I’ll take care of you.”
When Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to the Office of Special Counsel at the DOJ (someone that I’d written about over the last few years) my first words were, “wow, he’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel.” Ingrassia’s a nasty piece of work and the idea that he would even be allowed to set foot in the Department of Justice is an insult to very American.
But loyalist low lives like him are all Trump has left to hire. He can’t get most of the confirmed even by the GOP potted plants in the senate so he’s doubling and tripling up on jobs, such as making reality show star Sean Duffy Transportation Secreta as well as the NASA Director and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. It’s just too hard to vet the dregs of humanity that are still available to staff his administration.
I suspect Trump will take care of Paul Ingrassia. Look for him to land somewhere in the administration where he doesn’t require confirmation.