The Trump/Biden debate
"As a masochist, I can’t wait to see what the Democrats have in store for me."
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
I had already given my enthusiastic endorsement—whose remaining neural tissue I compared, poetically, to “a grapefruit floating in spinal wine”—to our President, Joe Biden, for another glorious term. But this morning, reflecting on the other night’s historic debate, my heart swelled. I decided to go further. Yes: I bought a lawn sign.
(I actually did this because you have to give your phone number. I made the mistake of donating to a Republican friend one year and now I am besieged by Republican spam. I can handle it, but it is wrong as a student of history to be getting only one slide of the slop. As a masochist, I can’t wait to see what the Democrats have in store for me.)
I am not sure how long the President’s entourage can resist this level of pressure. I am not a superforecaster. I am not a gambling man. If I was, I might gamble that he will fold in hours or days.
To believe that the President, especially a Democratic President, has or can have any kind of political independence, is to believe the kayfabe of the system. Then again—I am sure he was already under no shortage of pressure. He would have to do it. No one, except maybe his wife, could make him do it. I think they will make her make him.
What’s straight up hilarious is that it is not the easy choice it should be—since the Vice-President will be Black if they snub her, but Indo-Jamaican if they promote her. (Kamala has always reminded me of Hakan Rotmwrt’s line about the difficulty of scientific racism.) Were there a more appealing replacement, the deed might already have been done. We are where we are. At least Wall Street still sells popcorn futures.
As for Donald Trump, he has developed the simple, effective approach of overcoming anesthetic mindkill propaganda with brilliant exaggeration:
He did not say this. But he should have. The actual population of Guatemala is 17.36 million. Probably about 15 million of them would rather be here. At least until here turns into Guatemala. If you can’t picture what this means, maybe you need to hear Trump say “ten billion.” I also remain in awe of the new “post-birth abortion.” Maybe like Trump himself, I have not looked into it. If it isn’t real, I’m sure the libs will make it real. In the end, why does it even matter?
Trump, like George Washington, is a man suited to no other hour. Some salty wag of the time once said of Washington and his opponent, Lord Howe, that both Howe and Washington would have lost to any other general. (If this is not how you remember it, maybe you haven’t taken all the tablets.) Both Trump and Biden would have lost to any other debater. But maybe that’s ok!
Friends: I am not disputing that insane, beautiful things will happen if Trump wins the election. I just don’t hear anything I think will work. And I think that will be good for the bad people.
Yes: part of me also wants to see “the revolt of vitalism, the return of the spirit of the Bronze Age, and the destruction of the cities in fire.” But we’ll never get there, or anywhere, unless we play it smart.
And guys: don’t be like the guy who got out of Plato’s cave, into a slightly bigger cave. Dave Rubin writes on X:
And most importantly, who has really been in charge? Because it obviously hasn’t been Joe Biden. It’s likely Obama, via his holdovers. And if that’s not treason, I don’t know what is.
Crazy.
No, it’s not crazy! You’re crazy. You’re crazy because you still believe in the kayfabe. You care so much about Washington and have no idea at all how it works. That’s crazy.
Of course no one is “in charge,” Dave. You seem reasonably cogent, though I had to fix your grammar. No one is or has been “in charge.” Since when? Since 2020? Have you considered the possibility that the right number might be—1945?
Having seen the power of this system to lie in the present, why on earth would you doubt its power to lie in the past? Actually, in the past, it was much easier to lie. We all know that the mainstream media in the “Greatest Generation” was so fair and balanced that it hid the fact that FDR used a wheelchair, Stalin was a dictator, etc.
Crazy? Quite the opposite. You’re actually on way too low a dose. I get that you’re feeling a bit pilled right now, Dave. Everyone is. But it’s still mostly FD&C Red No. 2.
It’s not just that the present is fake—the past was also fake. Since when? Since 1945? Lol. The doors of perception won’t do you any good, man—unless you let them open.
Is this just a lowbrow thing? Dave Rubin is kind of a mid-tier conservacon. Let’s go to the dean of the conservative pundits, Ross Douthat of the New York Times—the Gray Lady, which has just (so wrongly!) asked the President to step aside.
Douthat puts it so much more grandly—some truly Churchillian rhetoric here:
Yes, presidential aides and cabinet members can manage some aspects of the job for a fading chief executive. But they aren’t law clerks drafting opinions on a leisurely timeline.
Their boss sits at the heart of a global network of alliances; commands the world’s most powerful military, which includes a vast nuclear deterrent; and is charged with maintaining a Pax Americana that’s currently under threat from an alliance of revisionist powers. The entire global order will be endangered if there is an empty vessel in the Oval Office, a headless superpower in a destabilizing world.
How can anyone be on this much crack? “An empty vessel, a headless superpower…”
Yes, the President makes “decisions.” In between his photo-ops, not to mention naps, oatmeal, etc, he makes “decisions.” Whenever the system can’t agree with itself, it is time for a “decision.” It is a “good decision” if the press
In technical terms, the whole executive branch uses him as an “oracle” of last resort for resolving internal conflicts. The Romans used to use chickens for this. A classier if less retro option would be a magic 8-ball. “YES.” “NO.” “ANSWER UNCLEAR—ASK AGAIN LATER.”
Note that in Douthat’s world, it is inexplicable that the “Pax Americana,” dating for some reason to 1945 (there’s that number again!) would last a minute in the storms of history without an alert captain at the helm. How are we still afloat? How have our many enemies, the enemies of democracy, bad people, not yet prevailed?
In my world, there is no captain and no helm—just a figurehead. Beyond the obvious embarrassment, it doesn’t matter if the figurehead mumbles a little. Actually I think it’s great, which is why I bought that lawn sign.
Like Confucius, I like to see things as they really are. I think they should be called by their real names. Call me crazy. (They called Confucius crazy, too.)
How does anyone even think about Washington the Rubin and Douthat way? How do you think someone was “in charge”? My parents worked in DC their whole careers. Like most of the four million Americans who “work for” the President in the executive branch, they saw “politics” as a vague distraction beyond their ken, like the storm above the fish in a coral reef. At most “politicians” could screw things up. This is not how people at Tesla see Elon Musk, who is actually “in charge” of Tesla.
Even Tony Blair, who whatever his faults has plenty of tissue left in his skull, admits it:
The problem with government is not that it’s a conspiracy, either left-wing or right-wing. It’s a conspiracy for inertia. The thing about government systems is that they always think, “we’re permanent, you’ve come in as the elected politician, you’re temporary. We know how to do this and if you only just let us alone, we would carry on managing the status quo in the right way.”
As a CEO of a company, you’re the person in charge. You can more or less lay down the law. Politics is more complicated than that.
When highly skilled CEOs come into politics, oftentimes they don’t succeed. That’s not because their executive skill set is the problem. It’s because they haven’t developed a political skill set.
This is about as close as you’ll get to hearing the kayfabe broken. No, they don’t succeed, because it is a completely different job.
The “political skill set” is managing conflicts between overlapping parts of the Deep State—like the eternal interagency conflict that results from having two departments, State and Defense, both tasked with ruling the world. Of course, we have an entire interagency agency—the National Security Council, “national security” being the normal DC euphemism for “world domination”—to resolve this conflict.
Still, sometimes, a meaningful “decision” will sometimes trickle up to the Oval Office, and make it to the magic 8-ball on the Resolute desk. I genuinely believe that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan would not have been accomplished without personal decisions from both Trump and Biden.
Let’s try to work out why you believe that anyone in your lifetime has ever been “in charge” of Washington, DC.
You are not “in charge” of a system because its press releases get to use your name. Biden did this, the President did this, etc. In the UK, the King does this, the Crown does that, etc. Of course everyone knows this is kayfabe.
The way the kayfabe works, though, is that it gets wrapped in ever deeper and more plausible layers—until no one at all knows that no one has been “in charge” of the executive branch since FDR. At least, not in the way FDR was “in charge.”
In fact, so far are we from objective historical reality, we do not even know what it would mean for the President to be “in charge” of “his own” executive branch.
You are not “in charge” of a system because, when it can’t make a decision on its own, it passes the buck to you. As Harry Truman said: “the buck stops here.” That is: no one else ever has to stop a buck. The President did this, did that, etc. No one in the actual government is responsible or can be held accountable. That’s the politicians’ job. Lol.
Truman was actually the first Joe Biden. FDR put him there so the government would run itself. During his lifetime it was the New Deal. It was his personal empire. After he died, it became the Deep State. It was no one’s empire. Everyone kept pretending.
And say what you want about FDR—but he had put together an amazing team. His regime literally conquered the world. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but he can put a stainless-steel skyscraper in space, and bring it back. Trump is not one of these people. Nor does he seem to have them around him. Otherwise—it might be different.
But until the man and the hour have truly met—not just in a comedy sense—why not stick with another four years of this, if we can get it? Can you imagine what this show will look like in 2026, let alone 2028?
And just ponder the power of a system that could conceal this reality, not just from most people but from itself, so deeply and for so long. It could be hiding anything. It is not really that different from FDR and his wheelchair—it’s just that the rest of FDR (say what you want about him) was a real thing.