What if?
Magnetized Obsidian?
The various Trumpenfreude outcomes were too dissimilar to one another to be the work of some set of Nixonian White House ‘plumbers.’ They just kind of happened. People screwed up. People failed at some ambitious attention-getting stunt. They got sick. They got humiliated in public. They got caught doing something icky. They lost an election they were expected to win. Their grand reunion tour got canceled. Some secret of their past came back to haunt them. Surber had the good sense not to explain these things. He just reported on them, waiting for the phenomenon to make itself clearer.
I’m beginning to see these happenings from a new perspective. Other observers saw at least part of what Surber was seeing. Their first impulse was, unsurprisingly, to blame Trump. It was Trump who created his own fierce antagonists with all those mean tweets and speeches peppered with brutal nicknames. And all the lies of course. By this time everything Trump said was deemed — if it contained any routine political exaggeration, incorrectly remembered number, or some opinion they disagreed with — a monstrous and unforgivable lie, unprecedented in a political environment also occupied by Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama (“my administration had zero scandals…”). People pretended to count up the lies and publish running totals in the thousands. He had sown the seeds of the ad-hominem wars against him and he was now reaping the whirlwind. If a few bad things happened to people who hated him, that was just a function of the fact that so many people hated him and it was only natural that bad things would happen to some of them. That’s just life being life.
Well, we’re seven years into this phenomenon now, and I’m beginning to think all the pundits are looking at the Trump problem backwards. Despite the fact that he has been playing defense against his political opponents since the day he rode down that escalator and entered the Presidential sweepstakes, the common interpretation of all the consequences is that they are Trump’s fault. He is the cause of the ugliness that has overtaken American public life. I’m sure Joe and Mika would use the metaphor of disease to explain what is going on. Trump is an intruder on a system that was working fine till he showed up. Which makes him a pathogen that precipitates an immune response. The body being attacked starts creating antibodies to hunt down and exterminate the pathogen and its component parts. The symptoms of the body’s range of immune responses can be unpleasant to experience. Fevers, releases of adrenalin, digestive upsets, fatigue, depression, etc. Just the body fighting back.
But we’ve seen enough now to speculate that human physiological response may be the wrong metaphor. What if the right one is straight from the physics of the universe instead? An interaction between the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Huh? To refresh the memories from your high school science class:
In this metaphor, Trump is not an intruder from outside a functioning system. He is an equal and opposite force generated by the system itself in accordance with Newton’s Law, not introducing new energy into the system but redirecting the energy already contained within the system to diffuse (and defuse) its entropy-accelerating momentum. He is, to borrow a term from the emerging science of Chaos Theory, a strange attractor for the entropic energies within the system and simply bouncing their focused particle assaults back to their sources in the form of less destructive waves.
What’s that mean in plain English? Trumpenfreude, or the “Trump Curse,” is not evil Trump energy emanating from him. It’s an elegant system response to its own excessive increases in entropy. Too much of the “things fall apart” nightmare of the poet Yeats. Trump is the immovable object drawing negative energy from other components of the system like a stationary magnet attracting loose nails. But upon contact with the super-dense surface of the magnet, the negative energy is spread, metaphorically flattened, and then returned with equal force but far less focus to the sources throughout the environment likewise fixated on the magnet. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Nikola Tesla:
What does this have to do with magnets and strange attractors made from obsidian? They’re just metaphors, an application of the logic of the Newtonian scientific method to what is fundamentally a human system. The energies we’re talking about here are more emotional and spiritual than physical, and they pertain in present circumstances more to the effects of the bounced back waves than the trajectories of the attack particles aimed at Trump.
There can be no identified physical connection, for example, between Mitch McConnell’s catastrophically incapacitating fall at a tony dinner party and Alec Baldwin’s entanglement in manslaughter charges on the set of a movie he was producing and starring in. Or between the pitiful cul-de-sac’ing of Ben Shapiro’s wannabe Buckley career and the teleprompter mishap that just exposed Robert De Niro as a stumbling, borderline-demented joke. Or between the specific circumstances that doomed the respectability of these oddly similar-appearing has-beens:
Lefty apologists use their musty legal tricks to explain away bad things that happen to this or that person who has been very public and personal about their emotions regarding Trump. They argue by anecdote in favor of coincidence. McConnell’s old. Raskin and Scalese got a disease millions get, so what? Special Prosecutor Mueller, same thing. Kathy Griffin was always unstable, built her career on it. Rob Reiner, Cher, Streisand, De Niro, Madonna, Sarandon, all has-beens whose futures have been in the past for a long time anyway. Kimmel, Colbert, Fallon, Letterman, Keillor, Stewart, all too edgy for a smaller late-night audience that just doesn’t respond to comedy these days. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, gimme a break — cable news ratings are down across the board. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger obviously taken out by fascist MAGA ire. The mayor of New York is getting frisked for his cell phone, hey, that’s Biden’s doing not Trump’s. Bill Barr’s book didn’t sell, Keith Olbermann is broadcasting with Dixie cups and kite string, Chris Wallace is interviewing himself in the dark, the Squad is getting terrible publicity, Jonah Goldberg has basically vanished from the media scene, the National Review is running pop-up ads for racy women’s underwear made in China? Well, cry me a river.
You know. Bad things happen to good people and sometimes to bad people. That doesn’t mean they are paying some price for disliking Trump as much or more than millions of other people who are doing just fine.
But is that true? The ‘just fine’ part? If you want to figure out what’s happening at a deep level of reality, you have to do some research and ask the right questions. I asked myself, just who is it that has prospered since targeting Trump as some kind of secular anti-Christ? Can you think of any specific examples? Who has paid no price for extreme rhetoric and action in opposing his mere right to exist in the body politic? I went looking.
Since turning against Trump in 2017, the Drudge Report has declined from a billion page views a day to 51 million. That’s a collapse of 95 percent. Is he still rich? Yes. Has he paid a stiff price? Yes. Jennifer Lawrence was on track to become the next Katharine Hepburn, with a whole row of Oscars and worshipful fans waiting for great next steps in her career. She’s still making movies. What’s the problem? All of her ‘Top Ten’ highest grossing pictures were made before Trump became president. I seem to remember some snark from her on the subject of the man in the White House. Since then, her output has slowed somewhat and, more concerning, she’s showing signs of the fate that befalls actresses who win Oscars and/or BAFTAs young, taking parts in genre franchises involving body hugging costumes and titillating sex scenes. Halle Berry wound up playing Cat Woman. Scarlett Johansson (the #1 female box office star in movie history) became the Black Widow in eight Marvel superhero movies, and now Jennifer Lawrence has played both Mystique and Jean Gray in separate X-Men outings. Is she still rich and famous? Yes. She’s also done a full frontal nude scene in a creepy spy flick called Red Sparrow, which performed only so-so at the box office. Trump’s fault? Wrong question. Trump didn’t engineer any change in Jennifer Lawrence’s career arc. He didn’t mount any search and destroy media wars against Wolf Blitzer or Chuck Todd. Just as he didn’t personally take down his mortal enemy Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO who banned the President of the United States from his “I’ll-let-you-post-any-122_characters-you-want” website. Elon Musk did that on his own.
And, yes, Dorsey is still rich. History will not be treating him kindly, however, no matter who writes it. To ask the age-old Reagan question, is he better off than he was four years ago? No. Who else might have a hard time answering that question if anybody looked them up to ask or answer it for themselves? Two pretty politically outspoken rock music bands, Green Day and Cold Play are still pumping out albums but have not surpassed or equaled their best years, which came just before the Trump presidency.
Surprisingly, the same is true of Taylor Swift. I waded through a vivid website proclaiming Swift’s status as the biggest thing in pop music since the Beatles, a living legend endorsed as such by Brooklyn has-been Billy Joel (whom I saw perform when he was young and handsome and hadn’t started his own prolonged melting process). I kept scrolling down through vertically interminable boxes providing scattered stats about her record sales, album by album. Her biggest sales year was over 4 million album copies sold in the U.S., followed in the ensuing Trump years by dramatic falloff’s into the c. 2 million range and lower. She was making something of a comeback recently in sales terms, but it’s been only a couple weeks now since she went publicly and financially all-in on the re-election of Joe Biden. We’ll see.
Which brings us finally to the most important question of all? What will be the destiny of the current immense crop of all-in Trump haters? More important, in fact, than what happens to Trump himself.
I’m going to put aside the German term and call it the Trump Curse.
I believe a lot of people who look like they’re doing okay about now are already doomed in the long term. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is never going to be Speaker of the House. She will become one of multiple artifacts of what will be called the “Crazed Twenties” or “Terrible Tweens” or some such derogatory nickname down the road. AOC will figure prominently in the baffled analyses of future pundits. Her incoherent positions on Hamas, Israel, a Social Justice that exalts abortion and the grooming and mutilation of children, as well as her own shallow political instincts, will become fatal to advancement as her looks fade and people turn away from a process where the fixing of elections is considered a fiction equivalent to the hollow earth.
Many others will encounter the consequences of the disconnect from reality associated with the careers of politicians and other public officials who will take any position, accept any absurdity, repeat and elaborate on every government-approved lie, and break every law in the name of protecting democracy and the rule of law. That’s a special attribute of the rebound wave effect of the Trump Curse. The wave blinds every recipient of those waves to the specifically self-destructive nature of their war against the immovable object the system has generated in opposition to them. Adam Schiff will live in the history books as a punchline buried in a footnote. In his case ‘there is no there there.’ Without Trump he doesn’t exist at all. Schumer will go away soon enough. He too is old, like all of the pols who might have filled the now empty Democrat bench without the nepotism of the Clintons and the judgment vacuum called Obama in two different sexes. The Biden cabinet will be remembered only as a cartoon picture gallery, like the members of some smokeless back room where the table stakes are a softball segment on the Ms. Joe and Mika follies.
Biden is still wandering around, but he has already been done in for all the rest of American history. It’s all there, on videotape, inside the files, archived in the record rooms. Lifelong pathological liar, utterly mediocre mental faculties at his height and then a long long way down into senile child fondling, vicious tantrums, and an objectively corrupt and treasonous political agenda.
The judges and prosecutors who are carrying water for Biden grin and act like they’ve got the bad man on the run when they’re the ones who are on the run, straight into the permanent end of their careers. Whatever they do, or try to do, for the rest of their lives, they will be known only for the roles they played in the disgraceful miscarriages of justice being planned and carried out against Trump. Who is not running away. But standing there in front of them, immovable, bouncing their own perverse and corrosive energies back in their faces.
The miracle here, and the proof of the truth in my description of the Trump Curse, is that it has affected almost everyone in the land. They witness the disgusting daily Democrat defecation on the Constitution and see problems that really should be addressed by somebody. “Maybe,” some of the earnest ones say, “if we pick someone less controversial than Trump….?”
No. That’s why Trump is here. He is the means by which all the sick particles are being pulled out of the woodwork where they’ve been hiding for years, generations maybe, and all their worst intentions turned back upon them in broad daylight. They don’t know how exposed they are. They don’t know how doomed they are.
How doomed are they? There are two possible resolutions to the current nationwide insanity. The first, which is the one the haters ironically hope for in their private hours, is the assassination of Trump. That will complete their immolation almost immediately. At that moment, the entire country will be standing around the dead body of a man who gave the last years of his life for free, and at almost unimaginable cost, to his fellow Americans. Even the most shameless will then be forced to ask, “What have we done? What have we accomplished here? What do we do now? Why did we do all the incredibly awful terrible things our parents, our educations, and our belief systems taught us were wrong? What can we do now?”
The politicians will get over this stage of shock. But the rest of the population probably won’t. Too much, too many warnings, were in full view all along. Who sought “progressive” political change with riots, arson, murder, rape, and the criminalization of the policing function? Who sought sexual liberation for every dark corner of the animal id and made sterilizing surgery a therapy that could be desired and understood by citizens who still believed in Santa Claus? Who made it fashionable to boast of how many abortions a promiscuous female had paid for rather than take an annoying pill every day? Who insisted that opposing such recklessly amoral policies was a threat to democracy and basic human decency?
You may not believe it. But a deep revulsion against such horrifying and sick behaviors is inevitable. Assassination will make that moment come pretty damn quick.
The other way is longer and dicier in the doing, but it might save the America many millions still believe somewhere in their buried souls is still worth saving. If Trump is elected President, he may be able to turn the ship around. He will need a lot of help, a lot of sacrifice by those around him, and a lot of patience and new learning by the voters. But there’s a chance that the American Way still carries within it the seed of triumph against long odds we’ve seen grow strong and tall in generations past.
The Trump Curse may not save our nation as it once was. But it does have the potential to save our souls. The Deep State has been so imbedded, so invisible, so cunning in its tricks of self-preservation that there was never any chance a lone President could find them all and root them out one by one. What was needed was for them to expose themselves, leap out of hiding into the sunlight, and show their crimes to every eye with the evident delight of the nihilistic sadists they are. That’s what’s being achieved by the Trump Curse at this very moment. If its waves have also reached into your life, blink yourself awake and have a cup of coffee before getting back to work…
There’s a Part 2 of these thoughts available now too.
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